So as brought up in
this thread, there are a few variations of these mini (~15cm high) arcade machines doing the rounds at the moment, with mostly 16-bit Cube Tech games (originals and hacks) built in.. and they're quite interesting, so I thought I'd start a new thread for them!
These three all have 240 games - it may or may not be the same set, there are some variations in lists posted online:
Taikee Micro Arcade Machine:
http://www.mymemory.co.uk/Gadgets/Taikee/Taikee-Micro-Arcade-Machine-with-240-Built-in-Games---16-BitRed5 Mini Arcade Machine:
http://www.red5.co.uk/mini-arcade-machine.aspx (this is the one I have)
Lexibook Cyber Arcade:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexibook-Cyber-Arcade-240-Games/dp/B00XW6CX4A (this one has a different design from the others, more Japanese-style)
and here's another version with 230 games (and a different menu, which resembles the one in the production-music-using Cube Tech DDR clone I mentioned in the previous thread)
SoundLogic XT Multicade 230
http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Multicade_230 /
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jwTCe-Wj40The hardware is something in the VT line - I'd guess a fairly recent model with lots of backwards compatibility, maybe VT369, since it's pretty much a greatest(?) hits(?) of Cube Tech, with their VT168 originals, VT03 originals, a
ton of better-than-VT03 NES hacks, a handful of VT03 hacks, who knows what else, and a bit of Waixing/Nice Code stuff thrown in at the end. Unfortunately most of the games are missing their title screens though.
Here's a list of the games found on the Red5 version (transcribed by me from the system menu to avoid any discrepancies with documentation):
http://pastebin.com/ZLaA5ADdMyMemory's listing for the Taikee one suggests the Red5 unit has a few changes, probably mostly for copyright reasons - Galaga was renamed Galaxy Battle and bumped to the start of the Shooting section, and Zuma was replaced with Unwonted Space. Also a few of the target shooting games were renamed; there may be other changes on top of that. I haven't done a full comparison yet. I'm not sure, though, if these differences are actually represented in the Taikee machine itself, or if MyMemory were just given an early game list and the final ROM actually matches the Red5 one.
The Red5 manual actually seems to have been made at some point in between the two - it has Unwonted Space in place of Zuma, but still has Galaga midway through the list and the old names for the target shooting games.
DreamGear also have an 8-bit version, covered here:
http://s4.zetaboards.com/PGC_Forums?topic=10399086/1/#newbut it looks like they're also getting on board with their own 16-bit variation, the "Retro Arcade Machine X", containing 300 games:
http://www.dreamgear.com/retro-arcade-machine-x-gaming-system-with-300-games/according to the game list on the sell sheet, it looks like they've supplemented *most* of the games on the 240-in-1 versions with a selection of their usual Nice Code games (some VT03). The games dropped from the 240 list seem to be almost entirely those that are either hacks or clones of too-well-known games - so, for example, the Donkey Kong Jr hack Jungle Max1 is gone, but so is the coded-from-scratch Frogger clone Cross River.
Oh yeah, and on the subject of the NES hacks found on this thing - as I mentioned they seem to be based on something better than VT03, I'm not sure exactly which part of the VT line supports these high-colour graphics on top of NES code, but .. that's what it is.
But interestingly there are also high-resolution versions of these hacks in existence, seemingly running at 2x the resolution of the versions seen on the mini arcade machines - in fact it looks like the graphics in those versions were downscaled from the high-res ones.
The high-res versions appear, for example, on a MiWi console I have (the same one that has production-music DDR), and I'm
fairly sure they can also be found on
this trapezoidal thing once seen on Cube Tech's site. I have no idea what hardware they are running on - some unknown high-res VT derivative? Something else entirely? But it's those high-res versions that are used, misleadingly, for the screenshots on the Mini Arcade box and the icons in its menu.