As the soot shows, this flashcart was found in the ruins of my home after the house fire. A clean-up revealed it to be a NeoPocket GD (GameDrive) from RetroHQ: an SD card flashcart for the Neo Geo Pocket and Neo Geo Pocket Color. It survived, so I reviewed it. The short version is that it works, and works well, once you get the ROM file extensions right. This video was sponsored by PCBWay.
The NeoPocket GD from RetroHQ
In a previous video I revitalised a Neo Geo Pocket Color, but I had no cartridges for it. The terribly nice people at RetroHQ stepped in and sent me the NeoPocket GD. It’s a lovely thing, with a laser-sintered nylon case dyed black and a full colour sticker on top. It plays games from a microSD card of up to 32GB, though in reality even a 2GB card holds the whole library many times over.
What’s inside the NeoPocket GD?
One screw, then the tightly fitted lid unclips to reveal the PCB. There’s a lone Lattice FPGA (this model has 256 logic elements and 55 I/O points), two 64 megabit flash chips giving 16MB of on-cart ROM storage, a good quality microSD slot and some passives. Not a lot else to see: the magic is inside the FPGA.
Choosing and formatting an SD card
The whole Neo Geo Pocket Color library, including multiple dumps and homebrew, comes in at under 400MB, and the monochrome Neo Geo Pocket library is just 16MB. So I used an ancient 2GB card, even though it’s slow. RetroHQ say the card must be FAT16 or FAT32. I did test exFAT, and it just didn’t work, so FAT32 it was. I made one folder for each machine and copied the files across. That old card certainly didn’t take advantage of my USB 3 reader, so I’d recommend a curated selection of games rather than my lazy approach.
Why don’t my Neo Geo Pocket ROMs show up?
This is where I hit a problem: my .bin files didn’t appear on the console at all. I suspected the SD card, but a second card gave the same result. I really should have read the manual. The files need the extension .ngp for monochrome Neo Geo Pocket games and .ngc for Colour titles. The binary dumps themselves are fine; they just need renaming, and PowerShell made short work of that. With the extensions changed, the games appeared and could be loaded.
Loading and playing games
Selecting a game copies it into the cart’s flash. That can feel sluggish with an older, slower card like mine, but once a game is in the menu it stays there for as long as you leave it (the flash chips are specified to hold data for 20 years). Titles are deleted from the menu on the console itself.
This was my first taste of Neo Geo Pocket gaming, ever. I’m not sure whether the version of Bomberman I tried is an official release, but Bomberman is great on any platform (I’m just not great at it). The one I’ll still be playing in my 70s is Metal Slug 2nd Mission: absolutely amazing for a small handheld, and so much fun.
Verdict: is the NeoPocket GD any good?
The NeoPocket GD just works, and works well. It’s easy to use once your files have the right extensions, and as it turns out, it’s pretty much fireproof. You can find it on the RetroHQ NeoPocket GameDrive page.
More from the fire salvaged Neo Geo Pocket Color: Restoring a Fire Salvaged Neo Geo Pocket Color with an IPS Screen and New Shell.
Related
More flashcart reviews on the site: the ElCheapoSD Atari Lynx flashcart from BennVenn, the Kung Fu Flash for the Commodore 64 and the Skunkboard Atari Jaguar flashcart.
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