Caring for a Neo Geo Pocket Color
What ages inside. What you can do. Where to call in a specialist.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color is a well-made handheld with two ageing batteries inside it: the AA cells you can see, and the CR2032 you cannot. Most of what goes wrong with one starts with a battery that was left in.
What actually goes wrong
The save battery is dead
What you see: Settings and saves are lost; in the worst case, corrosion has spread from the cell.
Why: A CR2032 keeps the memory alive, and it is now decades old. Left long enough, a leaking cell corrodes what is around it.
Corroded battery contacts
What you see: It will not power on, or power cuts out when you move it.
Why: AA cells left inside for years leak, and the contacts in the compartment corrode.
A tired screen or slot
What you see: Dead pixels on the LCD, buttons that do not answer, cartridges that need reseating.
Why: Ordinary ageing of an ordinary handheld — the LCD, the button contacts, and the cartridge slot.
What ages, what you can do, where to stop
What ages
- The CR2032 save battery, which is now decades old.
- The AA battery compartment, if cells were ever left inside to leak.
- The LCD, the button contacts and the cartridge slot — ordinary handheld ageing.
What you can do
- Take the AA batteries out before it goes on a shelf. This is the single most useful thing.
- Clean lightly corroded contacts with isopropyl alcohol.
- Reseat a cartridge before assuming the slot is dead.
Where specialist work begins
- Replacing the CR2032 save cell, and cleaning up any corrosion it has already caused.
- Anything where a leak has reached the board.
Honest answers
Monochrome or Color — which should I buy?
The Color, without hesitation. It plays every one of the nine games ever made for the monochrome machine, it plays them in colour, and it runs for about forty hours on two AA batteries where the older one managed about twenty. There is no argument for the monochrome model except curiosity.
How does a colour handheld run for forty hours on two AA batteries?
By giving something up. The Neo Geo Pocket Color's screen is a reflective TFT — it has no backlight at all. It borrows the light in the room, the way a Game Boy does, and asks its batteries for almost nothing. Sega's Game Gear made the opposite choice, lit its screen from behind, and ran for three to five hours on six cells. Both machines were right. They simply answered a different question.
Can I play Japanese games on a machine bought elsewhere?
The hardware and the cartridges are region-free, so a Japanese game will start on any Neo Geo Pocket Color. Whether you can read it is a separate matter, decided by the game rather than the console: some Japanese releases will display in English if the console is set that way, and others are Japanese only. Check the individual title before you buy it, not the machine.
What breaks on one of these?
The CR2032 cell that holds your saves has been in there for decades — expect it to be dead, and check that it has not leaked into anything. The AA battery compartment corrodes if cells were left inside. Beyond that, the ordinary ageing of a handheld: dead pixels, tired button contacts, a cartridge slot that needs reseating. Ask for photographs of the open battery compartment before you commit.
Is the clicky stick as good as people say?
People do say it. The microswitched stick clicks under the thumb, and reviewers have loved it for years — 8BitDo now sells a modern controller built to reproduce the feel of it, which is not a compliment many handhelds from 1999 have earned. We will be honest about the limits of that praise: it is the verdict of players and reviewers, not a design intention SNK ever put on record, and it is not unanimous — some players find diagonals harder to feel than they expected. Try it before you decide it is the best thing about the machine.