Andro Dunos on Neo Geo AES: Visco’s 1992 Shooter and Its Thirty-Year Wait for a Sequel

Andro Dunos is a horizontal shooter that SNK put in arcades on 15 June 1992 and that Visco, a small Tokyo developer, had built for the Neo Geo. A month later it came home. On 17 July 1992 the same game went on sale as a Neo Geo AES cartridge, product code NGH-049, at 23,800円 before tax — the Japanese title spelled アンドロデュノス on the spine.

Then nothing. Visco kept making arcade games, but only one more of them, Breakers in 1996, ever became an AES cartridge while the system was alive. Andro Dunos did not get a second part until March 2022, when a two-person Japanese studio that had nothing to do with the original made one. This guide covers what the 1992 cartridge is, why the wait was so long, how to tell the original from the licensed reproduction that appears in the same shop searches, and how to find a copy with the code.

• Japanese title: アンドロデュノス, developed by Visco (ビスコ); the arcade release was published by SNK
• Neo Geo AES (home cartridge): 17 July 1992 · product code NGH-049 · 23,800円 before tax, as recorded by the Media Arts Database
• Arcade (Neo Geo MVS): 15 June 1992 · board number NGM-049 · Visco’s first Neo Geo game
• Rare company: this and Breakers (1996) are the only officially licensed Visco games released on the AES during its original run
• Not the 1992 cartridge: a licensed AES reproduction from Columbus Circle and PixelHeart, 2020 — Suruga-ya lists it as a JoshProd item dated 6 August 2020, with a serial number on the box
• The sequel: Andro Dunos II, developed by Picorinne Soft, released 25 March 2022 — thirty years later, by a different studio

What is Andro Dunos, and what makes its weapon system unusual?

You fly one of two Neo Type fighters — Yellow Cherry for player one, Red Fox for player two — through eight stages against an alien invasion, and when you finish, the game starts over. Two players can fly together. On the AES cartridge, a memory card lets you save and resume at the last stage the game stored.

The part worth knowing before you play is the weapon system. The English Wikipedia article describes it as “the ability to choose between four different weapon sets at any given time in a linear order by pressing the B button”, each of which can be powered up several times. Holding A charges the selected weapon for a heavy shot, but there is a price: “the weapon decreases its power level down to one, weakening the ship’s current firepower as a result.” Dying costs you a level too. It is a shooter about managing four small arsenals rather than hoarding one big one.

Reviewers at the time did not agree about it. Scores collected on the same Wikipedia page run from 2 out of 5 in AllGame to 90% in the French magazine Player One, and the article sums the reaction up as “mixed reception from both critics and reviewers since its initial release in arcades and Neo Geo AES”. In Japan the arcade version did chart: Game Machine listed it as the twentieth most popular arcade game in its 1 September 1992 issue.

Which release is the Japanese cartridge, and what is its code?

Neo Geo games carry two numbers with the same digits: NGM- for the MVS arcade board and NGH- for the AES home cartridge. For this game the pair is NGM-049 and NGH-049, which is why MAME’s entry for the game is titled “Andro Dunos (NGM-049 ~ NGH-049)”. The home cartridge is the one a collector buys; the board needs an MVS cabinet or a consolised unit.

The Neo Geo Master List dates both the Japanese AES release and the English AES release to 17 July 1992, so a US cartridge of the same game exists. The two are the same game in different boxes, with a different manual and insert; Kataban’s catalog tracks the Japanese one, row M745270 in the Agency for Cultural Affairs Media Arts Database.

That database does not carry a product code for this row — it has neither a schema:productID nor a schema:gtin value. We added NGH-049 to the catalog on 16 September 2026 from three independent sources: the Master List, the Japanese store listing at satakore, and the MAME set name above. So the catalog card for the cartridge now shows the code.

One more thing that confuses searches: there was no Neo Geo CD version in 1992. The disc you will see on Japanese auction sites is a conversion by the independent studio Neo Conception International, released in 2012 under a rights deal with Visco.

Why did the sequel take thirty years?

