Immortalizing old hardware through emulation and teaching people about its inner workings is why MAME was created. Running games is merely a way of testing and authenticating the accuracy of emulated hardware for MAME’s developers. In addition to helping you play old arcade games MAME can also be used by hardware enthusiasts who wish to learn the system architecture of old consoles. Originally, MAME used a command line interface but this got upgraded to a proper GUI frontend called MEWUI. And you will run into performance issues on many games, unlike the Neo Geo stuff which runs perfectly. However, the driver support for these consoles is not as good. Technically, you could also use this emulator to play PS1, PS2, and N64 games. I recommend MAME as the best Neo Geo emulator since it has nearly perfect support for the entire Neo Geo library. In addition to the Neo Geo AES home console, MAME also supports the Neo Geo MVS which is the arcade cabinet version.
It is capable of playing both regular Neo Geo, and Neo Geo CD games. The developers behind MAME release regular patches and add features, along with support for more games. MAME stands for multi-purpose emulation framework, and it started as a project that helped retro gamers play arcade classics.
An open-source emulator that can run thousands of retro games.