NEOGEO CD

Catalog Spec

NEOGEO CD is the CD-ROM gaming console released by SNK in September 1994. SNK already got the commercial success by NEOGEO which included the great titles such as “Fatal Fury”, “Art of Fighting” and “Samurai Spirits (known as “Samurai Showdown”)” etc. On the other hand, NEOGEO had a big disadvantage that the console and its title ROM cassette were very expensive, SNK had received the feedback from the user that they wanted the company to reduce the prices of the console and ROMs. Finally SNK adopted CD-ROM as a cost down measure instead of ROM that normally costs more than 30,000 yen. Due to this measure, SNK succeeded to set the price range from 4,800 to 8,000 yen to provide the titles by lower price. However, the CD-ROM drive’s loading speed is 1x, it needed comparatively longer seconds to load the data. That wasn’t preferable fact for the user, in the variety of the released titles NEOGEO CD couldn’t match the competitors including PLAYSTATION and SEGA SATURN. In December 1995, the upper compatibility version NEOGEO CD-Z was released, it resolved some issue of the loading speed by 2x speed of its CD-ROM drive. Later NEOGEO titles became the big data size ROM, and then NEOGEO CD spec couldn’t catch up the big data. As on 1999, SNK decided to stop supplying CD-ROM title.