Video Game Gazette

Neo-Geo Pocket Archive

During the late 90s, the handheld gaming market was at a low point. The power handhelds, such as the Turbo Express, GameGear, Nomad, and Lynx, were all out of production. The only system that survived was the ageless black and white Gameboy. SNK and Bandai saw an opportunity to release systems into this vacum. In 1998 SNK released the Neo-Geo Pocket. It is a compact black and white handheld. It was the first handheld with a thumbstick. A year later a color version with a reflective screen was released. The black and white version could produce 8 shades of grey, while the color could produce 4096 colors. The Neo-Geo Pocket was the first third party system for which Sega produced a Sonic game.

NeoGeo Pocket
The core of the system is a 16-bit TOSHIBA TLCS-900h running at 6.144 MHz. The system has a resolution of 160x152 pixels on a 45 x 48 mm screen. There is hardware support for two scrolling backgrounds. It can produce 64 sprites with 4 colors per sprite. The system has a pallete of 4096 colors and can produce 146 simultaneously. The sound is processed by an 8-bit Z80 running at 3.072 MHz. It can produce 6 channel stereo sound. The system has 12KB of RAM, and 4KB of audio memory.

One of the upsides of the system was its power consumption. The black and white version could run for 20 hours on two AAA batteries, while the color version could run for 40 hours on two AA batteries. The systems were small and light, the B/W version only weighed 160g with batteries, while the color version weighed 195g. The system has 2 megabyte cartridges that measure 54 x 46 x 7.5 mm. It was one of the first systems to have wireless communication.

Classic games for the system include:
Last Blade Pocket
NeoGeo Pocket Last Blade box NeoGeo Pocket Last Blade back of box


Metal Slug 1st Mission
NeoGeo Pocket Metal Slug 1st Mission box NeoGeo Pocket Metal Slug 1st Mission back of box


Magical Drop Pocket by Data East
NeoGeo Pocket Magical Drop box NeoGeo Pocket Magical Drop back of box


The following is a complete list of games for the system.