Neon Neko Café

Let’s get this out of the way: it’s a pixel-art incremental clicker about Kiko, a cat girl who runs a café in a rainy cyberpunk megacity. You pet her. Hearts come out. You spend the hearts hiring a neon crew — Hover Couriers, Synth Baristas, Netrunners, an AI Goddess — who make more hearts while you aren’t looking. Eventually you relocate to a new district, keep your stars, and do it all again. That is the whole game. It is, regrettably, quite moreish.

It should have stopped at the browser version. It did not. There is now a real MS-DOS edition: a 386+ protected-mode game written in C with Open Watcom and the DOS/32A extender, with a proper SETUP.EXE, drivers for every graphics and sound card that mattered between 1984 and 1995, and a digitised “Nyaa~!” played through the PC speaker, because of course.

Then, because the DOS code was already sitting there, there’s a native Win32 edition that shares the same game code: one small EXE, no installer, no DirectX, no runtime, and it runs on everything from Windows 95 to Windows 11. And the DOS edition also runs inside the web page, in DOSBox-X compiled to WebAssembly, with General MIDI piped out to a soundfont synth in the browser. All three editions share the same art, the same six songs and the same rules.

The original. Plain JavaScript, no framework, every sprite generated from code — the cat girls, the café, the six districts, the music. It plays straight in the page, saves to your browser, and has a full-screen mode for those who want to commit.

The DOS edition draws the same 320×200 café on five kinds of display adapter. Each card gets its own conversion: 256 colours on VGA, an ordered dither down to 16 on EGA and Tandy, four on CGA (cyan, magenta, white, regret), and a luminance dither up to 720×348 in one colour on Hercules. Interface text is mapped without dithering, so it stays crisp on all of them. Screens below are shown at 4:3, the way a monitor actually stretched them.

A genuine DOS game: 32-bit protected mode on a 386 or better, in a single EXE with the extender bound in. It has an attract mode that kicks in on the title screen, a handful of cheat codes (yes, including that one), and one chiptune sequencer that talks to whatever card you’ve got — a software pulse-and-noise synth streamed to the Sound Blasters, the Gravis Ultrasound and the Disney Sound Source, real FM notes and rhythm-mode drums on an AdLib, the three-voice chip on a Tandy, MIDI out to a Roland MT-32 or a General MIDI module, and one square wave on the PC speaker, picked by priority.

No self-respecting DOS game shipped without a blue setup program, so this one has one. It sniffs out your hardware, lets you pick the video mode, music device and sound effects device separately, plays a test sound, and saves it all to NEKO.CFG. It works with the keyboard or the mouse, and it has its own text-mode version of Kiko’s Jukebox with a dancing Kiko and five visualisers drawn in box characters.

The site boots the real DOS executable in DOSBox-X compiled to WebAssembly. Pick a machine (VGA, EGA, CGA, Hercules or Tandy), pick the music and effects cards, press power. The browser build of DOSBox has no MIDI synth, so the game streams its MIDI bytes to a file on the emulated C: drive and the page plays them on FluidSynth with a General MIDI soundfont — MT-32 display messages included. Your save is copied out to the browser, so the café survives a reload.

The Windows edition compiles the DOS edition’s game code against a small Win32 platform layer: GDI for scaling, waveOut on its own thread for audio, the game data packed into the EXE as a resource, and saves in %APPDATA%. It imports nothing Windows 95 didn’t have. It also has a pixel-art jukebox, borderless full screen, and a choice of square or 4:3 pixels. Press F1 — there’s a hint telling you to press F1.

The quickest way is the browser: both the HTML5 edition and the MS-DOS edition run on the game’s page, with a switch at the top. If you want to take it home, there are downloads for real DOS hardware, for DOSBox (with ready-made configs for each machine), and for Windows.