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How to play Neo Geo games

/ How to play / Neo Geo games

SNK's Neo Geo (1990) was an arcade machine sold for the home, with the same games and the same cartridges on both sides. It cost a fortune, so SNK later sold the Neo Geo CD, much cheaper, and in 1998 a handheld, the Neo Geo Pocket.

We have Neo Geo, Neo Geo CD, Neo Geo Pocket and Neo Geo Pocket Color games on My Abandonware, about 200 in all. Each needs its own emulator.

Neo Geo games

The Neo Geo is an arcade board, so its games are ROM sets like any other arcade game. Use FinalBurn Neo or MAME, and put neogeo.zip, the console BIOS, next to the games.

  • FinalBurn Neo (Windows, and every system through RetroArch): the choice most people make for Neo Geo. Light, fast, and it holds the whole SNK library.
  • MAME runs them too, with the same files. See our arcade page, which explains ROM sets, parent games and BIOS zips in detail.

Our Neo Geo games are zips of 1 to 40 MB. A download can hold a second zip with the short name of the game, like breakers.zip: this inner zip is the file to use. Keep it zipped, put it in the roms folder of your emulator, and put neogeo.zip there as well: without the BIOS, no Neo Geo game starts. See our page about BIOS files.

The Neo Geo had two lives, as an arcade board (MVS) and as a home console (AES). Emulators let you choose: the console version of a game often has an easier difficulty and no coin counter.

WinKawaks: a quick start on Windows

WinKawaks is an old Windows emulator that plays Neo Geo games with almost no setup. It is not our main choice, but it is a direct solution: its download already holds neogeo.zip.

  1. Download WinKawaks, the WinKawaks.zip file (we used version 1.65), and extract it in a folder of its own.
  2. Open the roms folder. It holds one folder for each system: neogeo, cps1 and cps2. The neogeo folder already contains neogeo.zip.
  3. Download the game from our site and open the zip. Copy the zip of the game, such as breakers.zip, without unzipping it, into the folder of its system: neogeo for a Neo Geo game, cps1 for a CPS1 game, and cps2 for a CPS2 game.
  4. Start WinKawaks.exe, then open File > Load game (Alt+L).
  5. Pick the game in the list and click OK. To list only the games you have, choose Only Available.

In our test, Windows showed no warning, and the Neo Geo startup screen and the game intro appeared.

WinKawaks 1.65 with Breakers: the inner breakers.zip copied into roms\neogeo, File > Load game, then the Neo Geo startup screen and the game.

WinKawaks also runs Capcom CPS1 and CPS2 arcade games. From our site, we ran The Punisher (CPS1) and Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom (CPS2) with success.

Neo Geo CD games

The Neo Geo CD plays the same games from a disc, with CD music, but loads them slowly, as it did in 1994. Most of our discs are 30 to 100 MB.

Use NeoCD, a RetroArch core made only for this machine, which reads a .cue file or a .chd file. MAME runs the Neo Geo CD too. Open the .cue file when our archive holds one, so the music tracks come with the game.

The Neo Geo CD needs its own BIOS, different from the cartridge one. The long loading times between fights are part of the real machine, not a fault of the emulator: some emulators can speed them up in their settings.

Neo Geo Pocket games

The Neo Geo Pocket and its colour version were SNK's handhelds, with a good stick for fighting games. Their games are small files, .ngp and .ngc, and need no BIOS at all.

Use Mednafen, alone or as the Beetle NeoPop core in RetroArch: open the file and play. ares also runs them, on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Most Neo Geo Pocket Color games run in English, since SNK sold the handheld worldwide. A few games talked to a Dreamcast through a cable: that part does not work in an emulator.

I need help!

We do not provide support for running abandonware games. SNK's machines are well covered by the arcade community.

The FinalBurn Neo page lists the games it supports and the files each one wants. For the handhelds, the Emulation General Wiki compares the emulators.

Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.