There now exists a Wii U Emulator

Not really, NeoGeo never actually took off as home system. Dedicated fans with big wallets? Yeah. Maybe. But sales were nowhere near other game systems, even not so successful, like SegaCD or even 3DO To put it simple - i have many friends who like NeoGeo. But it's either arcade cabinet/CMVS or NGCD. Because you can get a game for 10-30 bucks which is obviously more affordable than AES titles even before that late 2000s craze that made prices go up at warp 9.
Emulation wasn't much of issue even back then, in 1999-2003. It was all about bootleg carts - the main source of "gold" for SNK was MVS, not AES.

 

Pirate carts certainly were the biggest problem, but so did emulation. Emulation may have helped break encryption/protection on games as well. Also I imagine that emulation did hurt home port sales. Why play a possibly inferior port when you can emulate the arcade version? Or why buy the port when you can emulate the arcade? Arcade sales certainly were important but so were home console sales, and I don't mean on the AES but on PS, Saturn, PS2, etc.

 

So, now that I've practically 100%'d Wooly World, I'd like to follow up on this:

For the first three worlds the new aesthetic is cool and the competent YI gameplay is pretty good in Wooly World. After that I started feeling like I was just playing it to be it. Towards the end (6-4-on) it got kind of interesting, but from World 4 up until that point the game is kind of a drag with some pretty terrible levels in there. Also, they recycle two boss characters (a mole and a red shelled winged Koopa Troopa) which, while they had different patterns, but painfully disappointing. Combine this with recycled music and the fact that they didn't pursue the "fabric based creativity" at all, and in the end I actually wound up kind of disappointed.

That said, it's still better than Yoshi's Story, Yoshi's Island DS, and Yoshi's New Island.