I mostly remember seeing reviews of Neo-Geo games in CVG UK when I was a kid, and remarking at how insanely expensive they were. I think one game was something crazy like 300 pounds of 1990s money, so probably about 10,000 pounds of today's money. When I moved to Japan I would see the same games on sale used for about 500 yen, which was about 4 pounds at the time.
Neo Geo was one of the first systems I was really into playing on emulators because of how much we all desired them as kids and because they played great even on my ancient Pentium 200 back in 2000 or so.
EDIT: I just remembered that when I joined my first company in Japan (in 2006 I think), one of my colleagues had a real Neo-Geo and we played 2-player Metal Slug during our afternoon break from time to time. He had the smaller sticks, not the behemoth ones that are larger than the console itself, and they were quite comfy to use. He had Blazing Star, Last Resort, Metal Slug and Metal Slug X. I think only Last Resort and Blazing Star were legit carts, and he sold Blazing Star for a decent amount of money when he got rid of it all.
Holy jeepers! 12 grand usd for a game! Never grew up around these but they’re the only games I emulate seeing how it’s 400usd for a aes everdrive and 1.2k for a console (in bad condition). The games really are beautiful though. Fatal fury has some of my favorite pixel art to date!
I was exaggerating, sorry :) I don't know what that is in today's money and am too lazy to find out, but it's a lot. I don't know exactly the difference between regular home console carts like those for Megadrive and SNES, and those for the Neo-Geo, but I think the main difference was that the Neo-Geo was essentially an arcade system, so didn't sacrifice anything for the home cartridge version. I think the price was mainly so much higher due to the comparatively huge ROM chips back when memory was rather expensive. Typical SNES games were 8 megabits I think, and the largest (according to Wikipedia) was 48. Neo Geo could go much higher and games were often 100 megabits or more.
I do know a bit about AES hardware, and there are actually 2 boards in there (pic related)
Sorry if this gets a bit technical, but iirc it uses a huge banks of ROM then a chip to synchronize both boards. Might be entirely wrong though, I can’t find anything on it recently