UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available
I’m going to start this with saying that the Neo Geo is one of my favorite systems EVER. Over the years I’ve owned multiple Neo Geo Arcade Cabinets, tons of Neo Geo boards, and a drawer full of cartridges for the system. It’s an amazing piece of hardware. The first games came out in 1989, and the system had games still coming out in 2004. There is even a homebrew scene that is still running which releases a game every couple of years.
Last week I started messing with Gngeo, an open source Neo Geo emulator. I have gotten it compiled and running. King of Fighters 98 is running at 60fps. It looks lovely. The configuration was kind of a pain, but I think I have everything working right. So without further ado, below is the guide for installing and running Gngeo on the Raspberry Pi!
- If you havent setup /dev/fb0 yet, just go ahead and do sudo chmod 777 /dev/fb0
- Download the Gngeo binaries here
- Download the Gngeo config file here
- Unzip the binaries. They should unzip to a folder called gneogeo
- You should have 3 folders, the ones that matter are “bin” and “roms”. Inside “roms” you need to put in a neogeo bios file as well as any legally obtained game files you have. I will not give any hints or tips on where to obtain these files.
- On the command line go into the bin folder (cd ~/gneogeo/bin), and type ./gngeo -i ../roms/
- The first time it may fail, crash, lockup your pi, or even get into a small gui looking menu. Immediately exit (this can also sometimes cause a crash).
- What this first run has done is create a hidden folder in your home folder called .gngeo.
- Go into .gngeo (cd ~/.gngeo), and copy the config file you downloaded earlier. This setups the keys and some video stuffs.
- Go back into the gneogeo/bin directory and run ./gngeo -i ../roms/
- You should now see a gui, press enter on “load game”. You should see a list of roms available to you. Press up and down to get to your desired game, then press enter to start it.
- Press 3 to give Player 1 a credit, 4 to give Player 2 a credit. Press 1 to start player 1, 2 to start player 2. Up down left and right control player 1, and z, x, a, and d map to the Neo Geo’s A B C and D buttons.
Press escape when done 🙂
So far I have played King of Fighters 98, Metal Slug X, and Samurai Shodown 2 at full speed with no issues 🙂
Let me know if anyone has any issues or tips.