Not too long ago, I found what looked like new old stock for a plug and play TV game, one that I had never heard about until then, from a company named VTG Interactive. After looking into it a bit more, it turned out that three of these TV games were produced and I found out that two of them were versions of games that I had seen on those 16-bit Sunplus Wii clones with games developed by Waixing (see: Zone 40 and Reactor 32-in-1), which now had VTG Interactive branding in-game and removed the Chinese copyright registration numbers from the title screen, with the menus even being slightly different. The games also share a, let's say, similar sound design philosophy with Waixing's other generic plug and play games in general. The TV games in question are Virtual Baseball, Virtual Tennis, and Virtual Boxing. So far, I know that Virtual Baseball and Virtual Tennis are based on the Baseball game and Virtual Tennis game on the generic Wii clones respectively. I'm not too sure about Virtual Boxing, but from going by the screenshots on a picture of the back of the box that I came across, it might be based on the boxing game on the 16-bit Wii clones of the same name. I have since added as many pictures as I could find for the boxes of all three VTG Interactive games to the respective BootlegGames Wiki article.

The VTG Interactive games are essentially simulated versions of real sports and would come with peripherals to emulate real world aspects of these sports with motion control (i.e., Virtual Baseball comes with a plastic wireless baseball bat and a wired mat you run in place on), with the games themselves being stored on cartridges. VTG Interactive would also sell their own proprietary console that you would connect the cartridge and peripherals to and play the games on. Someone named Furbland Channel uploaded a video with short demos of Virtual Baseball (named Live! Baseball on that version's title screen) and Virtual Tennis if you're interested in that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4gM2Mb5nGM. The games themselves are surprisingly very polished presentation wise for generic plug and play games and surpass the quality of Waixing's typical plug and play output. There is currently very little information on VTG Interactive as a company and their exact activity, and trying to search for information on them or their known games brings up nothing outside of the BootlegGames Wiki page I created. What I discovered yesterday though was that out of stock Amazon listings for all three of the games are still up that aren't indexed well by Google, and the Virtual Boxing listing even has two reviews from people who presumably had the product, so at least one of the games were sold at some point. The listings are all dated November of 2006, meaning that these products pre-date the 16-bit Wii clones by a bit to my knowledge and definitely pre-date the generic versions of the games. The lack of information on the games as of current and the general low quantity of stock probably means that they didn't sell much when VTG Interactive was still in business. An interesting thing about the generic plug and play versions of one of the games, Baseball, is that in one of the stadiums you play in, a version of VTG Interactive's logo is partially visible (video showcasing this here), which to me suggests that that the games were likely first developed by Waixing as a subcontractor for VTG Interactive before being repurposed for generic Wii clones. Waixing is known to have released many games specifically for plug and play systems of different types and even released units under their own name, but this is the first time I've heard of Waixing potentially working on unique plug and play games for specific companies.

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The VTG Interactive games may not have been the first time Waixing dabbled in contract work for plug and play systems, either. In 2005, a Sudoku plug and play unit was released by SDW Games named Sudoku - Do You Sudoku?. It appears to be very uncommon and was only dumped in MAME as of a couple months ago. It came with what I would consider a pretty advanced Sudoku game, with save functionality, hints, and the ability to mark numbers and clashes. Where Waixing comes into this is that a Sudoku game that is near identical to this one would be included on their 16-bit Wii clones, albeit modified to remove the SDW Games logo from the game as well as the hints, instructions, and options related to saving. Here's gameplay footage of the SDW Games version running in MAME and here's footage of the generic plug and play version. The generic plug and play version even has the exact same music, sound effects, and difficulty levels from the original SDW Games release (I assume the music periodically pausing in the former is just an emulation bug). Now, there's the possibility that someone else created the Sudoku game for SDW Games and Waixing simply licensed it and modified it for use on their Wii clones, and frankly I'm not too certain on Waixing having 100% developed this game either. It still intrigues me that something released as its own product not directly connected to Waixing would end up on their 16-bit plug and plays, though.

