The failed heir: The Hyper Neo Geo 64

As somewhat of an arcade obsessive, I traveled long distances to places that were supposed to have Hyper NeoGeo 64 cabinets back when they were new. Of the few dozen that I was able to track down here in the States, only two were in any sense working. Both were actually unplayable.

The Wild Ambition machine had severe video glitches and wouldn't take any input (although it would take your money).

The other machine was a Beast Busters machine, but the guns were not calibrated and were so far off to also be unplayable.

Both machines were off shortly afterwards and disappeared within another month. Shame, really.

If you look at Sega or Namco hardware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sega_arcade_system_boa...

the 2000's and on is just console hardware with upclocked CPU/GPUs and more RAM, or outright x86 + Nvidia Windows PCs running some sort of Windows embedded.

Compare this to the Hyper, and it's a MIPS cpu with custom ASICs. A completely dedicated system that doesn't have any amortization in games for the home market. The last of an era.

If you are interested in original arcade hardware, and want to learning about superguns or cabinets to play, I’m happy to point you in the right direction. One marvelous recent phenomenon has been the cracking of many old security protection schemes and the resulting multis - similar to everdrives/flashcarts for consoles. For example you can have one Neo Geo multi-cart that loads the full library of Neo Geo games from an SD card. Same for CPS2 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_System_II), sega system16 (https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=701), and many other arcade platforms. Sadly there is no HNG64 multi-cart but there aren’t that many games to collect if you like this platform specifically.

I'm honestly a bit surprised to see this. As someone who was fairly active in the MAME cabinet scene back in ~2000 [1] and owned a 4-slot MVS cab for a while, I don't remember ever hearing about this.

Then again, it was in-arcade hardware in ~1999 and I was so focused on emulation stuff that it makes I didn't consider it. Probably got chalked up with all the other unplayable-in-MAME stuff at the time..

[1] My cabinet, sold a few years ago as I enjoyed building it more than playing it: https://nuxx.net/wiki_archive/A/MAME_Cabinet