this is a 16-bit plug & play console I got at the same time as the Samuri, never really bothered with it much though. because yknow some generic 16-bit thing totally can't compete against Hummer Teamness. but I busted it out again recently and i've noticed a few interesting things about it. well kind of interesting. so here it is:



the box is packed away at the moment, its nothing special. except it says something like "EMG 2008 30 in 1 User Gnide"(sic) all over it for some reason. and no that text doesn't appear on the "manual" (a single sheet of paper with setup instructions in chinese depicting an AC adapter connection it doesnt actually have).

I don't know much about Sunnyflyer, google returns a few results for a Taiwanese maker of model planes under that name but there;s no mention of them branching into games. and i've seen two other consoles with their name on it, a famiclone with 88 games built in and 50 on cart (not sure if they're originals or what) and some unidentified dancemat.

anyway the console itself is about as cheaply made and uncomfortable to hold as it looks. it also looks identical to this Excalibur famiclone with Nice Code games built in.
theres an on-screen volume control in the menu for some reason, even though the sound in some games is distorted if you set it on anything above 1 (and it defaults to 4...).

i have no idea who actually made the built-in games, but there are one or two random connections in here. for one, the sound effect when you pause a game was also used by Jungletac, I think in the menu of the VG Pocket Caplet. the rest are game specific so i'll point them out when i get to them.

1. Lion Roar - Puzzloop clone
2. Battlefront - guy at the bottom of the screen shooting alien robot things. and there are shields you can take cover behind. like Space Invaders from a different perspective I guess. Kinda reminds me of Space Invaders: Invasion Day for the PS2 2Dified.
3. Bubble Man - like some kind of crazy bastard offspring of Bomberman, Sokoban and Bubble Bobble
4. Goal - Penalty shootout game. bit more involved than the usual Wii clone "shake the remote and hope" type game, there are powerups and stuff. but unfortunately this didn't reveal the name of the developer as penalty shootout games often do, unless theyre called "Bear" or "Cloud". (someone in the crowd is holding up a sign saying "Nice" but I dont think its ~Code)
5. Shooting King - one of these basketball shooting games. stop the guy moving and then set the power.
6. 1945 - vertical shooter. Similar to the games on ABL's 16-bit Air Blaster, maybe the same dev? Instead of no music like the Air Blaster's it has a probably stolen 5 second sample though.
7. 3D Bean - the Mega Drive Harry Potter pirate. seriously. the sound, a couple of the sprites and the HUD are different, but the background graphics are basically identical and so is the gameplay. unlike the original Level 2 uses the same graphics as Level 1, i'm not sure if subsequent levels do because the AI is annoying and the controls suck. >:0 I think it's a port to some other hardware rather than this being a Mega Drive clone though.
8. Sonic X - uh not really Sonic at all. well the main character isn't Sonic and it doesn't control like Sonic. but it is a platform game. The levels do have a few Sonicy elements in them though and some of the level graphics look like bits of Green Hill Zone if Sonic had been a bad early-90s PC game.
9. Apaqi - Another ABL Air Blaster esque shooter.
10. Blackjack - what it sounds like
11. Bomber - basically a Bomberman clone with a more maze like level layout
12. Bosconian - a port of Namco's arcade game. the sprites are updated but its more or less a direct port.
13. China Brick - tetris clone
14. Elevator - you're an elevator operator and you have to take cavemen to the floor they ask for. yep.
15. Golf - a golf game. seemingly with a lot of graphics ripped from Neo Turf Masters
16. Hit Brick - breakout/arkanoid clone
17. Math - pick the right numbers and symbols to reach the total on screen
18. Maze Car - Rally X clone
19. Moon Tank - a Pang clone. with a version of the Charlies Angels theme tune that reminds me of the obscure DS puzzle game Trioncube a bit.
20. Motorboat - jetski racing. Decent Mode 7 ish graphics. and also the riders' arses are very visible through their outfits. im just saying.
21. Poker - not poker. just bet on whether you or the computer have the highest card. exciting.
22. Span - you just run along and jump over stuff. sort of like a low rent Canabalt or something. (except this was made before Canabalt). quite fun really. oh and a special mention for the music which starts off quite reasonably but when the actual tune kicks in it sounds like its being performed by a robot cat with its balls caught in a dot matrix printer. or something.
23. Shooting Ball - a Puzzle Bobble clone. a pretty bland one at that.
24. Shoot Birds - shoot some birds. Not even ducks or anything, they look more like sparrows.
25. Spin - slot machine. yay pointlessgames
26. Tank - you're in a tank at one end of a field, other tanks are coming at you, shoot them, the end
27. Tank War - Battle City clone
28. Top Ball - bounce balls off your head from one side of the screen to the other
29. Treasure Brick - Columns clone. amusingly the sound effect when a piece lands is blatantly a stock door-closing sound effect.
30. Triangle Plane - Asteroids clone, complete with pseudo vector graphics

... and that's it!