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Lastly,  something I just discovered today: a dedicated plug and play unit that appears to contain another game that I know is in at least one of Waixing's 16-bit Wii clones: Operation Cobra Strike (or "Operation: Cobra Strike" on the box of the dedicated unit). This one I also found from an Amazon listing, which I'll link here: https://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Game-TV-Plug-Play/dp/B000LC0URK. This was also a release by SDW Games, although the Amazon listing lists VTG Interactive in the product info, which I'm not sure about the significance of right now. This particular game is on the TaiKee Interactive TV Games 49 in 1, and compared to the other games I mentioned I'd say the prerendered models for the terrorists look sorta similar to the models in Virtual Tennis (and Virtual Boxing if the pictures on the back of the VTG Interactive version are anything to go by). Doesn't seem like the version of Operation Cobra Strike on the dedicated unit is much different from the generic plug and play version going by the pictures in the listing, although I'd still be interested in seeing this unit documented if it actually got released. Unfortunately, it seems that this system is also very hard to find for sale, which suggests that it probably didn't sell too well (noticing a pattern here?). Generally speaking, from what I've seen in gameplay videos, Operation Cobra Strike seems like a solid game with interesting presentation choices, such as text crawls in the intro and level transitions that have a very "computer hacker"-style theme.

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That's all I have to say on this topic for now. This is a very interesting subject that I've enjoyed delving into when I got the opportunity and I probably should have made a forum thread about this a while ago just to make my discoveries more accessible. I'll update this thread if I find any more potential instances of Waixing acting as a subcontractor for plug and play development.

Quote from: APM on May 19, 2024, 12:18:02 PM

Oh you actually bought that one? Neat. Frankly my initial excitement of getting a Fire Bird has dwindled since we last talked about it but if I find an opportunity to get one then I certainly would consider it, lol.

If you've gotten the opportunity to dump the ROM from the working unit, can you confirm if it's identical to the common ROM? I'd also be interested in seeing what that weird link cable option at the bottom of the main menu does on real hardware, as going by emulation of the ROM, it still has the menu cursor for some reason and pressing the A button shows a loading dialog with changing hex values, which probably isn't how it's supposed to work? I'm willing to be proven wrong though. :p

The link cable thing didn't work when I tried it on cart. Probably doesn't activate unless you plug something into the link cable port. Maybe it's for copying codes between devices

Edit: Translation software says its for updating the device

Compared your ROM to the common ROM with WinMerge, and apparently there's a big number of differences in bytes between the two files. Notably, there's additions of large sections of "BANK XX" (X's being numbers) data in the common ROM that include the ROM header name and some other data in areas that aren't present in your dump, and vice versa. I'm not sure if it's the result of a custom mapper or what. If you got the same result for your dump during multiple attempts though then I guess it might be a different revision of the cheat card or something.

Also, interesting about the Fire Bird having the ability to update itself. Wonder how that was supposed to work. Did they provide a device to allow it to send updates downloaded from the internet from a serial port on a computer to the link port or did they have kiosks or something similar? Guess we'll never know until a boxed copy of this thing shows up that hopefully clears that up.

I know I'm four years late to the party but about a year ago I found a cheat device on Xianyu that happened to have the English name "Fire Bird" on it, which I suspected to be the elusive Vast Fame cheat card. As it would turn out, Ankos already bought the listing by the time I mentioned it on the BGC Discord. After it arrived they pretty much confirmed that it was at least connected to the Fire Bird ROM that's been dumped online, with its ROM header sharing the same name as the one in the common ROM ("VAST FAME 1.0"). Unfortunately Ankos couldn't get their unit to work and later discovered that the pins for the connector on the cartridge were bent. The ROM they dumped from the cartridge also didn't work on emulators when they tested it, which they suspected to be copy protection. Personally I still have more questions than answers about that cheat card after refreshing my memory of that whole experience, but hopefully one day more of this mystery can be put to rest.

From the last time I was able to freely search for stuff on Xianyu, the Fire Bird cheat cards aren't terribly rare but they definitely seem uncommon in mainland China at least. If I had to describe what it looked like, it looks similar to a Gameshark but it uses a translucent blue shell. I'll attach pictures of the cartridge that I downloaded from a Xianyu listing on this post.

