Here's an interesting variant of the SPG293 Subor hardware I had my eye on some time ago that I finally got images of: the Subor C21! Unlike most of the Wii knockoffs using the 32-bit hardware, this console comes in a shell not dissimilar to a portable CD player (although there is nothing even close to a disc compartment in the console from what I can tell). According to a translation I did on the description of the Xianyu listing I found of this thing, it comes with an 8GB SD card preloaded with the usual 32-bit games as well as some 8-bit NES ROMs, which going by the translation refers to actual NES/Famicom games. The unique thing about this 32-bit Subor console compared to the rest of the known ones is that it appears to have a completely different menu that takes on more of an overworld map type look. While typing this and going back to check the Xianyu listing I found out that a laptop-like device from Subor, the Subor V16, uses the same type of menu. It looks like that system also has the typical quasi-OS menu that comes with the Subor consoles so I'll probably look at it some other time. Pictures of the Subor C21 box, its contents, and the menu will be attached below.

About a year ago, I learned about the existence of the SPG293, a system-on-a-chip developed and manufactured by Sunplus as part of their SPG line of video game hardware. The SPG293 is an evolution of the SPG290 platform (best known for being used in the Mattel Hyperscan) and to my knowledge thus far, it mostly saw use in educational computers and plug and play systems that were manufactured by Subor and sold under various names, all of which included support for Wii-like controllers that used IR. The most notable of these releases are the Wii clones distributed by Lexibook in the mid-2010s that came bundled with various 32-bit games and what are essentially graphically enhanced NES games (VTxx) as ".wxn" files. You may have heard about it from this video. SPG293 mainly adds high resolution 16-bit color modes and rotation/scaling features to sprites. Like the SPG290, it uses the proprietary 32-bit S+Core architecture, developed in-house by Sunplus themselves. Comparing it to dedicated game consoles is a bit difficult, but the graphics are equivalent to a PlayStation 2 in regards to 2D and utilize a PPU similar to a SNES, making use of tiles for graphics as well as having support for a Mode 7-like feature, and audio quality can be on par with any fifth-generation home console at best. If you're interested in learning more about the SPG293 on a technical level or are interested in checking out the game library on the Lexibook consoles, I highly recommend checking out gatecat's video demonstrating them on her SPG293 emulator, as well as her development blog series on the emulator on cohost: https://cohost.org/kbity/post/775535-spg293-adventures-p

From my own research, it seems that some awareness of this technology being used for plug and plays goes back to the discovery of the now-defunct istudy666.cn site and the downloadable .wxn pack in 2011, but otherwise attempts to shed light on consoles using SPG293 hardware haven't been very prominent other than casual mentions on this forum from years ago. Recently, I've been collecting any information on systems that use the SPG293 whenever motivation strikes me, and now I've decided to create this thread with the intention of sharing the more interesting systems I've come across so far in an organized and public manner. I'll mostly be posting sporadically when it comes to sharing info I've found because writing takes time and there are surprisingly a lot of SPG293 consoles out there, albeit most of them are just variants of Subor's 32-bit computer/PnP hardware. I'm also keeping my postings limited to the more generic plug and plays that use this hardware so as to not stray too far from the topic of bootlegs. Others are free to share information or leads on any other consoles potentially using SPG293 hardware if they so choose to.

To start this off with a bang, I'll be sharing a couple of SPG293 consoles that until now were essentially unknown and that I thought were interesting enough to share here:

iSports Pro (Japan)

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This was a bit of a shock to me when I first discovered this from doing a simple Google search in an unrelated context. The iSports Pro, a plug and play system based on the 32-bit Subor Wii clone hardware, got a release in Japan by a company named "GAMEJOY JAPAN". Unlike most of the Subor consoles, though, this one only comes with 15 32-bit sports games. Now, the same console was released in Asian (and possibly European?) territories under an identical name and with the same shell as the Japanese version. That release appears to have been preloaded with the usual quasi-OS with menus for sports games, regular games, and miscellaneous applications. The Japanese iSports Pro actually uses a completely different menu more fitting of a typical multi-game console. The menu and games are completely in English and the games themselves are variants of games known to be included with the Lexibook consoles:

• Tennis
• Swimming
• Super Slider
• Golf
• Fencing
• Super Shoot (Basketball)
• Beach Volleyball
• Darts
• Horse Racing Speed
• Ping Pong
• Bowling
• Fishing
• Football
• Trampoline
• Sword of Warrior

The most interesting of the 15 games to me is Ping Pong, as it's a bit different from the version included with the Lexibook consoles. Not only does it use the PINGPONG.AVI video for its intro, which the version on the Lexibook consoles don't use (the file is still included on the Lexibook under "Classroom > More" and in the files for the ping pong game those come with), but the game itself from the little footage I could find has some visual changes. You can watch an unboxing of the Japanese iSports Pro and gameplay footage of all 15 games here.

