Making a Neo-Geo GAEM

Burning Fight!!

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I'm trying to find a good place for Neo resources and documentation but I'm at a loss here and my google search strings aren't giving me anything decent.

Can anyone show me a decent site for that kind of stuff? Any developer's manuals floating around?
 

xsq

Thou Shalt Not, Question Rot.,
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you get NeoBitz dev tools and HPman's DATlib there... you can build a lot with that.
 

Razoola

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Yup, the Neo dev wiki is the number one place for info needed to make a homebrew game.
 

tcdev

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I started on the Neo Thunder project page (Google or link from the neodev Wiki) and downloaded the toolchain and source code from there. Together with the included devkit documentation and the Official SNK Neo Geo Programming Guide (hardmvs.com), it's enough to get you up and coding in C at least. Once you dive into it and get more familiar with coding you'll realise the 'devkit' is a pretty thin wrapper over the raw registers.

You're probably OK with the same 'host' game to start out, but if you're getting into a serious number of sprites you'll need to match a host with sufficient CROM capacity.

I wasn't a big fan of Sebastian's build scripts so I put together a proper makefile that can produce both cartridge and cd images.

If you get serious you can also develop in pure assembler using the same toolchain.

Good luck!
 

Burning Fight!!

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I was wondering if I could do something so NeoDev001.zip doesn't trash my MinGW installation... probably gonna rename gcc to neogcc.exe, etc. lol
 

greedostick

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There's an official development manual. PM me you email and ill send you a copy.
 

Burning Fight!!

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Well I suppose a bit of reasoning is due... this is an old thread because I really didn't have time to look into Neo stuff until now, real life sux I know. I was actually wanting to do a "Riding Hero, but good" game on the PC Engine but due to some annoyances with the hardware and some disappointing stuff in the ""community"" I thought of taking what I have and continue it on the actual Neo, which also seems to have more power to do what I was envisioning for it.


The code is mostly boilerplate and scanline interrupt handling for now so it shouldn't be too hard to bring the concepts into the Neo.


Damn dude how many systems do you cover? :lolz:

Definitely checking it out.
 

tcdev

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I was wondering if I could do something so NeoDev001.zip doesn't trash my MinGW installation... probably gonna rename gcc to neogcc.exe, etc. lol

Pretty sure you just unzip it to whatever directory you want - it's been years since I actually installed it - and either set the environment to search those paths first, or set up a makefile with explicit paths (which is what I did).
 
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I got started here:


If you look in the Platform Specific Series there's a few Neo Geo entries. Getting the development tools to work will take some tinkering, I believe one of the batch files in the toolkit has a typo that needs fixing as well. You'll also need a valid NEO GEO bios file and getting one of those isn't easy. MAME is a bit picky about NEO GEO emulation (even now I don't know exactly how it works or what file my game actually resides on, I just press F6 in Notepad++ and MAME automatically boots with my game in it)

For the graphics side of things, I use evobboy's NGGTS and YYCHR to edit my graphics. Sprites on the NEOGEO are split into two files, and NGGTS can combine them into one file temporarily for you to edit, then you can split them back up when you're done making changes.
 

Burning Fight!!

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Yeah hyper thanks for a fucking x68000 tutorial for my 2017 query you donglord :lolz:

Can't believe it's been 4 years already and I've still haven't put any effort on it.
 

tcdev

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A few years ago I started with the Neo Thunder page but more recently I updated to Damien Ciabrini's toolchain (under Windows/MSYS) with great success.

I transcoded the original Z80 arcade Scramble to C and ported it to the Neo Geo. It's currently all-but-complete.

Feel free to ask me anything abut setting up the toolchain, starting off coding, etc. FTR I wrote utilities to convert the graphics from MAME to the Neo Geo.
 

Burning Fight!!

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ok, a much better post, that's great!

tcdev: nice job! You should create a thread for your game. Having people actually actively working on stuff that isn't grandiose $500 per cart releases makes me more motivated. Also, any chance of having it run with a horizontal monitor? I know that's probably a bit farther than the original game, but no game on the MVS system has a vert screen.
 
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