[HN Gopher] NeoGeo AES+: SNK announces reissue of retro console ...
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NeoGeo AES+: SNK announces reissue of retro console without
emulation
Author : doener
Score : 45 points
Date : 2026-04-17 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heise.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heise.de)
| fooqux wrote:
| FYI, SNK is owned by Mohammed bin Salman.
|
| I think I'll pass giving them a single cent.
| tombert wrote:
| I hadn't heard this, but looks like you are right.
|
| Makes me feel a little conflicted having bought one of those
| SNK bundles a couple years ago on Steam or Humble Bundle or
| something. Don't love the idea of giving money to someone like
| that.
| kraquepype wrote:
| That's a shame, I've always had a thing for Neo-Geo and SNK
| games.
|
| He won't get a cent when I play on my MVS carts on actual
| hardware, so there is that.
| platevoltage wrote:
| I hate that we are in the era of Millennial dictators feeling
| the need to own things that they thought were cool when they
| were kids. I don't see how owning SNK could be considered a
| great investment opportunity.
| chongli wrote:
| _I don 't see how owning SNK could be considered a great
| investment opportunity_
|
| It's not. It sounds much more like a vanity or passion
| purchase. Like how Neil Young once invested in the Lionel
| model railroading manufacturer.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Yep. I guess owning Metal Slug is better than his previous
| hobby of hacking up journalists.
| _--__--__ wrote:
| The payoff for MBS was to use SNK's brand recognition to
| promote the esports World Cup (run by another of his
| foundations). He even got to buddy up with some celebrities
| (Christiano Ronaldo and some famous DJ) when he shoehorned
| real people into that new Fatal Fury game.
| lamasery wrote:
| The main problem with playing older games in a modern media-
| hardware environment is the screen. You've got the problem that
| lots of them look worse, or even outright wrong (see:
| transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog)
| on anything but a real CRT without some serious shader work. This
| is also true of older TV shows, to some extent, incidentally,
| especially if the only sources available are things like
| broadcast rips.
|
| Then problem #2 with the display (mostly) is latency. Those CRTs
| were _fast_. Even 50ms of rendering latency is noticeable on a
| some of the console games that require very-precise input timing.
|
| You get emulation latency (this may avoid that by using ASICs, at
| least); input latency above what the original hardware had, if
| you're not using the real thing (bluetooth...); any picture-
| conversion latency (this _might_ avoid that, but I wouldn 't bet
| on it) to digitize the signal into HDMI if you're working with
| real hardware with analog outputs; TVs that struggle to get under
| 50ms of latency, especially without making the picture look a ton
| worse; and then shader-induced latency if you're trying to make
| it look semi-correct. Like, getting it down to where it doesn't
| feel _wrong_ is tricky as hell.
| anthk wrote:
| Metal Slug and Garou looked fine-ish with 25% scanlines on LCD
| screens and 50% on PC CRT's.
| tombert wrote:
| My first exposure to Metal Slug was actually in regular
| emulators, and I never used the scanline filters, so now when
| I use the scanline filters in Metal Slug they feel..."wrong".
| In my mind, Metal Slug is supposed to have really sharp,
| chunky pixels.
| anthk wrote:
| Not my case; I'm old enough to play it at mid-late 90's in
| both bars and arcade rooms.
|
| And that's the problem with current pixel art artists: they
| have no idea of what actual pixel art looked like. Hint:
| look at Garou with at least scanlines (or maybe a bilinear
| filter) enabled. That's what's Garou almost meant too look
| in CRT, far closer than raw pixel art.
| tombert wrote:
| I need to play Garou: Mark of the Wolves again, haven't
| touched that one in years. I believe that's the one that
| has a character named "Butt".
|
| I've played a lot of Neo Geo games, and I even used to
| own a full MVS machine for awhile with its own CRT
| (mostly playing KOF 99), but I guess the scanlines never
| did much for me. I grew up playing the SNES and
| PlayStation and N64, but I almost equally grew up with
| emulators, so I guess I'm just used to the raw digital
| signal being displayed.
| tombert wrote:
| 50ms is pretty high, even by LCD standards. I have one of those
| MiSTer Laggy measuring things, and when I have my cheap Vizio
| TV in "Game Mode" the latency is around 24ms, a little lower on
| the top of the screen and a little higher on the bottom, but
| still considerably lower than 50ms. Moreover, I think that
| OLEDs can get less than 10ms nowadays (though I do not have one
| to test at this moment). Since most retro games ran around
| 60fps, so about 17ms, we're talking about 1.5 frames of latency
| for the LCD, and about half a frame of latency for an OLED.
