Neo Geo Architecture: A practical analysis

Straight from the arcade world, the Neo Geo was an expensive piece of hardware designed to cater to both arcade owners and wealthy households. The system came in two variants: the Multi Video System (MVS) for arcades and the Advanced Entertainment System (AES) for homes. With a dual-processor configuration, the Neo Geo featured a Motorola 68000 and a Zilog Z80 CPU for sound management. The system boasted sophisticated I/O handling with a vectorised interrupt table and inter-process communication between the two CPUs. Unique to the Neo Geo was the inclusion of a Watchdog program for auto-repairing frozen systems in arcade cabinets. The system offered impressive graphics capabilities despite the lack of Direct Memory Access (DMA) for memory transfers.

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/neogeo/

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