SNK Neo Geo CD (Front Loader)

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Neo Geo had released their previous home system the AES, in 1990, but both the console and games were very expensive, the carts were priced from £175 to £350, way out of reach for most of the gaming population.

The AES system was basically an arcade board in a box, and the carts held all the data for the game. SNK decided they needed a cheaper way of getting the games into the home.

The Neo Geo CD game console from SNK was released in 1993, three years after its cartridge-based equivalent.

This is the first iteration, a front loading machine, and the second of the home Neo Geo family of consoles. The system was originally priced at around US$300. It has a single speed CD-ROM drive making loading times relatively long as a result. This was because the cartridges contained most of the graphic and sound data for the game, which was retrieved much faster than could be achieved by the CD format.

However, the trade-off was that Neo Geo CD game prices were much cheaper at £50 each, whereas the the Neo Geo AES game cartridges could cost as much as £300 each.

The system can also play Audio CDs and all three versions of the system have no region-lock.

The Neo Geo CD was bundled with a control pad instead of a joystick like the AES version. However, the original AES joystick could be used with all three Neo Geo CD models, instead of the included control pads.

The third model of CD machine was the Neo Geo CD-Z, this was a much smaller unit, and had a cache memory twice as large to reduce loading times, despite retaining the single speed CD-ROM.

Manufacturer: SNK
Date: 1993

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH50979. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.

 
SNK Neo Geo CD (Front Loader)

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