Neo Print

The Neo Print was one of SNK's attempts to pull the last dollars from the NeoGeo brand. It was a small purikura (photo booth) which ran on a MVS-based board, and had a camera and printer interface. Players users could add various frames to their picture with more-or-less common themes, SNK characters, before printing to sticky photo paper.

It was apparently exported to the US for some time (video ad on Youtube).

A variety of cartridges were produced with different themes and for US/JP localization.

!!! Preliminary info !!!

Cartridges

• The cartridges have the exact same mechanical format as MVS cartridges.
• The PROG boards have an identical pinout, some in fact are simple MVS PROGBK1 boards.
• The CHA boards are custom made for the Neo Print and have a different pinout, they have no fix ROM and pre-muxed C ROMs.
• Electrical safety compatibility with MVS carts ? Apparently they just freeze on a black screen without damage.

Board

• Power: 5V only. Current rating ?
• Backup RAM, or at least an RTC.
• Z80 has its own 8MHz oscillator ?
• 68K runs at 12MHz.
• 5x 16V8 PALs for glue logic.
• NEO-SDR-T chip for ext I/O and dipswitches.
• The board doesn't seem to have an embedded system ROM, the cartridge's program does everything.

Video

• The sprite rendering logic is probably quite different from the regular NeoGeo systems.
• There is no fix layer, and sprite graphics are loaded from a 16-bit bus.
• The video timing seems to be "genlocked" to the NTSC camera's video signal, PSTG-SNK is used as the only custom graphics chip.
• It seems that the camera's video is not simply overlaid with generated graphics but converted digitally and processed as tiles.
• All video I/O is done in S-video (chroma/luma). The printer is fed with analog video too, it actually does a "screengrab" before printing.
• VRAM is made of 4*128kB 8-bit SRAM, probably as 2*256k words.
• A NEC µPC6620 triple 8(?) bit video DAC feeds a common Fujitsu MB3516 RGB encoder chip for output.
• 6x NEC µPD42280 dual-port video RAMs (2 fields for each color component) filled by 3 NEC µPC659 video DACs.
• NEC µPC1862 video sync maestro (NTSC).
• 2 Sony chips for mux/demux or color burst generation for monitor and printer ?
• 2 Mitsubishi M52065 triple 2-to-1 high speed analog switches.

Audio

Sound comes from the same YM2610-YM3016 pair, driven by Z80 and fed by regular V ROMs (both PCMA and PCMB are used ?).

Printer

The stock printer was a Mitsubishi CP-710E (sublimation technology). The Neo Print "emulates" the original printer remote control via the PRT1 and PRT2 ports (mini DIN 8, stereo jack).

Camera

To do. Probably any S-video capable NTSC camera works.

PCB picture: http://mvs.gotwalls.com/images/e/e1/Pstm-p1_set1_top_nocover.jpg