The Neo Geo AES+: The Definitive Review
Absolutely Ersatz Sensationalism
In the automotive world’s upper end, where prices get silly very quickly, there is a long history of replicas and a specific lexicon to describe them. Terms like ‘coninuation’, ‘tool room copy’, ‘evocation’ and so on all serve to mask the ugly truth of new machines built to look like something much older and expensive. Of these, there’s a special tier of brand-sanctioned continuation models, notably the Aston Martin DB4 Zagato and the Jaguar E-Type Lightweight. Of those two, the Jaguar is the most interesting,1 being built completely from scratch when many vintage recreations require an in-period donor car. The E-Type Lightweight includes a brand new engine, itself a recreation of the period straight-six, meaning the entire vehicle is as new as can be. Obviously, this recreation is extraordinarily expensive - the Jaguar was priced at £1.2m. These are the playthings of the rich, being built quite specifically for vintage racing. What we don’t immediately realise is that they exist so that owners of the real E-Type lightweights don’t have to risk their cars on track. The genuine lightweights exist in a pricing bracket so expensive (£6m+) that a £1.2m replica is preferable to risking the original metal, the implication being clear: the community knows these precisely precise replicas are not the originals, and will never command the same price or the same cachet. And that’s for extremely detailed replicas. There’s a whole bottom end of faux-Ferrari rebodies for old Toyota MR2s and dubiously-welded kit-car AC Cobras. These are where replicas get their darker reputations as eternally second-rate copies that only impress the blinkered and the naïve.
This brings us to one of the most fervently-salivated-over retrogaming objects for many years, the recently announced Neo Geo AES+. It may come as some surprise that I’m not a fan. This isn’t just for the thankfully well-publicised political issues surrounding the machine, which I have to say should be worth considering before anyone goes for the preorder, but actually due to something much more personal: it wouldn’t satisfy me. Even if I bought the full deluxe pack, I’d still want an original AES. Owning a modern replica would feel like living a lie of sorts. Like draping a Ferrari body around a rusty old Toyota. Many years ago I bought a C64DTV and that was the last thing I bought in this class of retro-rebodies.2 I don’t own any of the recent mini-consoles because emulation exists and is, generally speaking, a considerably cheaper and better experience overall - even if you have the original hardware, as I am lucky enough to own. Especially given the times when I really want to bang through some 8 or 16-bit classic. I have to say, it’s pretty rare, and certainly not worth £100+ a pop, per platform, to indulge in. Especially when my 6-year-old (£49.99) Anbernic handheld has all the fucking ROMs I could ever want and does perfectly fine emulation for everything before 1994. Consider that the SNES Mini still retails on Amazon for £119. I bought a real SNES for £60 and a multicart for £15. I got the real thing with way more games for less money. I mean, if you really must have the clunk of pushing an £70 cartridge into a £180 slot then I guess now you can, but given that the 10-game deluxe AES+ pack weighs in at £799.99, maybe it’s worth considering that a genuine AES and a 161-in-1 MVS cart with a MVS-AES converter comes to £578.08. And you still have room for a £140 RetroTINK-2X Pro. If you don’t care about the AES form factor, you can have Neo Geo on your telly with a £77 MVS motherboard, a £113 JAMMA supergun with USB controller input and the same 161-in-1 cart for a mere £255! Yah, less than £100 more than the base AES+ with no games at all. And you know what? You’d own the real thing.