In general the games aren't too bad. the graphics and music are a bit dodgy in some of them which didn't give me a great first impression, but mostly theyre quite fun.

a lot has been said about Hummer's Titenic lately but what of the other Titanic game? not the one by Union Bond. D: the other other one.

SpaceNinja did a Lets Play of it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKrad_e_i1U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlxIsIRf_qU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBaBDRGZT68

it being on my Overmax 151 in 1 as "Sunken Ship" got me wondering about it - it was released on cart by Nanjing in 2005 but the music sounds like Dragon Co. music, and the graphics look fairly Dragon Co. as well, so i'm guessing Nice Code was the intermediary here like with the Hacker.

but unlike The Hacker it doesn't look like a hack, it has Titanic music and it generally seems like it was built from the ground up as a Titanic game. but Dragon Co went out of business in 2003 and I don't know of any cart release of this game before Nanjing's. and it seems odd that Nice Code would re-release a Dragon game completely unmodified in any case.

so what are we dealing with here? an unreleased Dragon game that was finished up by Nice Code? a previously released but undiscovered Dragon game? or just something more or less made from scratch by Nice Code, maybe using one or two old Dragon resources that one of the staff still had kicking around?

(also you have no idea how many times I typed "Titenic" instead of "Titanic" while I was writing this post)

i've been doing a bit of investigation into original games from AtGames' Firecore systems (their licensed Mega Drive clones, which are apparently really some kind of ARM based thing running an emulator). some of their newer systems have SD card slots, and an SD adapter is available for older ones - this is all ostensibly for playing these legit original games (but obviously the thing they're not telling Sega is that it also allows you to play thousands of illegally downloaded roms)

Anyway I just recently came across this video of the games from a Firecore SD card:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzQfSsKVVxo
& you can download the games here:
http://elektropage.ru/index.php/gopoher (second link)

AtGames themselves also have some games to download from this site:
http://www.mugaatgames.net/Free_Trial.html
& my Firecore Super Arcade console has a fair few included as well.


Bomber from the SD card is playable on standard Mega Drive emulators and has a Tectoy copyright in the ROM, and many of the games on the Super Arcade are credited to Tectoy & Devworks Game Technology (another Brazilian company), so I think those particular games were developed by Tectoy for their own endless MD variations and licensed to AtGames.

but! everything else is unplayable on an emulator, and all of those games, for some reason, have a "Chu Chu Rocket" header (remnants of some licensed port that never happened?) a "FVRING" copyright and the same font near the start of the ROM, which I guess are probably both from the dev kit.

now a lot of those games on the SD card and the Super Arcade are renamed ports of Shenzhen Niutai's games from various 16-bit systems (the Wiii3 has them for instance). they look nice enough, but, well, they sucked on the Wiii3 and they suck even more ported to the Mega Drive.
(edit: oh and, kind of amusingly, Niutai's Ping Pong is based on Cube Tech's one which samples Fable (Dream Version) by Robert Miles. because stealing music is Cube Tech's whole thing. and for the Mega Drive port they recreated that same song, not particularly well, with the MD sound hardware)

The ones on AtGames' site seem to have been developed by someone else, theyre all puzzles and they look more like flash games or something.

There are a couple of unique games though - "Fish Story" from the SD looks an awful lot like Nice Code's only listed Sega game. I kind of have a soft spot for Nice Code, its a shame their 16-bit/32-bit/Mega Drive/VT03 games don't show up more often. they've improved a hell of a lot since their earlier NES games, which were mostly terrible to be fair. And then there's Mahjong Solitaire on the Super Arcade which is the only one credited to AtGames themselves. (its fairly poor.)


also the Sega Reactor has some of the games from the Zone 40 built in, which I think is a VT168 - I haven't seen enough of that one to tell if they're ports or not, but I kind of suspect theyre not. I couldnt imagine Waixing going to all that effort. the Firecore seems to have the ability to switch to another system - the Super Arcade has a built in famiclone with 95 games - so they may well have done the same with the VT168 there.

came across this topic on the Assembler forums recently: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33804
someone there had an unknown famiclone which this mysterious () "mrdomino" identified as the Air Blaster by ABL, you can see two variations of it on this page:
http://www.advancebright.com.hk/V2_html/console_html/console.html

the one he has is the 14 in 1 running on famiclone hardware (not sure if its VT03 or not). theres also a 5 in 1 with 16-bit games, one of which is on ebay UK for a fairly low price (and i'm slightly tempted to buy it). but i've never seen any of those games before in my life. Balloon War looks a bit like an advanced hack of Balloon Fight but some of the others look original, and I have no idea who made them. Same goes for the 16-bit games for that matter.