|
| With something like the MiSTer, you can also enable high speed
| USB polling, which I believe is roughly 1000hz. My
| understanding is that it doesn't work with all controllers, but
| it has worked with all the controllers I have tried it with.
|
| The composite video artifacts are definitely noticeable though;
| I noticed the weirdness of the waterfalls in Sonic when I was
| playing it recently. It doesn't bother me that much but I could
| see why it bothers other people.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah with mister laggy measuring and my lg g1 oled (six years
| old now so it may have got better) in game mode latency is
| 8ms.
| pipes wrote:
| Same here, Samsung s95b QD oled, mister laggy tested it, as
| far as I can remember it's about 8ms. Also snac adapters by
| pass usb entirely and are pretty much zero lag as far as I
| understand.
|
| Retro arch has run ahead latency reduction etc, I'd like to
| see some comparisons of that Vs mister. I could do it
| myself but I've never got round to it. I've noticed that
| fiddling with latency reduction in retro arch really works,
| but it is a lot of fiddling.
| tombert wrote:
| I did the preemptive frames thing with Retroarch with
| Sonic the Hedgehog 3 a couple years ago, and I certainly
| convinced myself that I could tell a huge
| difference...and then I kept taking hits and dying just
| as much as I was without doing anything.
|
| It's entirely possible that someone who is better at
| video games can tell a huge difference (e.g. speedrunners
| and the like), but I'm afraid that I'm not good enough at
| most games to be able to realistically tell much of a
| difference.
|
| I might still fiddle with it a bit; someone told me that
| it helps a lot with Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which is a
| game I have never beaten with an emulator.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Interesting. I bought sonic origins as a palate cleanser
| the other day and I really feel like I can feel the
| latency. Sonic 1 was the only game me and my brother had
| for our mega drive so we know/knew everything there is to
| know!!
|
| Our speed runs were crazy.
|
| I don't know if feeling the latency is just my age
| though, although I'm a semi pro SIM racer still and
| competitive in my late forties it's a different kind of
| twitch reaction.
| chongli wrote:
| _Since most retro games ran around 60fps, so about 17ms,_
|
| That's an oversimplification. Many retro game consoles don't
| use a frame buffer. Instead they render the game state to the
| screen on the fly, one scanline at a time, and they're able
| to process input mid-screen because they read the controller
| input many times faster than 60Hz (on the order of 2kHz). In
| practice, this means input lag is way below even 1ms.
|
| Lightgun games, for example, rely on very precise timing of
| the control input vs the CRT raster and simply do not work
| without a CRT.
| mrob wrote:
| >Lightgun games, for example, rely on very precise timing
| of the control input vs the CRT raster and simply do not
| work without a CRT.
|
| Perhaps the most famous light gun game of all time (Duck
| Hunt on the NES), does not rely on especially precise
| timing. It draws one white rectangle per frame over each
| duck when you pull the trigger and checks if the Zapper can
| see it. LCD latency will probably still break this, but
| it's not like the later Super Scope for the SNES that
| actually does track the precise raster position. I expect
| it would be possible to patch the timing in software to
| make it work for a specific model of LCD. But even if you
| did this, the Zapper also includes a bandpass filter at the
| CRT horizontal retrace rate (about 15kHz) to better reject
| other light sources, so you'd need to mod it to bypass
| that, or mod the LCD to strobe the backlight at the right
| frequency.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm not disputing that CRTs have lower input lag than LCDs
| or OLED. I was disputing the specific 50ms of lag claim
| that the parent post made; modern LCDs aren't that bad, and
| OLEDs are getting to a point that it's getting close to
| undetectable to human eyes. Even with horizontal interrupts
| that could be done between scanlines, there's still a limit
| to how fast we can actually perceive it (and frankly I'd be
| skeptical of anyone that claims that the 8ms of input lag
| that an OLED is _actually_ affecting your gameplay).
|
| For light gun games, yeah, that timing might matter, but
| I'm not convinced it matters anywhere else.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I now own a QD OLED that has a processing+display latency of
| 1.21 ms in 240hz, 1.83 in 60hz, and an unfortunate 7ms with
| 120hz + black frame insertion.
|
| Displays are no longer the problem anymore, we're back to CRT
| speeds again.
| HerbManic wrote:
| Latency has improved in the last decade or so but yes, it is
| still off.
|
| As John Carmack said once, we can send a data packet across the
| atlantic faster than we can get a pixel out the back of a
| computer nowadays.
| vunderba wrote:
| 50ms latency would be extremely rough for games heavily reliant
| on frame perfect timing and lightning fast reflexes. I can't
| imagine playing Mike Tyson's Punchout for the NES with that
| kind of lag.
