Is there a GB Studio for the Neo Geo?

What the question usually means

GB Studio changed what people expect from retro tooling. Chris Maltby’s editor made Game Boy games something you build by painting scenes and wiring events rather than by learning assembly, and well over a thousand finished games have come out of it. It has been going since 2019, it is MIT-licensed, and it is very good.

So the question is rarely “which of these two should I use” — the two machines have nothing to do with each other. It is: does that kind of tool exist for the Neo Geo? It does. The rest of this page is what it is and what it is not.

From a blank project to a real ROM

Neo Studio runs in a browser tab. There is no installer, no toolchain to set up, no Docker image to pull — you open a URL, start from a template or an empty project, and the compiler is a button.

You draw sprites and paint levels, give an actor a set of animations and a behaviour, then wire the rules on an event sheet: on this input do that, on this timer spawn that, when this animation ends fire the next one. Press build, and your project becomes C, the C becomes a 68000 binary, your sprites become C-ROM and your samples become V-ROM.

The ROM that comes out boots in an emulator embedded in the same page you just edited it in, and reloads live when you rebuild. When it is done, export a .neo — the NeoSD flashcart format — or a MAME romset.

What the Neo Geo changes

The machine is a different order of thing from a handheld, and that shows up in the editor rather than in marketing copy.

• Colour is a constraint you see while you draw. The sprite editor works in native Neo Geo palettes — sixteen colours, pen 0 transparent — so what is on your canvas is what the hardware will put on screen. You do not discover the quantisation at compile time.
• The screen is 320×224 (NTSC), and sprites are the whole rendering model. Backgrounds are built out of them too, which is why each band can scroll at its own rate without a dedicated layer — and why the real budget is per scanline: 96 sprites, transparent pixels included. How that adds up.
• Sound is a YM2610, not a handful of pulse channels. Four voice families — FM, SSG, drums, ADPCM-B — and the music editor composes on the real chip rather than on a soft-synth approximation. Drums fold onto the chip’s six ADPCM-A voices at build time. Hand it a WAV or an MP3 and it is encoded to ADPCM-B and looped by the hardware itself, within what the cartridge’s sample budget holds.
• It emits ngdevkit C, not a black box. What the event sheet produces is the C you would have written yourself against the ngdevkit headers — the same code a hand-written homebrew would compile.

What this is not

It matters more that this gets read accurately than that it gets read impressively.

• It is in open beta. It opened in August 2026. The event sheet covers a deliberately small set of triggers and actions, and it grows week by week from what people actually hit.
• The editor is closed. It is free to use and the C it emits is yours to read, but the tool itself is not open source.
• There is no library of finished games to learn from yet. No archive of examples, no body of tutorials written by other people. You are early.
• Neo Geo hardware is not a cheap target. A NeoSD and an MVS board cost what they cost. If the point is to hand a cartridge to as many people as possible, a handheld is the easier platform — and that is a fine reason to build elsewhere.