Cadillacs and Dinosaurs now has a fan port for Neo Geo MVS and CD

Homebrew developer Teo Tormo has released an unofficial conversion of Capcom's 1993 arcade brawler Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and Neo Geo CD. Released in early November 2026 as a free download on itch.io, the project adapts the original CP System (CPS-1) arcade code to run natively on SNK hardware via MVS flash cartridges like the NeoSD and BackBit, or on Neo Geo CD consoles using burned CD-Rs and Furrtek's SD Loader.

While the MVS and the home Neo Geo AES share the same basic architecture, this release skips the AES entirely. According to Tormo, the conversion relies on the extra backup RAM present on MVS arcade boards, giving the system twice the usable memory of a stock AES console, and he has no plans to build an AES version.

Why Capcom's brawler stayed in arcades for 33 years

Originally released in arcades in February 1993, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is based on Mark Schultz's post-apocalyptic comic book series Xenozoic Tales. Up to three players could pick between Jack Tenrec, Hannah Dundee, Mustapha Cairo, and Mess O'Bradovich to fight poachers and mutated wildlife across the 26th century. Even though it was one of Capcom's finest CPS-1 brawlers alongside Final Fight and The Punisher, it never received an official home console port or inclusion in modern Capcom arcade compilations.

The culprit was a tangle of comic book, Saturday morning cartoon, and automotive licensing agreements with General Motors. Rocket Science Games did release Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm for Sega CD and PC in 1994, though that was an unrelated full-motion video rail shooter rather than Capcom's side-scroller. Before Tormo's Neo Geo conversion arrived, fans had also attempted to bridge the home console gap with an unofficial Sega Genesis demake from Nemezes Games back in November 2022.

Squeezing 384 pixels into 320

Porting games between 1990s arcade rivals is easier on the CPU side than on the video side because both Capcom's CPS-1 and SNK's Neo Geo run on Motorola 68000 processors. Tormo's project is part of a recent wave of Neo Geo conversions he has published on itch.io (alongside ports of Final Fight, The King of Dragons, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, and RoboCop) that credit Anthropic's Claude for coding assistance under Tormo's direction and real-hardware CRT testing. I'm skeptical of how well AI-assisted assembly translation holds up in edge cases, though getting a CPS-1 brawler booting and playable on a Neo Geo CD is still a wild sight.

The biggest hardware hurdle is screen width. CPS-1 games render at 384x224, whereas the Neo Geo outputs 320x224 (with roughly 304x224 visible on a real CRT). To keep everything on screen without rewriting how individual graphic layers align, Tormo used the Neo Geo's hardware sprite scaling to offer three aspect ratio modes: original CPS-1 width, native Neo Geo width, and an in-between setting.

Because this first public build is still a work in progress, it has occasional slowdowns and minor graphical glitches. Tormo added an option to dial back certain visual effects, which he recommends leaving enabled during two-player co-op to keep the framerate steady, alongside stage select and full button remapping.