they have probably caught on and done something like that. I can't imagine that neo-geo emulation was ALWAYS this hard. Well, the l33t hax0rs cracked the old banking method that SNK made for KOF99, Garou and others...SNK Playmore has taken things a bit further. As you may or may not know, Neo-Geo games really didn't have any kinds of protections untill KOF'99 came out. actually, even the old titles such as fatal fury 2 or maybe earlier games have protection as well. emulation-wise, the reason it seems old games dont have protection is because the protections themselves are emulated properly.