The Other Consoles Page.
Welcome to The Other Consoles Page. Rather than having some very sparse pages on the consoles I barely wrote anything about, this page will include the Nintendo and SNK stuff.
Being a Sega fan, you probably would’ve expected me to’ve got a Game Gear or even the rare-ish Nomad instead of this, but there’s something about this console that caught my attention, and I figured it would be pretty cool to get. And heck, SNK seems to have had a pretty good relationship with Sega anyway - they’ve provided numerous quality titles on both the Saturn, making use of the extra RAM cartridges, and still providing the Dreamcast with games in the not so productive years, and Sega’s provided games for the NGP also. There’s even that link cable that connects the NeoGeo Pocket to the Dreamcast. Anyhow
Even though the console was 1st released in 1998 as a black & white system, a colour version came out the next year, and came in a nice variety of smart looking colours itself also. The version I bought (which was
actually for my birthday) is a brand new Japanese model, but seeing as there’s no region dealie, and that you can set the language to English anyway, it doesn’t really matter. The console came in a nice neat
square shaped box with folded instruction paper, and the batteries as well.
The NeoGeo Pocket is really comfortable to hold, and the d-pad is simply amazing to use. Talk about moveability! There’s 3 main buttons A, B and Option. The option button varies in its function from game to game, mostly pausing, but sometimes doing other functions instead. Battery life is excellent, with 2 AA types lasting for 40 hours of use, which wizzes all over the shockingly power hungry Game Gear. (No offence, but it does.)
The CR2032 backup memory battery should last for a year or so, seeing as it’s in constant use. There is also a socket for an optional 3V DC power supply too if you want to run the console from something else
apart from the standard batteries, and the NGPC saves the juice with its optional auto off dealie. When changing the batteries - especially the CR2032 one, you simply need to make sure that the 2 AA ones remain in
the console as you do so, and you won’t lose your saves.
Without a game inserted, the NeoGeo Pocket offers a clock, alarm, horoscope, calendar and world time comparer in the Pocket Menu. Although the world
time dealie is a bit useless for me, because it doesn’t have the Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne time line in it, and there doesn’t seem to be any other compatible countries listed. Oh well. The calendar function is useful though and the alarm probably is also, although I haven’t used that yet. The Pocket Menu area also has a catchy tune playing in
the background and performs neat transition effects between screen changes.
Plugging in your headphones is the way to go if you want stereo sound, and it requires much less juice on the volume control to actually hear
stuff compared to the internal speaker. Plus you won’t annoy people on the train / plane / bus etc.
The screen ratio is almost square coming in at 20:19 in terms of the resolution,
with pixels at 0.3mm in size. The image is very clear, especially when you view it from a low angle rather than top down and you even get a nice
little animated intro to the console when you turn it on, just like the thing you’d see on a full size home console.
(By the way SNK stands for Shin Nihon Kikaku for those of you who don’t know, and were wondering what the abbreviation was.)
John’s Recommended Games:
King Of Fighters R-2
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Gals Fighters
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Puyo Pop
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Sonic The Hedgehog Pocket Adventure
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Neo Turf Masters
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New reviews coming when the moon turns to cheese: Sonic The Hedgehog Pocket Adventure, Gals Fighters and Neo Turf Masters.
Specifications On The NeoGeo Pocket, Game Gear and Game Boy Colo(u)r:
(As usual with all my specs, capital “B” is for bytes and lowercase “b” is for bits. If you think I have something wrong, please tell me. It’s probably someone elses fault from where I looked the specs up anyway. ;-P)
NeoGeo Pocket
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Game Gear
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Game Boy Color
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CPU: | 16-bit Toshiba TLCS900H 6.144 MHz
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8-bit Z80 3.58 MHz
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8-bit Z80 4.194304 MHz |
RAM: | 12 KB
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8 KB
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8 KB
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Video RAM: | ?
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16 KB
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8 KB
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Sound: | (12-bit DAC) 3.072 MHz Z80. 6 tone stereo PSG
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SN76496 - 4.194304 MHz.
4 channel stereo |
4 channel stereo
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Audio RAM: | 4 KB
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?
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?
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Screen Type: | “High Reflective” Thin Film Transistor LCD
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Backlit LCD
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LCD
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Resolution: | 160 × 152 pixels
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160 × 146 pixels
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256 × 244 pixels
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Colours: | 4096 (146 at once)
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4096 (32 at once)
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32768 (32 and 56 at once colour modes, plus high colour mode.)
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Sprite Capability: | 64 per frame.
4 colours per sprite including transparency. |
64 (8 × 8 pixels, 8 × 16 pixels, 16 × 16 pixels [double mode])
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40 (8 × 8 pixels, 8 × 16 pixels)
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Software Format: | Cartridge
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Cartridge
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Cartridge
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Power Supply (not including transformers and other big fat battery packs): | 2 AA size batteries and 1 CR2032
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6 AA size batteries
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2 AA size batteries
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External Connection: | (5-pin serial port) SIO 1 channel. 19200 bps transfer rate
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?
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(Serial port) 512 Kbps
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Here you can read up on reviews on my GameCube, DS & GameBoy Advance games. Being a Sega fan, most of the games here are actually by them in some way or another. (This’ll probably be next updated when I’m old with grey hair!) Click on the GameCube logo to go to the page about that. There’s nothing on the DS yet, apart from the stuff below.
Here are the DS specs below. As usual, if you think some of the stuff is a bit out of whack, let me know.
CPUs: | 33 MHz ARM7TDMI & 67 MHz ARM946E-S |
RAM: | 4 MB + 32 KB of dual CPU RAM & 64 KB for some other thing for the ARM7 CPU apparently. |
Video RAM: | 656 KB |
Resolution: | 256 × 192 pixels (on both screens) |
Display Type: | 2 backlit LCDs with 0.24 mm pixel size. (The bottom one with a touch sensitive overlay.) |
Colours: | 262 144 (18 bit colour) |
Polygons Per Second: | 120 000 |
Fill Rate: | 30 000 000 pixels per second |
Effects: | Fog, transparencies, texture mapping and probably other stuff too |
2D Stuff: | 128 sprites on screen at once, 4 screen scrolling |
Audio: | 16 channels. 8 channel PSG. |
Controller: | Digital d-pad, A, B, X, Y, L, R, Start & Select buttons, plus a stylus and microphone. |
Power Supply: | Some kind of rechargeable lithium ion battery, plus transformer. The battery provides somewhere between 6 and 10 hours of use. (Uh, and it takes about 4 hours to charge.) |
Software: | GBA cartridge, DS cartridge thing & transmitted data. |