Compared to the other consoles of the time, the Neo Geo had much better graphics and sound. The home system was originally a rental unit, but SNK quickly began selling the system through stores when customer response indicated that people were willing to spend the money. The Neo Geo was announced on January 31st, 1990 in Osaka, Japan and released on April 26th, 1990. The Neo Geo hardware was essentially developed by Alpha Denshi's Eiji Fukatsu, adding sprite scaling through the use of scaling tables stored in ROM as well as support for a much higher amount of data on cartridges and better sound hardware.
Contrary to other popular arcade hardware of the time, the SNK/ Alpha Denshi hardware used sprite strips instead of the more common tilemap based backgrounds.
The Neo Geo hardware was an evolution of an older SNK/Alpha Denshi M68000 arcade system board that was used in Time Soldiers in 1987, further developed in the SNK M68000 hardware platform as used for P.O.W.
