The Neo-Geo Pocket Color is SNK's colour handheld, released in Japan on 16 March 1999 and in North America and Europe later the same year. It succeeded the monochrome Neo-Geo Pocket after only a few months, reusing its case, its processor and above all its famous microswitched mini-stick, simply swapping the screen for a reflective colour panel. It is backward compatible with the entire monochrome library.
Its strength is a catalogue built for arcade play: SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium, The King of Fighters R-2, Samurai Shodown! 2, Card Fighters' Clash, Metal Slug: 1st Mission and 2nd Mission, Faselei!, and Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure, developed by SNK with Sega's blessing. Fighting games are particularly successful on it, the mini-stick allowing inputs that a conventional D-pad simply cannot deliver. The console also has a link cable to the Dreamcast, which let certain titles on both machines exchange data.
Despite excellent reviews, the machine could not withstand the dominance of the Game Boy Color, nor SNK's financial troubles: the company was bought out in 2000 and quickly ended Western distribution. Production stopped in Japan shortly afterwards. The Neo-Geo Pocket Color is now regarded as one of the most endearing handhelds of its era, and a good part of its catalogue has been re-released on modern platforms.
The monochrome Neo-Geo Pocket is a separate system on Recalbox, with its own roms folder and its own page. Monochrome games (
.ngp) do not go here.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro Mednafen_NGP | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Libretro RACE | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
The Neo-Geo Pocket Color is available on every board supported by Recalbox.
Mednafen_NGP is the default emulator: it is the most accurate, it supports softpatching (an .ips or .bps patch placed next to the rom is applied automatically, which is very handy for fan translations) and CRT video modes. RACE is a lighter alternative, originally designed for low-power machines, without softpatching or CRT support; it remains useful if a game misbehaves with the default core.
Netplay is not available with either emulator. RetroAchievements are supported on this system.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ngpc/
Supported extensions: .ngc .ngpc .zip .7z
Both emulators accept exactly the same extensions. .zip and .7z archives must contain a single game.
Roms in No-Intro format are strongly recommended. Some dumps are distributed with the
.npcextension: rename them to.ngcso they are recognised in this folder.