Is it possible to make a cheap neo geo clone?

rep boost for Calpis, that's good info there mate!

 

I dream of a clone that looks like those twin system fami clones, with the fami and sfc ports. Except MVS and AES ports.


But yeah... If you were a Chinese company, which would sound the best:

1. Clone semi-niche gaming platform
2. Clone popular and simple platform
3. Put more money into whatever you've probably already cloned

 

More so than they do from Nintendo or Sega?

Why?

 

No, but in other cloned consoles, the BIOS are nonexistent/concealed/rewritten (and certainly not in a discrete ROM which could be easily verified).

I think the era of console cloning is over (ending with SFC or GBA if a true clone even exists); the hardware is just too secure/complex/integrated to mask clone/logically reverse engineer/implement in structured ASIC respectively. It's the natural progression of things. Not only is more recent hardware (for example) crazy difficult to implement in hardware, the hardware is abstracted so much and the constraints are so trivial that for all intents and purposes software emulation is actually more sensible. This is especially the case when you consider that the silicon isn't set in stone throughout a console's lifetime anymore, it keeps evolving closer to the "ideal" model which can easily be expressed in software.