The Neo-Geo CD is emulated by three cores in Recalbox 10.1, and they share neither the same BIOS requirements nor the same accepted file formats. That is the source of nearly every problem people run into on this system.
Emulator / core (RUN WITH) |
Accepted formats |
|---|---|
LIBRETRO GEOLITH (default) |
.chd, .cue |
LIBRETRO NEOCD |
.chd, .cue |
LIBRETRO FBNEO |
.cue, .bin, .iso, .img, .ccd |
The CHD format is by far the most comfortable: a single compressed file, with no audio-track pitfalls. If you are starting from a .cue + .bin dump, converting to .chd usually fixes everything at once.
Geolith (the default core) requires two mandatory files:
/recalbox/share/bios/geolith/neocd.zip
/recalbox/share/bios/geolith/neocdz.zip
NeoCD requires at least the CDZ BIOS:
/recalbox/share/bios/neocd/neocd.bin
and optionally accepts others, including the Universe BIOS CD 3.3 (neocd/uni-bioscd.rom) and the Top Loader (neocd/top-sp1.bin) and Front Loader (neocd/front-sp1.bin) BIOS files.
FinalBurn Neo uses neogeo.zip and neocdz.zip, to be placed in /recalbox/share/bios/.
Recalbox's BIOS manager tells you exactly what is missing and for which core.
Many games circulate in two flavours: the original version and a CDZ patched one. FinalBurn Neo accepts both, but other Neo-Geo CD emulators only read the CDZ versions. If you are building a collection from scratch, keeping only the CDZ versions will save you a lot of surprises.
Dumps following the Redump standard come as one .cue file with several .bin files (one per track). The Neo-Geo CD cores do not handle that split: the tracks have to be merged into a single file.
The simplest fix is to convert to .chd with chdman (shipped with MAME) or an equivalent graphical tool: CHD accepts multi-bin input and produces a single file.
Otherwise, on Windows, CDmage 1.02.1 can rebuild the tracks:
File → Open, select your .cue file.File → Save As, give it a new name so you do not overwrite the original, then save.MODE1/2352 in the drop-down list on the right, then OK.