Hardware neogeo

HeavyMachineGoob

My poontang misses Lenn Yang's wang
10 Year Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2011
Posts
5,816
The hardware was five or six data buses?

There's six

1 for the 68000 (P ROM)
1 for the Z80 (M ROM)
1 for the YM2610 (V ROM)
3 for the graphics subsystem (C ROM odd, C ROM even and S ROM) (16bit+16bit+8bit)

Nothing in the Neo Geo data bus system ever exceeds 16 bits wide, as far as I know.
 

MetalSludge

Armored Scrum Object
15 Year Member
Joined
Feb 17, 2007
Posts
260
That was in the latest Retro Gamer magazine interview on Neo Geo. I think they said they used Photoshop to create the sky gradients in MOTW. I'm sure they said they used a 3D package to render the helicopter on Kevins stage - before putting it into pre-rendered sprite form. Also did the same for the bell on Hotaru's stage.

I would add that, even back in the day, the use of a variety of high-end tools well beyond the platforms they ran on were often used to make our little vidya games. I was surprised to eventually learn that it was not uncommon for Amiga games to be developed on 386 computers and the like, which were bleeding edge at the time, even for smaller games that only had one lead programmer and somebody else doing the music or whatever.

I agree with those here saying that the artistic aspects of the late games were as important as any technical proficiencies for how they looked though. Another thing to keep in mind is that the art was itself evolving the whole time, which is only natural. Regardless of hardware, the art just looks better in later arcade games in general.

It's anecdotal, but I recall being a small part of a cartooning digital art community as a kid on the Internet around the time some of the earlier SNK games were being developed, and one day there was a poll on Usenet or something about the favorite artists from the community at the time. A top ten was developed and...it was made up of various promising, but actually pretty limited amateurs.

I mention this cause, not so many years later that same list looked very different in terms of the art quality it referenced. Some of the OG people improved, sure, but also, the newer folks just had it going on and had much more advanced ways as well, building on what had come before. The shift in art quality in well less than ten years was dramatic, even though the tech tools hadn't really changed that much.

I can still recall marveling at graphical tricks I hadn't seen pulled off before, and yet only a year later accepting them as just normal touches that everyone knew about. I'm sure a similar evolution occurred in pixel art for games around the same time, it's just what happens.
 

konrad

The Ultimate 11
Joined
Aug 20, 2013
Posts
226
I would add that, even back in the day, the use of a variety of high-end tools well beyond the platforms they ran on were often used to make our little vidya games. I was surprised to eventually learn that it was not uncommon for Amiga games to be developed on 386 computers and the like, which were bleeding edge at the time, even for smaller games that only had one lead programmer and somebody else doing the music or whatever.

I agree with those here saying that the artistic aspects of the late games were as important as any technical proficiencies for how they looked though. Another thing to keep in mind is that the art was itself evolving the whole time, which is only natural. Regardless of hardware, the art just looks better in later arcade games in general.

It's anecdotal, but I recall being a small part of a cartooning digital art community as a kid on the Internet around the time some of the earlier SNK games were being developed, and one day there was a poll on Usenet or something about the favorite artists from the community at the time. A top ten was developed and...it was made up of various promising, but actually pretty limited amateurs.

I mention this cause, not so many years later that same list looked very different in terms of the art quality it referenced. Some of the OG people improved, sure, but also, the newer folks just had it going on and had much more advanced ways as well, building on what had come before. The shift in art quality in well less than ten years was dramatic, even though the tech tools hadn't really changed that much.

I can still recall marveling at graphical tricks I hadn't seen pulled off before, and yet only a year later accepting them as just normal touches that everyone knew about. I'm sure a similar evolution occurred in pixel art for games around the same time, it's just what happens.

Is the helicopter that appears on kevin's stage made with photoshop?
 

bulbousbeard

Iconic Romhacker Analinguist
Joined
Jul 31, 2013
Posts
481
Really, the most technically impressive Neo Geo games are probably the ones that don't slow down and have a lot of parallax. Due to the way machine worked not really having dedicated background layers, doing parallax was kind of a nuisance on it (which is why most of the games don't have a lot of parallax).
 
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