For anyone who hasn't been following this thread too closely, I made a post here where I briefly talked about a 32-bit Wii clone named the WiWi 65 manufactured by Qi Sheng Long, which came with 32-bit games from Nice Code and didn't appear to have been released, and in the same post, also briefly mentioned a similar 48 in 1 system from the same manufacturer (which comes with Shenzhen Niutai games, just for the record), which along with the 65 in 1 I suspected to use SPG293 hardware. Just to go on a side tangent about the 48 in 1 for a moment, I only recently just found out that there was actually solid proof of it using the SPG293 in the form of Chinese copyright filings (They're linked on the BootlegGames Wiki page for Sunplus SPG but are on a website that no longer works. I dunno if there's a way to access the Chinese copyright database still).

Anyway, as luck would have it, I managed to find a Wii clone system with 54 games on Carousell that has a similar menu to the previous two Wii clones I mentioned. It doesn't appear to have a proper name, instead just calling itself something along the lines of "TV Sport Game plus color 32 bits", with the menu calling itself the "Ultimate Sport 54 in 1". The console's box credits it to a "Virtual Interactive", or Vi as also shown on the box. Unfortunately, it's sold out, but here's a link to the listing just to prove that I'm not making stuff up: https://www.carousell.sg/p/tv-games-like-wii-36764154/ - I'll also attach the pictures from the listing here in case the link goes down for any reason.

From the looks of things on the box and menu, it appears to mostly consist of the same 32-bit Shenzhen Niutai games from the 48 in 1. Assuming that all 48 of the 54 games are Shenzhen Niutai games, though, that still leaves 6 extra games. I don't believe those extra games are shown on the box and the picture of the console's menu from the listing shows games that already exist on the 48 in 1 to my knowledge. I also haven't a clue on who could've developed the extra games. I really want to believe that they may be SPG293 Nice Code games though, and I think that it's definitely possible, as Nice Code games being included with other games has happened on at least one plug and play system before to my understanding. The 205-in-1 "Wiii3" console comes to mind, which supposedly does a similar thing if the BootlegGames Wiki is anything to go by, although the Nice Code games are included on a separate 7-in-1 cartridge instead of being built in with the rest of the games, and the 198 games it comes with are currently unknown (the regular 198-in-1 model shows Shenzhen Niutai games on the box, for whatever that's worth). The possibility of the extra games just being more Niutai games or even games from an as of yet unknown developer is also likely, though. I haven't looked too hard but it does seem like this specific console isn't too easy to come by, which makes things annoying to research but also intriguing. Where was this console released? When was it released? How different is it from the 32-bit 48 in 1 console? Not sure if we'll ever find out, but learning that this exists at all is exciting to me and I'm glad to be able to talk about it here.

EDIT: Realized that two versions of the Wiii3 were released. A 198-in-1 model that appears to come with Shenzhen Niutai games according to the back of the box (it's being sold on eBay from Greece at the moment), and a 205-in-1 model with a 198-in-1 cartridge with games of unknown origin (according to an old thread most of them were from Cube Tech? Unless that was ye olde timey bootleg company speculation that no longer applies) and a 7-in-1 cart with 16-bit Nice Code games. Reworded my theory regarding the 54-in-1 to consider this information, although it doesn't affect it by much.

Hey guys, got another quick ROM dump release for you all. This time it's for the Spanish version of Makon Soft's Pokémon Jade (no relation to the Telefang hack of the same name), Pokémon Esmeralda (or "Pokémon - La Versión Esmeralda (Special Pikachu Edition)" on the box). I have Cris_Kaiju to thank for this one. This is simply a Spanish translation of their Pokémon themed Sonic Adventure 7 hack, featuring a new title and the story and transition screens translated into Spanish. I'm not sure if they fixed the bug that crashes Stage 1 upon completing it, but otherwise it's pretty much identical to the English version in terms of gameplay.

The raw dump currently only works on hhugboy if you set the unlicensed compatibility mode to "NT (Makon) new" before running it, or if you're using the latest version of mGBA (0.10.3), go to "Tools > Game overrides..." without a game running, and in the Game Boy tab, select "NT (new)" for the memory bank controller and select Save (this setting will reset when you restart the emulator, but just in case, reset the option back to "Autodetect" if you want to continue using other ROMs when you're done). No GBX version this time, sorry. I'd like to look at the cart PCB to exactly know what hardware it uses to create a GBX based on that for the most accuracy before releasing one. So far I haven't been able to find any pictures of it for Pokémon Esmeralda's cartridge, but if anyone is willing to provide pictures of the cart's PCB then I'll likely make a GBX ROM and add it here.

