The SNK licensed handheld the Neo Geo X Gold has been hacked, hacking can be bad news for any handheld system especially with the Neo Geo X only having been released in late December 2012. However I suspect at the retail price point Tommo Inc were not solely relying on game sales to subsidise the manufacturing costs of the hardware as this is not a low cost handheld console.

Currently the Neo Geo X Gold ships with twenty preinstalled Neo Geo classic games, and one additional Ninja Master’s game card. I suspect the majority of early adopters and hard core collectors will still continue to purchase any future released official game cards.

Neo Geo X Gold Specifications:

Neo Geo X Gold Facts So Far:

• The Ingenic XBurst  JZ4470 CPU supports 1080p video decoding unit for H.264, VC-1 and VP8 (a secondary 500 MHz MIPS processor with SIMD extension), 2D+3D GC860 graphics core (licensed from Vivante) supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG 1.1

• Ninja Master’s game card is a normal 64MB SD card

• The NGX logic board system storage is either a 2GB microSD or onboard Samsung chip

• The Neo Geo X is running FinalBurn Alpha to emulate the Neo Geo

• NGX Kernel version appears to be 2.6.31.3-g0fbfaf2-dirty running MIPS 32bit

• UNIVERSE BIOS can be injected into .fba ROM files

Neo Geo X .fba UNIVERSE BIOS Hacking:

You can inject the UNIVERSE BIOS into any of the existing Neo Geo X games, this hack is only currently possible if you have the socketed removable microSD storage card located on the Neo Geo X logic board.

1) Download A380 Neo Geo conversion tool.
2) Download UNIVERSE BIOS.
3) Replace the asia-s3.rom file inside of the neogeo.zip archive with a renamed UNIVERSE BIOS.
4) Unzip the conversion tool then place your Neo Geo ROMs in the “roms” folder and launch “fbacache.bat”. It will start to convert all roms into .fba format.
5) Mount the microSD card under Linux, then just exchange the games with the updated unibios verisons.