Goliath 64

The arcade era came to an end as the focus switched to home consoles. Once they had become cheap enough and powerful enough to provide a better experience than in the arcade, the video arcade became redundant. SNK were about to move from their Neo Geo cartridge system to a new 3D polygon gaming system, that still took cartridges but could provide cutting edge 64 bit gaming. The Hyper Neo Geo 64 was released in September 1997 and discontinued just two years later. The system only ever had seven games produced for it.

I like early 3D fighting games such as Tekken and decided to get a Neo Geo 64 and a few cartridges. I bought them brand new, still factor sealed, as the stock levels were never exhausted! I needed a standard JAMMA arcade cabinet to house this metal beast!

I decided to put it in an absolute classic of the arcade, an Electrocoin Goliath MkIII. This was a large upright cabinet with very distinctive red, white, blue and black! The Hyper Neo Geo 64 sat nicely inside and the Goliath cabinet is roomy enough to store the spare games cartridges in the lower portion when the coin box lives. There's also enough space that I can swap the games without needing access to the back of the cabinet. A very useful thing in a small arcade room such as mine. Connection was a simple case of plugging it in to the JAMMA harness and then setting up the games to my preferences. I made a jumper wire for this as the unit doesn't use the standard JAMMA service switch settings.

As I said before there were only seven games released for the system but these were across three different system boards as follows:

• Fighting - Only plays the 4 fighting games
• Driving - Only plays the 2 driving games
• Shooting - Only plays Beast Busters:Second Nightmare

I have the fighting board with three different cartridges:

• Buriki One
• Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition
• Samurai Shodown (Samurai Spirits) 

I'm only missing "Samurai Shodown 2: Warriors Rage".

Game Screenshots