Over the last few months, developer IQ_132 converted many classic Neo Geo MVS games over to the often forgotten Neo Geo CD. Thanks to his hard work, many titles that never made the transition from the Neo Geo MVS to the Neo CD now have a second life at home on SNK’s other consumer hardware. While a few of these conversions existed prior thanks to the work of other developers, they usually crashed or were extremely buggy.
The older conversions also generally had a very loud ear piercing screeching noise when game assets couldn’t quite fit into the CD’s internal RAM. Unfortunately, this meant that those conversions that did work needed to be played with the volume muted or in the case of other conversions, were basically unplayable due to crashing or other issues.
The following titles had previous MVS to CD conversions that were buggy. They are now fully playable due of IQ_132‘s new conversions.
These new conversions now play and sound great, with many also featuring custom loading animations and clean CD audio. Before anyone gets too excited, the audio tracks are recordings of the original music from the carts and are not new or arranged soundtracks. If you know what you’re doing, however, the tracks can be swapped out with arranged tracks, similar to what talented folks have done with the MSU tracks on Nintendo and Sega consoles. In addition to the games listed above, Super Bubble Pop also recently received the conversion treatment and is now fully playable on your Neo Geo CD.
The latter conversions only need to load once and are virtually arcade perfect. In the few cases where the original ROMS were too large, minor cuts or adjustments were made. For example, in Eight Man and King of the Monsters, some voice samples and sound FX needed to be cut in order to fit into the Neo CD’s limited memory. The graphics and gameplay remain identical and faithful to the original games, however.
As fantastic as these conversions are, where things get far more interesting are the completely new MVS to CD conversions. Spin Master (also know as Miracle Adventure) is a fantastic run-and-gun game from Data East that fans of Metal Slug, Contra, and Caveman Ninja (Joe and Mac) should love. What makes this conversion even more spectacular is that IQ_132 was able to split up the game into chunks to make the fully game playable despite it normally being too large for the Neo CD’s RAM when unmodified. Similar to SNK’s original release of Metal Slug for the CD, the game only loads between rounds which keeps loading screens to a minimum. Loading between stages significantly reduces game play interruptions. It’s an excellent port that was sorely missing from the Neo CD library.
Then there are the new arcade ports that were never Neo Geo releases to begin with. P.O.W. and Atomic Runner Chelnov!
These play great and although there may be some minor glitches or bugs, the vast majority of people would likely never notice. Both games are basically identical to their original hardware releases and can be completed.
The arcade hardware for both games share some similarities to Neo Geo hardware but that does not mean that they are direct ports by any means. For anyone interested, there is more info here, here, and here.
As always, if you are interested in supporting devs who perform this type of work, IQ_132’s patreon page can be found here. The page also goes into great detail about how these conversions were achieved. It’s great info for any developers who might be interested in creating their own ports and conversions or just the technically curious.
Of note, IQ_132 is not distributing ISO files of these copyrighted games. What he offers is a conversion script for each individual game that creates cue/iso/wav files that can be burned to a CD or that can be used in Furrtek’s excellent Neo Geo CD loader. The conversions require finding the correct MAME files and following the instructions in the included Read Me files. Knowledge of how to check CRC32’s are greatly helpful to ensure the correct ROM is used.
These game conversions were only tested on original hardware. Emulators and even the MiSTer FPGA may have some audio playback issues with their tracks, for example on the Eight Man intro. These issues do not exist on original hardware.
As always, use these at your own risk. Enjoy the greatly expanded library for the Neo Geo CD with hopefully more to come!