Of course the value proposition is that of image and convenience. It looks like the real thing and will be much more convenient to use. But given the background of the companies involved, I find it difficult to justify a purchase based on those two criteria. Yes, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism but there are degrees to that - and murderous, repressive regimes and the Fucking Embracer Group3 should colour the degree to which this purchase could be considered unethical. But everyone has their price, so what would make me bend my morals to buy such an object? The answer lies in the underlying hardware. The press release proudly touts the use of ASICs to recreate the original SNK chipset, but the details are non-existent. I think we can safely bet that if the machine carried real legacy chips, the 68000 and Z80 CPUs, the Yamaha sound chip etc, then they’d be heavily referenced in the promo text. Yet they’re not. This is the first indication that we’re not getting transistor-level replication of the Neo Geo board. Given that the only people with any insider knowledge that are commenting on the hardware are people closely involved with emulators or the MiSTer core, it does seem that the AES+ could have a modified version of the logic rather than the circuitry. What that would mean is the ASICs are only relevant to the AES+, and that these new chips couldn’t be used to resurrect dead AES and MVS machines. Minor bummer perhaps, but to be fair, nothing has been confirmed or denied around what the ASICs contain. It’s not beyond the realms of imagination to assume the AES+ engineers had access to SNK’s schematics for the Neo Geo’s graphics chips - the most critical and exotic part of the chipset, but to recreate late-80s chip-fab processes with modern fabricators isn’t a likely proposition. The old stuff is etched at a totally different and much larger scale than today’s chips, so unless they’ve found some old chip foundry that can do the late-80s processes, we have to assume the ASIC is made at the modern scales. That doesn’t preclude a direct circuit copy but again, given the existence of really good emulation and MiSTer cores, it would seem an extraordinarily expensive endeavour when you could conceivably split existing solutions into a CPU ASIC and a graphics one. But why should you even give a shit?
The answer is utility. If the ASICs really are enhanced replications of the FPGA cores, we’re being ripped off. For one thing, as many have already pointed out, the config is set in stone with an ASIC. Any bugs or other shortcomings are there forever. With FPGA, it can be updated. Imagine if instead of just being a pretend AES, the AES+ could also be a Neo Geo Pocket or any of SNK’s arcade boards. Wouldn’t that be an even better proposition? Better still, what if it was switchable into a fully-fledged MiSTer? Now that is a fucking product I’d be interested in. Hell, I’d be more interested in an ornament that looks like a real AES to sit under my telly than a pretend one. Again, the specific choice to make this a single game per-cart console turns me off. I think anyone paying £70 to own a modern reprint of an old game is suffering from a certain lack of judgement. I just do not see the point in cosplaying original AES and paying that much money for it on a per-game basis. I mean, I find the Evercade to be just as ludicrous a proposition as the AES+, but at least that has the decency to offer multiple games per card. Here you’re playing seventy fucking quid to play a single game that you can download, extremely easily, for free. You can buy a really good retro handheld with that fucking game on it for that price. You can even buy two averagely decent handhelds! And the reality it that with those handhelds, you’re much more likely to actually play them. The fact that the revenue from the AES+ range is going to really fucking dubious people should be the kicker, too. It’s not as if Plaion or the Saudi-owned SNK is going to track down the original Nazca team and hand them royalty cheques for all the new Metal Slug carts, after all. But hey, consumerist lust is insatiable with the right kind of shit, and the Neo Geo was always that impossible dream for so many. I can absolutely understand the fervour, but please do hold fire. At least until we see the machine in action and have an idea of how the internals are working. And also, because it’s giving money to bad people that you don’t have to give. But I have to say, and after hearing reports from casual retronauts who bought the mini-consoles on release, there’s a fair amount of buyer regret once the unboxing is done and you’ve banged through the faves. These machines are ultimately novelty toys, not profound re-centerings of gaming habits. I should imagine the AES+ won’t be much different. I certainly don’t see them doing much more than gathering dust after the first couple of weeks, meaning a mocked-up shell for a fraction of the price might be just as good in the long-term. Yes, you might get the theatrics of AES ownership to please you for a day or two, but I’m pretty sure it’ll always feel more than a little bit hollow. Just buy a fucking handheld.
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The coolest are actually the Lister continuations.
Interestingly, Jeri Ellsworth's superb re-implementation of the C64 uses an ASIC to hold the entire chipset. However, despite the board being shaped to fit inside its Competition Pro joystick housing, she included all sorts of extra solder points. These allow the attachment of a disk drive and a keyboard, meaning the C64DTV could be expanded into a fully-functional recreated C64. Sadly that homebrew spirit of offering far more than you expect hasn't been part of the modern offerings.
(C) Nathan Brown Enterprises.