This version of the iSports Pro seems to be very uncommon. I've only ever found two listings for it on Mercari Japan and Yahoo! Auctions. The Mercari listing also happened to have a couple of what I can only describe as "proxy listings" for it on eBay with inflated prices and the exact same images from it. From what I can gather, the iSports Pro didn't sell particularly well in Japan, likely explaining why it's so scarce on Japanese auction sites. As of writing, this particular console also hasn't been dumped yet, which hopefully changes soon.


iGame Family/iGame V60/i-Vision Game/IPSPG1000A

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And now for an SPG293 console not manufactured by Subor. Or at least, I believe it's SPG293-based from what I've been able to deduce. I have gatecat to thank for mentioning the existence of this thing on the BGC Discord and indirectly bringing it to my awareness.

This console isn't purely meant for video games, and its main purpose was to function as an iPod dock that let you stream music and video from your iPod to your TV. It also happened to have the ability to play games natively that made use of a motion controlled wireless remote (sounding familiar to anyone?) and had an SD card slot to allow more games to be loaded onto the console. Apparently, the OEM of this device is Sansonic, a Chinese company with next to no documentation and a very generic name, and the original names for it were the i-Vision Game and the more cryptic IPSPG1000A. According to this Softpedia article, the i-Vision Game used "a SPG293 MCU running at 162MHz, 32 MB of SDRAM memory and 8MB of NOR Flash memory". It appears that this console managed to get distributed by PealPal, another Chinese company, and of all things, an IT and consumer electronics company in the UK named Elonex that rebranded the device as the iGame Family. I believe that the iGame Family is connected to the i-Vision Game since not only do the consoles themselves look almost identical outside of branding, the image of the box the i-Vision Game supposedly came in on its ECPlaza page shows a 3D model of a boy character at the far right (named Mark in the games) that would also be used for the iGame Family's box art and promotional material (attached below). The Elonex release is interesting in that it's the only version of this console known to have had extra games released for it, which could be downloaded or purchased from the igamefamily.com site (now defunct) and put onto an SD card for use on the iGame Family. So far, none of these downloadable games were archived and have been lost since the iGame Family website shut down. A complete list of games that came included with the iGame Family or were available for download online can be found here.

I won't be delving into the dock functionality of this console to keep this thread focused, so I'll just talk about the games for a brief moment. From the scant few videos covering them that I could find on YouTube, most of the games are the typical knock offs of the games from Wii Sports. One game that particularly stands out from the rest though is the trampoline game, which uncannily resembles the one made for the Subor consoles down to the presentation and gameplay mechanics (doing button/motion combos to maintain jump height, obtaining points when completing certain combos).

The iGame Family in particular seems to have been sold exclusively in the UK and retailed for £79 there. It launched on October 2009 and was discontinued in 2012. I'm not sure how Sansonic or PealPal originally distributed the i-Vision Game but the ECPlaza page for the PealPal release still has the option to contact the company to request a bulk order, so make of that what you will. Of course, none of these consoles have been dumped yet either and wouldn't work in emulation at the moment anyway since they rely on flash memory to store system applications.

A crappy little plug & play known as "Croaky Karaoke" was just added to MAME. In concept, the game is nothing more than a karaoke video played with some song covers played in that distinct "DDR Famiclone" style. Amusingly, four of the songs were licensed from Sony Music, leading to the console having a licensed NES cover of "Take On Me", of all things.

There's no microphone input or anything on this console, but the menu inexplicably uses a proprietary control setup; so I can't actually navigate the song selection screen in any emulator. As such, I attempted to extract the songs into individual ROMs; to my surprise, this worked perfectly for 13 out of 14 songs (the one exception being "Sing"). Each file has three songs built-in, running dominant as one of them (similar to the educational computer ROMs); however, zeroing out one or two sections of code will run the other song + video. The only caveat with the working files is that they do not emulate the sampled "clapping" sound effect, I am unsure if that's an emulation issue or an extraction issue. Download attached below.

It's an issue with releases of FCEUX earlier than the recommended version 2.6.2; the Duck 3D Blast ROM relied on PRG-RAM, which earlier emulators did not support in this form. The 86-in-1 re-converted the hack to not use PRG-RAM; I have released a new 64-in-1 ROM revision using the "fixed" version of Duck 3D Blast.

Thank you.  _{(and thanks to kelvin too, since i evidently forgot to reply to that at the time…)}