NEOGEO Was "Refused Ordering Chips" Due To The AES+ Pre-Order Success

If you are a retro gamer, then it's likely that you know about NEOGEO's AES+ and how it's now been delayed an entire year. This hurt a lot of the enthusiasts who pre-ordered early, even more so that NEOGEO hid the news after a Japanese customer was told it was delayed, for NEOGEO to wait months before coming out with the official news.

Well, the reason behind the delay has now been revealed thanks to Video Games Chronicle who has spoken with Plaion's director of hardware & software at this year's Tokyo Games Show.

“After we announced AES+, we received an overwhelming response and really significant levels of preorders. So I straight away went into the procurement phase, and advised our partners in the Far East what our requirements were, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been refused ordering chips, and I’ve worked with Plaion for nearly 20 years in this field. I was like, ‘What do you mean you can’t get these chips? Oh, AI” states Ben Jones.

This seems to be an ongoing trend around the world. We cover a lot of Chinese retro handhelds here at Retro Dodo, and they too are having huge issues supplying not only memory but decent display panels, and they're the ones that manufacture them! So it seems like the sheer popularity of this device pushed them over the line in terms of getting certain tech at good prices in good time.

Ben Jones added, "With that in mind, we tasked ourselves to try and see if there was some kind of a workaround with using what’s called Serial NOR flash, which is basically the same as parallel, but because the NeoGeo only uses parallel flash, you have to do a conversion that lets you use serial flash, which is in easier demand and you can basically get them. If you hadn’t had the solution for the flash, I think everything was dead. But that’s the journey. And remember, we’ve been working on this for years as well, so it was a bit of a ‘nothing stops this train’ moment. I had to go to Taiwan, I had to speak to everyone, we just had to exhaust all options and be 100% focused. We had to deliver.”

It's clear this demand almost broke NEOGEO's mission in reviving this product for the masses, and if it wasn't for their expertise in the field and sheer passion for this project, it could have been cancelled, and it still could; a year is a long time, anything could happen. But that said, they have the numbers, they know the demand, and they seem to have locked in a manufacturer and engineers to evolve this product and get it to market next year. Thanks to VGC for diving into this story for us to share with you.