---

oh yeah AND i posted something about this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/CHALLENGE-TV-CONSOLE-GAME-3-1-DRIVING-SHOOTING-/320718672942?pt=UK_VideoGames_VideoGameConsoles_VideoGameConsoles&hash=item4aac52942e but the board decided to log me out.

seems to be the same developer, and its also cheap, but i kind of resent filling my house with all this plastic crap when all i want to get at is the games stored in a gloptop about the size of this -> O

this is now sold!

I finally tracked down a Power Joy Supermax with both carts (60 + 30 games) today, so i'm selling my old one with only the 60 in 1 cart.

Game list:

Catcher (War of Strike Mouse), Dragon Run, Three Country (Shisen Mahjong 2/Sanguo Sichuan Sheng), Panda "Advanture" & Space Shuttle are all (ex-)Hummer Team games. The rest are mostly Nice Code with a few hacks scattered throughout. There are no built-in games, everything is on the cart.

the console is PAL, OneBus-based famiclone (so its cart won't work on non-OneBus clones, but it will play normal Famicom carts no problem). it's only VT02 though, no 4bpp graphics mode. It can run off 4 x AAA batteries or an AC adapter (not included, but it should work with other famiclones' 9v adapters, or the 10v ones from the original Famicom & Model 1 Mega Drive/Genesis. definitely *not* the one from the NES). The end of the lightgun bit has a small piece broken off but it still works fine.

Also comes with a second player controller which uses a proprietary 7-pin connector, you could probably mod it to take a standard famiclone controller if you wanted though. Box is included albeit fairly scruffy looking.  No manual.

Price-£10 super awesome PGC discount price: £6 GBP (roughly US$10/€7) sold!

shipping:
UK:  2nd class £3.50, 1st class £4, recorded £5
rest of Europe: airmail £6, registered £10.50
everywhere else: airmail £9.50, registered £14.50

If youre interested PM me, but post in this thread too because the PM system has been a bit unreliable lately.

just wondering how people want to handle multicarts (if at all)?

personally i'd say put them in a separate gallery on each game page, but only if the game's actually featured on the label with some artwork and stuff - adding something like that recent 200+ game multi on all 200+ pages would probably be massive overkill. and then we could have a "(system) multicarts" category for the actual images, so we'd still have somewhere to put multis that wouldnt go on any game page (like if they don't have any particular games on the label, like the Power Joy ones)

i've added a console infobox template here: http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Infobox_console
with fields for manufacturer, distributor, system, games, game developers, ID no & alternate names. if anyone can think of anything else that'd be useful to have, feel free to add it.

whenever i think i've got these companies figured out something always comes along and throws a big fat spanner in the works. this time its ping pong.

now as pointed out by cheetahmen in his video here this V-tac casino thing has the same music on its menu as is used in the Famicom Table Tennis, a game featured in various places with a Waixing copyright. and an early version  of which is on a Techno Source 10 in 1 thingy. this was at some point suspected to be a Nice Code game  but I don't think it is, personally. its only ever appeared either with a Waixing copyright or (in an early version) on that Techno Source console, and the same goes for a few other games with similar music, whereas other Nice Code games Waixing released all showed up elsewhere with different graphics. and Techno Source's Elmo plug & play was evidently developed by V-Tac so they seem to have connections there already.

now this game has a pretty similar title screen (but not gameplay) to the vt03 ping pong game listed on cube tech's website, which i have on a standalone ping pong console made by ABL. cube's vt168 pingpong is pretty different, but the one on my Wiii3 (some sunplus 16bit system i think?) 198 in 1 cart is basically exactly the same with higher quality graphics/sound. it has the same "(c) all rights reserved" text as all the other games on that cart, but a few things set it apart, like the fact that it still has the stolen 80s italo soundtrack so beloved of cube tech, and it still refers to the O button from the ABL console which isnt present on the Wiii. theres yet another upgraded version on the 32-bit GC Pro.

in the Wiii3's tennis game (the one that was also sold standalone by Conny) during the intro you can see something that looks quite a lot like it says "V-tac". so its possibly coming back around to them again? BUT V-tac's own site shows a very different pingpong game to either of the aforementioned versions. and Waixing has a 16-bit ping pong game with the same options ("Knocks Exercise" & "Smash Exercise") which is otherwise different.

so theres:
* cube(?)'s vt03 pingpong
*  v-tac(?)'s sunplus 16bit pingpong
* ?'s 32bit pingpong
which are all basically the same game
* waixing/v'tac(?)'s famicom table tennis
* waixing's unknown 16bit pingpong
with a little bit in common with the above
but
* cube's vt168 pingpong
* v-tac's unknown pingpong
have nothing in common with any of them
so! what the hell.