r/neogeo

My son has 850$ saved up. He was saving for a 1000$ two slot machine but it got sold. He’s taking it well but I still feel terrible. Then he found a 700$ one but that one got taken off the market because the monitor died.

If anyone is selling for around 850$ or a little more, preferably in Pennsylvania, bonus point for near Scranton, we’ll take it.

He said and I quote “The number of slots doesn’t matter, condition of the outer cabinet doesn’t have to be more than decent. As long as the hardware and the machine works I’ll take it.”

• Details and preview
• Round 1 preview

###Translation:

>None of this would have been possible without AI; I'm not claiming any of this as my own. It's simply for fun, working on a game that marked my childhood and that I would have loved to see ported to the Neo Geo.

>For the past few weeks, I've been working on something a bit unusual: running Streets of Rage (MD version, Rev A) on the Neo Geo. Not a remake, not an emulator: I'm translating the original 68000 code so it runs directly on the Neo Geo's 68000. The addresses are remapped, and access to the VDP, the Z80, and the sound is intercepted. The display is recreated using Neo Geo sprites, and for the sound, I have a custom Z80 driver that sends the YM2612 writes to the YM2610. The DAC samples are converted to ADPCM-A.

>For now, there's only round 1, but it's complete, boss included, and you can play as Axel, Blaze, or Adam. It's a bot playing, Rui Nelson's autoplay.

>To make sure I'm not talking nonsense, I'm running the Mega Drive under MAME and the port with the same inputs, and I'm comparing the game's entire RAM usage at each logic frame. In the test games, there's no difference. The sound recordings are identical too.

>What's missing, and it's a lot: the other rounds, the menus (it starts directly at round 1), two-player mode, and cleaner sound. The YM2610 only has 4 FM channels compared to 6, so when it gets too busy, I cut the oldest note, and the mix still needs adjusting. Tested only under MAME in MVS, nothing on real hardware or FBNeo yet. And obviously, I'm not distributing anything; it contains ROM code.

>I prefer to say it right away: I could never have done this alone; I rely heavily on Claude Code. I direct, I test, I verify, but without him, the project wouldn't exist.

>So, this is just a proof of concept. I'm open to your ideas for the future. Two questions in particular:

• The YM2610 only has 4 FM channels compared to 6 on the Mega Drive, and currently, I cut off the oldest note when it overflows. How would you handle this?
• And for distribution, since there's ROM code in it, I was thinking of a tool that creates the Neo Geo ROM for each user from their own Mega Drive ROM, like decompilation projects. Good idea or bad idea? Criticism is also welcome.

>I've been doing a bit of console coding (Mega Drive, Amstrad) for 5 years now, and what AI allows now is truly incredible.