Getting Started for a Project - Neo Geo CD Emulator with Cd-rom

Question

Hello, i'm manuele from italy.

I'm a videogame entusiast since many many years and i would like to try make a project starting from 0 knowledge about raspberry pi and his possibilities, i would like to ask some question with you and people already deep in this world if i can see my project is capable of being realized.

The emulation scene is really strong today and by time people was able to make emulators for pretty much any system available, one of them is about the NEO GEO CD (Neogeo-sdl), was ported from dos/windows to Playstation2, Original Xbox and Dreamcast.

This emulator has a cool feature that let you play directly by using original cd-rom games, and for people into the retrogaming scene, it's really o cool feature since the original gaming hardware is famous for having long time loadings and bad reliability overall.

I would like to know if should be possible to made a new "system" by using this emulator (ported or re-coded) + cd-rom on the raspberry Pi.

What i would like to have is a new "machine" that straight boots into this emulator and let you play the games on a tv by reading the discs, just like the same emulator does on the other consoles or windows itself.

Do you think this is a project that could be done or i just be dreaming about too much?

mconners · Answer

Hi thedeath , well, the difficulty of converting or porting a dos/windows program to raspberry pi can be difficult if not impossible. It may take a complete rewrite of portions of the old program, up to and including the entire thing.

Linux is a different story, raspberry pi runs a flavor of linux based on the Debian release which has been dubbed Rasbian. If there is linux source available for the program you seek, it may not be so difficult to recompile on the Pi. But if that is the case, I'm sure someone would have already done it. It may exist, I'm not sure, I know there were posts about porting neo geo cd to emulation station back in 2015 (https://github.com/libretro/fbalpha/issues/4 ) I'm not sure if this has been completed, or how much neo-geo-cd differs from regular neo-geo support, which retro pie has.

I am not available to commit to something that could be such a large effort, but from your description of the original project retropi (https://retropie.org.uk/ ) and emulation station will get you to about 95% of where you are trying to go.

I would suggest installing retro pi, play with it a bit then figure out where the gaps are between what it provides and what you want it to do, then repost a question about "How can I get from a to b?" versus what you are asking now which is more like "how can I get from a to z?"

I've used retro pi, and have used the NES and playstation emulators, as well as some of the arcade emulators (MAME) I have not used the neo geo stuff, but I know it is there.

Mike