The program I use is called RGB2PCE and was sent to me by a fellow PCE graphic designer on IRC that I talk to. I don't think it can be found on any sites, so I can email it to you if you want. Better yet, I should upload it to my webspace and offer it, which I'll do a little later.
But like you said, you would have to do some hand customizing on the graphics to make them look even closer. An example in those screenshots are the light clouds in the background. In the original you can see a very faint cloud, but in the converted image it does not appear since the program couldn't find a color to use for it, so redrawing the cloud using a simple white color would work
.
now the final question would be, how the arcade pce could handle the technical specs of the game (animations, dynamic, scaling (analog AoF), action etc)..and not at least the loading time Razz
I'm no PCE programmer (just a graphics artist) but I would say that would be one helluva game to port to Arcade Card
. I think you could get away with keeping a lot of the animation frames for the sprites, but might have to cut a few frames from sprites and bacgkrounds to conserve the RAM. Luckily there isn't a whole lot of characters in the game (as oppose to KoF), so that saves some extra RAM. I'd imagine loading times would be annoyingly long
.
By the way, here are some other Neo Geo game screenshots I took and also converted to PCE standards:
Magician Lord
Metal Slug
King of Fighters '98
KoF'98 would actually look a little different/worse on the PCE than the screenshot shows since that screenshot more than likely uses more than 256 colors for the background.