The Neo Geo CD had 7 megs of RAM, and the Neo Geo cart games just kept on getting bigger. The last CD games released would often load midway through levels or several times per fight for fighting games. Then from there many Neo Geo games never got a CD release because it just wasn't feasible.
As for the price of Neo Geo games, just for some fun here is one that sold last week for over $5000: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Blazing-Star-Neo-Geo-AES-JP-import-1...
Many Neo Geo games are now in four figure territory.
Re:Neo Geo Programming Guide (1991) [pdf]
by 0xcde4c3db on Saturday April 02, 2016 @01:30PM
(#11412359)
Yes. I had a Neo Geo, but my parents would only buy the games used. The less-popular games got pretty cheap that way, so I mostly played a bunch of "odd" games rather than the huge hits like King of Fighters and so on. To give an idea of how big the games are, a Neo Geo cartridge is roughly the size of a VHS cassette and contains two circuit boards.
The game size was still kind of an issue on Neo Geo CD since it was only a single-speed drive. The system was kind of infamous for long load times. Think of the loading time of an early PS1 game, and then consider that Neo Geo CD had something like 3x the RAM to fill, a drive half as fast, and no good way to "stream" or otherwise hide disc loading. A few later games had to stop in the middle of a level to load.
And by the time the Neo Geo CD came out where this was suddenly not an issue anymore, it was too late alredy...