SNK's past efforts in porting the series from the arcade to the home consoles has varied from questionable to decent. KOF95 was their first port to the home consoles. While the Saturn version was fairly nice with a few minor problems, the PlayStation version suffered from many gameplay bugs as well as extremely long load times. Every port after KOF95 showed steady improvements - less bugs and more intelligent compromises with the hardware limitations on the PS version; on the other hand, the Saturn version most noticeably suffered from poorer and poorer sound effects because the original game size grew over 100 megabits per year. The PS and the SS are both capable of handling great Neo Geo ports; the underlying problem was the RAM limitations on both systems. With 16MB of main ram in the DC, the memory issue is gone; therefore, a perfect conversion is to be expected.

DM99 offers Team Play, Team Vs, Single Play, Single Vs, Survival, and Practice modes. In addition, the game allows you to link up with KOF R2 for the Neo Geo Pocket Color to download/upload its save file. The save file opens up an image gallery in DM99, including a few images of upcoming KOF99 characters. The intro of DM99 is also replaced by an animated intro of Kyo and Iori fighting and flashes of other characters in the game. There are total of 30 characters plus 13 alternative versions of the characters. The load time is about 5 to 7 seconds for the initial load and 2 to 3 seconds during the game and between rounds, which is not a whole lot longer than the cart version.

Graphically, depending on your viewpoint, SNK either did a good job or a so-so job on the conversion. First of all, the backgrounds have been converted to 3D objects with mixtures of 2D sprites for the crowds and a few other things. Using 3D objects allow for smoother animation, at the same time utilizing less memory. However, they seem to have forgotten the aliasing problem on those polygonal objects. (Aliasing is the noticeable jagged edges or "jaggies".) A few backgrounds that do not suffer from this problem look great, but the others are annoying at times. The problem is evident usually when the objects are moving - for instance, the boat moving up and down in the China stage. Besides this minor annoyance, the backgrounds are beautiful. They seem crisper and more colorful than in the original version. Secondly, the game seems to be running at a higher resolution than the arcade, which is great for the backgrounds because they were redone, but problematic for the sprite based characters. This could be a simple resolution mismatch between the Neo Geo and the DC versions; the DC is running at higher resolution than the Neo Geo resulting in slightly skinnier characters because of additional padding to both sides of the background. This is the similar to but much more noticeably occurred in the SS KOF95 conversion. The third difference between the Neo Geo version and the DC versions are the transparency effects. The Neo Geo does either dithering or draws the background on top of the foreground sprites to fake transparency effects. The DC is capable of transparencies; therefore, no faking was needed, which looks different but is neither better nor worse.

The sound effects and voices are, for the first time, perfect on the home conversion. SNK fighters tend to use a lot of voice samples, but thanks to the additional RAM and a better sound chip in the DC compared to the PS or SS, there are no more low quality, muffled, and often shorten voice samples in the conversion. The music is arranged, redbook audio similar to NeoCD version of KOF98. I, however, wish SNK had taken their time and used chip-produced music in DM99 instead. The CD music sounds fantastic but has to restart for every round of fighting in team modes. Thus, by the time the music reaches its climax, the fight is usually over and the music starts from the beginning again.

For most part, the gameplay is consistent with the original version. There is just one bug in the conversion that annoys me enough to prevent me from playing with one of my favorite characters - Mai. The move Musasabi No Mai (charge down, up + punch) plays an important role in my tactics to create confusions. In KOF98, when this move is executed, she always hops to the wall behind her while in DM99, the side of wall she chooses to go to is inconsistent. Sometimes, she would stick and keep jumping to the same side and sometimes she would alternate regardless of which side of the screen the move is executed on.