The Neo-Geo is the most successful and long running arcade hardware system ever released. Cabs were in every arcade throughout the 90's.

How could you not have heard of Metal Slug or King of Fighters? If you've truly never heard of this thing, then you have a lot of very, VERY good arcade games to catch up on. SNK, the developer of most of these games is absolutely top tier, and as far as I am concerned, utterly unmatched in terms of pixel art design, detail and animation. Metal Slug 3 is simply astonishing.

What's the best way of playing the games? I have MAME installed but apparently I need an older version instead and my package manager does not let me choose the version. There is Fightcade, but that one wants me to sign up for their service. Anything else? I'm on OS X BTW.

EDIT: Got it, the experimental build of OpenEmu works, but I needed a newer NeoGeo BIOS, it has to include "uni_bios_3_0.rom". Make sure you have the MAME core, drop the ZIP that comes with the game into OpenEmu window to "install" it, the right-click the game (in OpenEmu) -> Show in Finder and drop the BIOS (neogeo.zip) into the folder as well.

If Crosmando is not too young then the only plausible thing is that the games were available only in arcades in Australia and the console in itself was never released there thus making the brand unknown (then "Neo-Geo" would only be seen as as a dev in the splash in-game screens like Data East and such....).

Yeah that's a point, I guess I did spend a lot of time in arcades and I only ever saw one Neo-Geo for sale here at a thrift shop so I have no idea if the AES version actually came out here or not. Though a lot of Neo-Geo titles did get ported home to any popular console that could run them so the games themselves were still pretty common.

Best Neo-Geo Games:

15. Garou: Mark of the Wolves
14 The King of Fighters 2002
13. Ninja Master's [sic]
12. Last Resort
11. Samurai Shodown II
10. Strikers 1945 Plus
9. The King of Fighters '97
8. Art of Fighting 3
7. Twinkle Star Sprites
6. The King of Fighters '98
5. Shock Troopers
4. Samurai Shodown
3. The Last Blade
2. The Last Blade 2
1. Samurai Shodown IV

I think needless to say don't bother with this bundle if you are not a fan of fighting games. But there were some surprisingly good shmups on Neo Geo as well. I think Shock Troopers and Twinkle Star Sprites are must-play for anyone who claims to be a shmup fan, and both are in this bundle.

Other than the reported issues with the bundled emulation software, I guess the main flaw of this bundle is the fact that the most of the games are most fun with local multiplayer and the PC isn't really the best platform for local multiplayer.

Furthermore, SNK were at their peak in 1994-1998 and most of the SNK games outside that period aren't really worth playing. So even if this bundle includes every single Neo Geo game, you're really only buying it for like 15 games.

Those modern PC ports (?) of KoF 98 and KoF2002 are interesting though, even if they are Steam-only. I didn't even know these updated versions existed until now.

Maybe, but many countries didn't have many arcades (if at all).
I've never seen an arcade gaming centre in my life, only five cabinets spread over two bowling centres, a billiard centre and a swimming hall.
They never were a thing in eastern Germany.

I'm in Australia, so is Crosmando, and we had stacks of arcades. Video rental stores had cabs stuffed in the back, amusement parks had them and dedicated arcades showed up all over the place. One very popular street in the Adelaide CBD had three of 'em up until a decade ago.

*sigh* Now I miss arcades again. :s

Oh, that's sad, man. I mean it.

Now I "kinda" know why. Still, sad to know that. Been to some small-medium cities across South America some years ago and arcades were still a thing. Then, I suppose, LAN places/cyber cafés came and it was -almost- all over, just "pop" goes the weasel-instamoment. True shame. Yep, like "hey msn messenger/ICQ are as fun as King of Fighters". Right...

But back in the later 80s and early 90s arcades shook this entire subcontinent, with the exceptions of some countries/territories we don't even know why it's there :P

Fantastic bundle... Do want ROBO ARMY next week!!

Edit : It's ROBO not roboT, ooops

Ironclad or nothing!
Did I hear Blazing Star?
World Heroes Perfect... ring a bell? :P

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*** TWINKLE STAR SPRITES : DEV INTERVIEW ***
****************************************************************

Yup, saw this one today on my tweetfeed so enjoy the reading:
http://shmuplations.com/twinklestarsprites/

The only thing that is driving me nuts with this are the controls. A PNG of the control layout does not constitute an option, so don't put it under options if that is all you are going to provide. Also, that should not be all that is provided, key remapping should be available. I might not care if it lined up with my past KoF experiences, but the key mapping makes no sense to me. People always fiddle with key mapping. That's a standard thing, that's what we do - especially with fighters.

There is a gmecontrollerdb.txt file that looks like it tries to map the buttons for various pads, but I haven't figured out which map set (if any) is being used for my pad. I did get stuff running in the old MAME version, but I really don't like dealing with MAME. It's very techy and needs significant amounts of configuration to get right, and it's been wildly unpleasant thus far. I'm not having any performance issues or other weirdness with the packaged emulator, so I'm fine with using it, outside of the not being able to configure my controls.

You figure that had to have come up in some meeting somewhere. Who shut that down?

Just got this and I can confirm the roms themselves work fine on MAME Plus 0.159, though unfortunately you have to go the not so legitimate way of getting a new version of the Neo Geo BIOS with some files that are not included with the collection's version of the BIOS.. Aside from that the games run fine on it on my end.

Just set the "SNK Playmore" line to $0, although I have a feeling they payed DotEmu beforehand.

Man, I know DotEmu catches a lot of flak for their emulators, but I really have to applaud them for their vision and ability to get publishers on board. I mean, as things currently stand with copyright law, there's not really much chance of old arcade roms becoming public domain anytime soon. So instead of encouraging people to simply sidestep certain legalities and ignoring moral quandaries, they are trying their best to revive and preserve these old classics within our current legal framework so that these titles can be enjoyed without it feeling like some sort of underground scene. I mean, I really have to hand it to them that they've been able to accomplish quite a bit getting publishers like SEGA and SNK to open up their IP to fully licensed DRM-Free usage on PCs.

Edit: I see that SEGA has pulled the Genesis collections from DotEmu's catalogs. That's unfortunate. But I suppose that they are available on Steam means you can still have a license to play them on PC via other emulation if you pay for them?