I'll just preface this post before I continue by saying: these aren't my own dumps and these were technically publicly released since about a year ago, albeit only on the BGC Discord. I had these downloaded on my computer for a year and only rediscovered them yesterday, which is when I had the idea to publicly share them so these dumps wouldn't end up being lost to time. I have Cam from the BGC Discord to thank for dumping these in the first place and for giving me permission to release their ROMs here. I likely will not be doing this often, so don't expect me to release many ROM dumps.

Now, the dumps in question are for two cartridges for the Game Boy Color: a multicart named the "Super Color 26-in-1" with an ID of CY2086, and an English release of Digimon 02 5, a Makon Soft game (cartridge ID is CGB-208-USA).

The Super Color 26-in-1 includes a couple games developed by Makon Soft. The games in question (Street Fighter Zero 4 and Pokemon Gold 2) use the "NT (Makon) new" mapper. Both games, as well as the Pikachu INC. translation of Pokemon Gold appear to be identical to dumps that have been released elsewhere. I'm including a dump of the full multicart anyway for preservation's sake and in case anyone can figure out the mapper this cart use. At the moment, the full multicart dump only partially works in emulators and the only game that can be launched is The Pikachu Nightmare ("POKEMON GO GO" in the menu).

Now, for the slightly more intriguing dump of the two. Digimon 02 5 is yet another Makon Soft platformer, and the dump is of the English release of the game. Until now, the only version of this game dumped was a Kongfeng release of the Chinese version with no copy protection that Ankos dumped. While Digimon 02 5 definitely controls better than the games that made Makon Soft infamous as it's based on their Digimon 2 engine, it's still not great and can be very frustrating to play through. This time, though, the game's intro is a slideshow of various Digimon followed by a story (in English in this case) and stars... something that I think is supposed to resemble Veemon as a playable character. You can pick up a power up to transform your character into a guy with armor that gives you a more powerful fire attack. I managed to play through four levels (with the help of save states, of course) and it's nothing particularly out of the ordinary for a Makon Soft game. I'll be releasing two versions of the dump here: the original raw dump, which only works on hhugboy if you set the unlicensed compatibility mode to "NT (Makon) new" before running it, and a GBX ROM of the raw dump configured to use the NT new mapper and 32 KB of save data (the original cartridge uses a 32K GoldStar GM76C256ALLFW70 SRAM chip), which will automatically run on hhugboy and the latest version of mGBA to my knowledge (for anyone who cares, I used rari_teh's GBXBuilder tool to create the GBX ROM).

Enjoy your new ROM dumps! Pictures of the cartridges, and PCBs if applicable, taken by the dumper (Cam) will be posted shortly.

In a previous post I briefly mentioned that the 32-bit Subor hardware used in their Wii clones also appears to have been used in a laptop (presumably an educational one like their other computer products) they produced, the V16. I'll be writing a bit more about it here and give you all a general overview of what the device is like:

The Subor V16 is a clamshell laptop that has a regular LCD screen, a trackpad, speakers, and a full keyboard complete with shortcut keys where the function keys usually are and a Windows key. This is one of the releases of the 32-bit Subor hardware that was positioned more as a learning device. Despite this, it still has the game player fully intact and comes with the IR knockoff Wiimotes. At the bottom of the laptop is a reset button and a removable compartment that I assume is where the battery is, and the laptop allows power to be received from a power adapter. Along with support for the knockoff Wiimotes, the Subor V16 also supports external USB mice. Thankfully, there's video footage online of the Subor V16 in action so I was able to get a bit more insight into how it works. Pictures of the V16 and some of its menus that I found on Xianyu will be attached here as well.

The V16 laptop has an overworld map-type menu with different sections to access like the C21. Going into one of these sections on the V16 appears to go to a specific menu on the more typical OS most of the 32-bit Subor consoles use (the C21 uses its own custom menus). Like the other 32-bit Subor devices that are positioned as learning devices, they come with educational materials that I believe add points to the system if the user engages with them. The points can then be used to play the games on the system. To my knowledge, the game library on the Chinese releases of Subor's 32-bit devices are similar to what you'd find on the Lexibook and whatnot. The video linked earlier should be able to illustrate what the educational activities are like.

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.