Visco was mainly an arcade company, and the Neo Geo AES was an expensive home system with a small library. As the English Wikipedia article puts it, Andro Dunos and Breakers “are the only officially licensed Visco games to release on the Neo Geo AES platform during its original commercial run from 1990 - 2004.” A studio with two home cartridges in fourteen years was never going to keep a shooter series running.

What did keep the game moving was licensing. The 2012 Neo Geo CD conversion came out of an acquisition deal covering Visco’s intellectual property. In 2020 Columbus Circle and the French publisher PixelHeart put out an officially licensed AES reproduction in English and Japanese. A Dreamcast version followed in August 2022, and in October 2023 the game turned up again in the VISCO Collection for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series, Nintendo Switch and PC.

The sequel came from the same neighbourhood rather than from Visco itself. Andro Dunos II was developed by Picorinne Soft and published by PixelHeart, and Steam dates it 25 March 2022 and describes it as “The sequel of the famous Shoot’em up from the Visco studio … back, 30 years after the first opus, released exclusively on Neo-Geo MVS and Neo-Geo AES in 1992.” It came out for Windows, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with Dreamcast and Xbox One versions later the same year. So the game was a one-off for thirty years, and then it was not.

How do you tell the 1992 cartridge from the 2020 reproduction?

By the shop’s own listing data, because both come back from the same code search. At Suruga-ya the original is filed as a ネオジオROMソフト dated 1992/07/01 with the maker ビスコ (Visco). The reproduction is listed under the longer title アンドロデュノス -ANDRO DUNOS- (シリアルナンバー入り) — “with serial number” — dated 2020/08/06, maker JoshProd, list price ¥71,500. If a listing gives a 2020 date, a serial number or JoshProd or PixelHeart as the maker, it is the reproduction.

Note also that Suruga-ya dates the original 1992/07/01 while the Media Arts Database and the Master List both say 17 July 1992. The shop’s date field is not the release date to quote; it is close enough to tell the two cartridges apart, which is all it needs to do here.

Where can you buy the Japanese cartridge today?

Suruga-ya: search the code. NGH-049 works there. On 16 September 2026 the default view showed results: 5 (this game: 1). Asking Suruga-ya to show sold-out items as well gave results: 20 (this game: 7). The other listings in both views are different Neo Geo games: Suruga-ya’s code index is loose, so read the titles rather than trusting the count. Stock and prices as of 16 September 2026: this game was sold out at Suruga-ya itself, and its marketplace line showed 3 used copies from ¥516,500.

Buyee: search the title, not the code. The code returns nothing at all on Buyee. The Japanese title with the platform, アンドロデュノス ネオジオ, reported 6 listings on 16 September 2026, a mix of the AES cartridge, copies of the 2012 Neo Geo CD conversion and MVS items (the breakdown is in the sources). The bare title アンドロデュノス reported 13, which adds the Switch sequel, a Dreamcast copy and Evercade cartridges. Either way, read every title before you bid: ロムカセット or ROM for the home cartridge, MVS for the arcade board, NGCD for the 2012 disc, 説明書 for a manual on its own.

The prices above are as of 16 September 2026. A cartridge this thin on the ground moves in steps, not in a smooth curve, so treat the numbers above as a snapshot and not as a going rate.

Why search Kataban for this one?

Because all three ways in land on the same card. Checked in a desktop browser on 16 September 2026, Andro Dunos returns one result, アンドロデュノス returns one, and NGH-049 returns one — the Japanese AES cartridge, with the code, the 1992 release date and the kana to look under on a Japanese shop shelf (ア). The English title is enough here, which is not true of every Japanese cartridge; when a game has no English title in the catalog, the kana is the way in.

Andro Dunos · アンドロデュノス · Neo Geo AES, 17 July 1992 (NGH-049) · Visco (ビスコ)

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp — code (NGH-049) · Buyee — title (アンドロデュノス ネオジオ)
See the cartridge on Kataban →

Thirty years is a long time to be the only game of its kind in a company’s home library. If you want the object that started it, it is the 1992 cartridge with NGH-049 on it — not the 2020 reproduction, not the 2012 disc, and not the sequel that finally arrived.