| mrob wrote:
| >or even outright wrong (see: transparency-layering effects on
| things like Sonic the Hedgehog)
|
| If you're talking about the waterfalls, I'm not convinced
| blurring was necessary or intended. RGB support was rare in
| televisions in the USA, but it was common in PAL regions via a
| SCART cable, and the Mega Drive had native RGB output.
| Furthermore, the waterfalls are drawn as vertical lines, which
| I interpret as representing individual streams of water. If it
| was purely a pseudo-transparency effect it would make more
| sense to use a checkerboard pattern, e.g. as in the spotlight
| effect in Streets of Rage 2.
| 7jjjjjjj wrote:
| >transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the
| Hedgehog
|
| That only worked because they expected to run over composite.
| Arcade cabinets used RGB which doesn't have the bandwidth
| limitations of composite.
| corysama wrote:
| If you can run RetroArch at 240 Hz on an OLED in "game mode",
| you can use CRT Beam Simulation to get pretty close to the CRT
| feel for motion https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-
| gpu-shader-looks...
|
| If you have an HDR TV, preferably OLED, and miss the CRT look,
| check out the RetroTink 4K https://www.retrotink.com/
| orbital-decay wrote:
| That's a predictable response, but I think you need to keep up
| with the times. Modern gaming rigs can do single digit ms
| click-to-photon latency in hugely complex game engines that
| have fullscreen shaders, which this thing won't have.
|
| If you're really concerned with the latency, use a modern
| gaming display and a sub-frame latency retro scaler ( _if_ it
| won 't have a builtin one).
| IronBacon wrote:
| One can buy right now a MISTerFPGA from aliexpress for around
| EUR150 and that can emulate both MVS and AES. On this side of the
| pond, a VGA to SCART cable is all that's required to connect it
| to a CRT TV.
|
| If instead one want the real HW, a working MVS PCB can be found
| for less that EUR100. A JAMMA cabinet would be the perfect place
| to use it, but with a supergun a CRT TV can give the same
| results. Cheap superguns can be found or built for around EUR30,
| fancy models can cost between EUR200 to EUR300 tho.
|
| The carts aren't cheap tho, specially if original. I've only a
| battered "Puzzle Bobble" cart, it's a really fun game in PvP, but
| probably not the more iconic NeoGeo title.
| 10729287 wrote:
| Puzzle Bobble, actually, is definitely one of the more iconic
| Neo Geo title. If you open it, you may have a surprise. The
| game was such a success that Snk itself had to butcher other,
| less successful games (essentially Power Spikes II if I
| remember correctly), to produce conversions/bootlegs and answer
| to customer's demand. It has one of the best replayability of
| the system, it's very fun playing versus, plus, girls
| absolutely love it. There have been many sequels, but none live
| up to the original despite the additions, and they're all more
| or less unnecessary.
| pipes wrote:
| Ha! The only multi player game my wife will play with me :)
| 10729287 wrote:
| Classic ! Try Magical Drop 2 or 3 and Money Idol Exchanger
| on the same system. There's a good chance she'll love them.
| They're a little bit more nervous tho, especially Money
| Idol !
| platevoltage wrote:
| This is what I do. There is also an overclocked core that
| drastically reduces slowdown on Metal Slug games.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Assuming this is well done, it's an extremely cool product. The
| original Neo Geo systems and cartridges are ridiculously
| expensive on the used market and bootlegs are rampant. Even
| though they're charging $90/cartridge, that's still thousands of
| dollars less than what a lot of these games go for used.
|
| The biggest concern I have is accuracy. SNK wouldn't be able to
| just start manufacturing their old chip designs from the 90s
| again because a lot of the chips in the Neo Geo from other
| companies are no longer made, such as the 68000, Z80, and YM2610.
| This means that they'd have to make a new SoC that incorporates
| the IP from those chips. At that point there's no real benefit to
| the ASIC over an FPGA. It means the system costs less to produce,
| but if they find any inaccuracies in their new SoC design they
| won't be able to release an update to fix them. I'm cautiously
| optimistic, but I'm not going to place a pre-order until they
| release more details about what exactly is going on under the
| hood.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| There must be three dozen commodity Z80 clones, no? I get it
| that the other asics and dsps are impossible to source, but
| that's a strange example.
| bityard wrote:
| NeoGeo! The system I will always remember as having fun fighting
| games in the arcade with a home console that only kids with
| "status symbol" money could afford...
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I never knew anyone that had one, but i knew lots of kids who
| wanted one
| platevoltage wrote:
| This is kind of cool, but is there an actual market for this? I
| kind of understand the Analogue FPGA based N64 systems that were
| released given that there are a lot of people with N64 carts
| lying around their house, but who just has a bunch NeoGeo carts
| besides collectors? I guess a multicart is an option, but at that
| point, why not just go with MiSTer?
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