OK, so you know how every time you boot up a Neo-Geo game you see that little piece of technobabble: MAX 330 MEGA PRO-GEAR SPEC It took me years to fi

OK, so you know how every time you boot up a Neo-Geo game you see that little piece of technobabble: MAX 330 MEGA PRO-GEAR SPEC It took me years to figure this out, but it actually means something. (Hell, even "Blast Processing" means something; it was some marketroid's sizzle term for the very fast DMA controller the Genesis had). Anyways, to break it down, MAX 330 MEGA means that cartridges could have a maximum size of 330 megabits. Bank switching would later increase this limit, with appropriate sizzle text on game boot. PRO-GEAR SPEC means that the technical specs of the home console are identical to the Neo-Geo arcade machines which are considered professional equipment or "pro gear". The Neo-Geo console was an arcade board in a console case -- at time of release one of the more advanced arcade boards at that. And the cartridges weren't home ports -- they were literally the arcade games. So of course the Neo-Geo was going to be vastly more expensive than the SNES or Genesis -- it had more memory and more advanced hardware than either of them, its games had vastly more ROM, and chips were pricey in 1990.