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From: ifarqhar@sunc.mqcc.mq.oz.au (Ian Farquhar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Neo Geo
Message-ID: <1014@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz>
Date: 6 Jan 91 22:01:03 GMT
References: <6725@crash.cts.com> <4563@vela.acs.oakland.edu>
Sender: news@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz
Organization: Macquarie University, Sydney
Lines: 46

In article <4563@vela.acs.oakland.edu> hastoerm@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Moriland) writes:
>HAM mode uses. The large palette makes from some nice screens. And
>yes, it can address up to 330 megaBYTES. 

Well, as the Neo Geo uses a 68000, which can only address 16M, we can
assume that the 330M (which frankly I do not believe) is only either
addressable by the graphics and sound hardware, or by bank switching.
Another thing that makes me very suspicious is that 330M is not a power
of 2.  My information is that the current carts contain up to 6Mbytes of
ROM.

>I must admit, that in my opinion, it is the ultimate home video game
>system out at the moment. 

I don't.  The games, at the moment, are pretty dismal, and the actual
animation hardware is reportedly not that hot.  As for the claimed
"wonderful graphics", all the games I have seen seemed to be badly drawn
and particularly poorly animated.

>Seeing as the same hardware is what they are using in
>the arcades, they plan to have the arcades as well as video stores et
>al rent the carts to overcome the high price of them. 

So what?  There are A500 motherboards in lots of arcade machines too.

>When you consider what it does and how well it does it and the fact
>that the A500 can't come close to it, it will be a good reason for
>those people who were going to buy an A500 for games to switch to the
>Neo Geo instead. It only has 6 games because it's brand new. It's
>selling like mad in Japan.

Except for the number of colors, the Amiga *does* come close.  Extra
sound channels can be simulated on the Amiga (albeit using some
computational overhead), and HAM can be used in moving graphics if you
are clever enough (ie. background is all straight from the pallette and
moving objects start with a pallette color and do not overlap.  This may
sound limiting, but remember that the *best* arcade-style game on the 2600 was
Demon Strike, and it's graphics were *much* more limited than this.  It
was just so well done that nobody noticed.  Demon Strike, BTW, is still
the best shoot-em-up I have ever seen.)

--
Ian Farquhar                      Phone : 61 2 805-9400
Office of Computing Services      Fax   : 61 2 805-7433
Macquarie University  NSW  2109   Also  : 61 2 805-7420
Australia                         EMail : ifarqhar@suna.mqcc.mq.oz.au