Developing for Neo Geo?

Metal-Willis · Jun 6, 2009

Has anyone heard of or know how you could get into developing a game for the Neo Geo? I know it obviously can be done because with games like Last Hope... I was just wondering if anyone knew how to get started on this process.

websites?

madman · Jun 6, 2009

Do you have a programming background at all? Developing for a very undocumented console like the NG is quite difficult.

Metal-Willis · Jun 6, 2009

Yeah, a little... so I was just curious to see what was out there ya know. I just wanted to see what all I could find out about the console because I know like you said it's very undocumented.

Rade K · Jun 6, 2009

I'm dumb in this regard, but isn't knowledge of low level programming a must?

And a gigantic pain in the ass?

madman · Jun 6, 2009

Yep, you'll need to know 68k asm and z80. If you haven't programmed a game in a high level language like C on a well documented platform like a PC, you haven't a chance of doing anything remotely useful on the Neo. If you want to start console coding, look at the gameboy. The z80 is super easy to learn and the system is very well documented.

xiao_haozi · Jun 6, 2009

Could try to talk to jeff kurtz and/or check out his site. Has some dev tools and homebrew games there http://www.neobitz.com/

the.bet · Jun 6, 2009

I wish there was a better Home brew market for Geo

It is neat to see decent Home Brew Games being released on the Atari Jaguar. I hope that spirit comes to the Neo Someday.

Fett · Jun 6, 2009

As much as I'd love to see some new games for Neo Geo, you would be wasting a lot of time and effort for a very niche demographic. There are much easier tools you can use to devolope games for PC which can in-turn be ported to Xbox Live or Wiiware where indy devolopers are getting their games out to many more people (and making money). If you're interisted I reccomend looking into Microsoft's XNA program.

rarehero · Jun 7, 2009

This would be a good community project.
We could make Diggerman II.

Piratero · Jun 7, 2009

'nuff said.

If you need any more info, there are countless games that you can reverse engineer! Also, there is source code for a few emulators that can explain a lot of the features of the Neo-Geo.

Try developing on the Saturn. That's a pain in the ass.

joe8 · Jun 7, 2009

Try developing on the Saturn. That's a pain in the ass.

Even the official developers at the time had trouble programming for it. Most games didn't use all of the Saturn's power. It was too hard to make use of both CPU's.

Piratero · Jun 7, 2009

joe8 said:
Even the official developers at the time had trouble programming for it. Most games didn't use all of the Saturn's power. It was too hard to make use of both CPU's.

I was talking about me in terms of programming. It was mostly lazy programming.

Actually, I think a lot of games used both the master and slave CPU. It was probably because Sega released the SGL which used both.

Using the DSP was something else. Not many games used it at all!

Who knows.

pooch · Jun 7, 2009

This is off topic, but I thought a group of guys were programming for the Samurai Spirits RPG? How is that progressing along?

Developing for Neo Geo?

Metal-Willis

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madman

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