Howdy Legends! Today we embark upon an epic quest of hope, deceit, and a little too much solder. Today I bestow upon you THE TALE OF THE NEO GEO. Back when one of our owners was little, she remembers seeing Neo Geos floating around and every chance she got, throwing a quarter in to see what amazing game she could play! Was it King of Fighters? Was it Metal Slug? Was it Puzzle Bobble? There was always something new and exciting to play on a Neo Geo! So of course when we were planning the arcade we desperately wanted a Neo Geo! The search was on, and sometime in April, we found a working 2 slot Neo Geo for sale that appeared to be in full working order, with its original CRT and came with BOTH Metal Slug AND Puzzle Bobble! We were elated! Perfect!
Now little Ms. Neo was located down in California, and at the time, we didn't have the time to drive down and pick her up, so we sent our faithful friends over at Greek Movers a call, and they swung her, and a few other games, up to us. We unloaded her from the truck and plugged her in and Voila! She fired right up and there was Metal Slug and Puzzle Bobble, all ready to play! We have her a few play tests, looked over everything, and it seemed in good shape, so we carved out a spot for her in the back retro room, and waited to see the excited look on everyone's face at the new Neo Geo!
What our faithful questing party was not prepared for was the dreaded villain ENTROPY, who decided to throw a wrench in our plans!
Neo Geo worked for exactly 2 weeks, and then...suddenly without warning, disaster hit!. At first, we got nothing, no power, no "playing blind", nothing. We change out the power supply and rewire the JAMA harness, pop it all back on and then we see it.... The dreaded CALENDAR ERROR!
For those of you unfamiliar with the Neo Geo Calendar Error, it is essentially that NEO GEO boards have a battery on them to help with Ram processing, memory, etc, and that over time this battery likes to...how shall we say... explode into a corrosive goo all over the board, tearing up traces, and killing chips. So we pulled the board, and low and behold...the battery was dead, and some of the traces were annihilated. For most Neo Geos, this is a death sentence. Most operators won't mess with Neo Geos for much this reason, they are notoriously hard to fix.
But, we replaced the battery, traced the lines, and bam....nothing.
Darn it!
So, we needed to find some RAM that we could replace the bad RAMs with. and while looking for RAM online, we see a beautiful 4 slot board for sale, and there are pictures of it working...we think to ourself...you know what, lets go for it...its an upgrade after all.
So we buy the 4 slot and wait (not so) patiently for it to arrive in the mail!
So a week passes and the quest party looks excitedly at our newest board, we plug it in and........
Software Gore......
So we pull out this board, and did everything we could to try and figure out which RAM was bad, or What connection was broken.
But with little success, our adventuring party begins to feel a little frustrated with this whole process. What started out as a cheap NEO GEO, was turning into a VERY expensive NEO GEO. We found two more boards, which we bought at auction for relatively cheap, totaling 4 NEO GEO boards.
NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM WORKED. Finally, after several threats of taking it out into the back ally and setting it on fire, we broke down and did the one thing that we swore we wouldnt do....buy a 1 slot board. 1 slots are ok...and WAY less prone to board issues, but, but, but...its only 1 slot!
But we got the one slot board in a few days ago, installed it, and BAM she's up and running.
After nearly 2k in Boards, JAMAS, RAMS, Universal BIOS Chips, and countless solder, trace wire, and even buying a new heat flow soldering set up, we finally got this dang NEO GEO to do something.