Neo is the only style besides Authentic that draws the 1999 character set, and the pairing is the point.
The alphabet is the one from the opening titles. The color is not.
In Revolutions a blinded Neo sees the world as light rather than surface. Seraph glows gold, the Machine City is gold, and Smith ends in a burst of amber. This style puts the first film's characters into that later palette, which is a combination the films never actually show you.
The most bloom in the app
Three settings compound here. Bloom runs at 0.90, higher than any other style. The high pass sits at zero, so every lit cell feeds the glow instead of only the brightest ones. The cursor burns at 2.5, hotter than everything except Operator and Morpheus.
The counterweight is speed. Fall speed drops to 0.20, second only to Twilight, and trail decay is set to 0.60 so trails hang rather than snap. Bright and slow, not bright and frantic.
The numbers, if you want to check them
| Setting | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rain model | layered | Three depth planes |
| Columns | 70 | Grid width |
| Bloom | 0.90 | Highest in the app |
| High pass | 0.00 | Every lit cell feeds the glow, not only the brightest |
| Cursor color | #FFEAB2 | Pale gold |
| Cursor intensity | 2.50 | Among the hottest cursors in the app; Operator and Morpheus run 3.00 |
| Fall speed | 0.20 | Second slowest in the app; Twilight runs 0.10 |
| Trail decay | 0.60 | Trails hang rather than snap |
| Raindrop length | 0.60 | Medium trails |
| Cycle speed | 0.02 | Slower than default mutation |
The palette
Five stops, the longest ramp in the app, running black through deep bronze and full gold to near white.
The glyph file
Identical to Authentic's: 30 mirrored half-width katakana, the kanji 日, ten numerals, the letter Z and eleven punctuation marks, each in an isolated 128 by 128 slice with its own eight level mip chain.
Slices 53
Bytes 868,352
SHA-256 849f70891abb6d9b9b599277235df27152c7e2be40945319f1c9b14c5b6d9a2b
Source Hiragino Sans W6 and Menlo Bold, transcribed from Carl Newton's film analysis
Rebuild swift scripts/generate-glyph-coverage.swift
On your display
This style renders natively at 3840 by 2160 and 5120 by 2880. The glyph atlas picks its mip level from the real backing scale, so characters stay sharp on a 5K panel instead of going soft.
Refresh rate is handled separately from simulation rate. The rain advances on its own fixed schedule and the shader interpolates between the current state and the previous one at presentation time, so a 120 Hz display gets 120 smooth frames without the rain running faster. On battery or under thermal pressure the app drops to 30 or 15 fps and turns bloom off.
Common questions
Why is the Matrix code gold in the Neo preset?
It references the end of Revolutions, where a blinded Neo perceives the world as light. Seraph, the Machine City and Smith's defeat are all rendered in gold and amber in that film.
Does Neo use the same characters as Authentic?
Yes. Both draw the 53 character Matrix1999 family transcribed from a frame-by-frame analysis of the first film. Neo changes the palette, the bloom and the speed, not the alphabet.
Is Neo the brightest preset?
Yes. It runs the highest bloom in the app at 0.90 with the high pass at zero, and a cursor at 2.5 intensity, behind only Operator and Morpheus. Fall speed is dropped to 0.20 to keep that brightness from becoming frantic.
The alphabet and the color
The films give you the 1999 characters in green, and gold light in a different film entirely.
This style is the one frame that was never shot.