In 1990, SNK sold a home console for $649.99 with games priced around $200 each, and people bought it. This episode explores the Neo Geo, a platform whose name means New World in Greek and whose mission was to erase the gap between the arcade and the living room. We look at the broken 1980s arcade business, where operators had to buy 300-pound dedicated cabinets for every new game, and how Street Fighter creator Takashi Nishiyama brought a dual-format strategy to SNK: the MVS cartridge system for arcades and the AES for homes, running identical code.

We dig into the hardware behind the 24-bit marketing claim, including the Motorola 68000 CPU, the Z80 audio coprocessor, the sprite-strip graphics architecture that allowed hardware scaling, the Yamaha YM2610 sound chip, and the bank-switching tricks behind the 100 Mega Shock startup screens. T ...