Greetings, folks. It's been a while since I last made an interesting post on here. Most of that can be attributed to a major crash my laptop suffered near the end of last year, which thankfully hasn't rendered the SSD in it completely useless but prevents it from booting, and has basically thrown me and my research efforts in regards to bootlegs off by a lot. Since then, I've been using a backup PC running Windows 7 until I can gather the nerve to recover what hasn't already been backed up from my laptop and get it in working order again.

Anyway, the subject of this thread. Following some major reorganizing of the game lists on the BootlegGames Wiki's JungleTac page, I ended up discovering by complete chance while looking through archives of JungleTac's website that they developed of all things, a V.Smile game, after reverse image searching one of the images on a page showcasing their software work. The game in question was released in English as Learnin' Wheels, and received German and French localizations as Freds Zahlen Rallye and Apprenti' pilote respectively. The game itself from what I can find was released as early as 2004 (going by the manual) and seems to be very obscure, with English copies of the game in particular not being very common, although French and German copies slightly moreso going by a quick eBay search in both regions. The only comprehensive documentation on it that I could find is an old YouTube livestream by who I am certain was a child at the time, available here, which covers both the Learning Adventure and Learning Zone modes. On the plus side, all known versions of the game are dumped (although MAME doesn't have the English version recognized for some reason).

What's interesting about this game and its connection to JungleTac is that the screenshots of the game shown on their website seem to be from an earlier point in development and majorly deviate from the equivalents in the final game. The images from their website are included below (direct from the Wayback Machine, so keep in mind that not all images will load at all times):


Considering the major differences and the fact that JungleTac's screenshots were clearly taken from a direct source (likely an emulator), I am not convinced that JungleTac is unaffiliated with the game and simply repurposed screenshots of the game for their own benefit. There's also the fact that they repurposed the sheep sprites from the game for their own games. The earliest instance of this that I could find was in the Pluto mini-game in the licensed Disney Game It! Classic Pals handheld from 2006 that JungleTac developed, where the sheep are clearly based on the sprites for them in the "Number Path" mini-game from the Learning Zone section of Learnin' Wheels (the last photo from the above images being from an earlier incarnation of the mini-game). There's also their generic 16-bit game "Hide and Seek", where the dancing sheep animation that plays when the haystack it's hiding in is selected is definitely traced from the one shown on the results screen in Learnin' Wheels for when a Learning Zone activity is completed. Images of both instances will be attached below.

As of writing, it is unknown if JungleTac developed additional V.Smile games. I'm certainly not qualified to find that out as idk how to disassemble Sunplus SPG-based games in general. I did find out however that there is an interesting pattern in the dumped V.Smile games where graphics for a "VTech Electronics Co., Ltd." copyright notice are in the ROM data for some of them (which to my knowledge are not shown in any final V.Smile games) while others appear to not have it at all (which includes Learnin' Wheels), and going by the fact that it is also present in the graphics area for what I assume is a test program that is included in some V.Smile games, with at least one game (Care Bears - A Lesson in Caring) having both kinds of copyright notice graphics, I have my suspicions that they might not only suggest that some games were developed internally by VTech but that they had third-party developers at all, although without anything concrete I can't say for certain. Should share what I have of those findings at some point somewhere once I'm ready, although idk if just sharing them here would be appropriate.

Making a post in this thread about a year later to bring up a really obscure 32-bit plug and play I did not know about until literally four days ago while doing research into an unrelated bootleg-adjacent company. Introducing the Console Motion Games, a plug and play sold in France by FX Toys around the 2010s that contains 30 built-in games. This system was actually manufactured by Qi Sheng Long, the same company that produced the Wireless Hunting plug and play, who originally listed it on an old version of their site with the model number HD-047 (which is also printed on the box and manual for the Console Motion Games).

Interestingly enough, this system solely uses a camera to control the games, similar to the Wireless Air 60, but the games pictured on the back of the box don't resemble the games on that system at all. If anything, the games weirdly remind me of Nice Code's 32-bit stuff (or rather, what little of it has surfaced in pictures and videos I could find online), which is why I'm even posting about this here at all. In addition to some of the games featuring the same sort of generic HUD in some of Nice Code's other 32-bit games (i.e., in Toy Land and Dream Forest on the Wireless Hunting console), the first game on the second row of screenshots on the back of the box features a bear character that has appeared in multiple games connected to Nice Code's 32-bit output, including "Guess direction", shown in the WiWi 65 game screenshots image (which I previously posted here, the one that isn't the box) and as a cameo in the Wireless Hunting game Balloon Shoot where they appear flying in a hot air balloon that can be shot down for points (lol). Unfortunately there is very little I could find on the Console Motion Games outside of a few listings (which is how I was able to get images of this thing), so I can't exactly confirm if the games were produced by Nice Code at all or provide details on what the games are like. Also of note is this Amazon listing for the console, which features a promotional image for the system that contains a high-quality image of the title screen for one of the presumed built-in games: "Pirate Ship".

I can't recall if this was uploaded here already, so here is an NES2.0-headered copy of the Lexibook Junior Noddy plug & play. I believe I didn't upload it here before as it has no sound; I question if it runs audio off of an external, non-NES device.

Assuming that I have the correct system (the small wheel-having console), then yes I can confirm 100% that this console at the very least does not seem to use the VT03 APUs and instead plays some sequenced sample-based music. Unfortunately, the only documentation I could find of this thing was from an old YouTube video, presumably casually uploaded by a parent, that prominently features their child using the console (which I ironically found while searching for videos of another bootleg system), so I don't think it would be smart of me to just drop the link in a public space and have the uploader potentially receive unwanted attention. If you want me to PM you the video here, then feel free to reply.

Update regarding this mystery: after hearing back from Barver on the BGC Discord about this strange Lion King SNES cartridge, it is indeed the case that it is just a regular pirate cart, probably of an official Lion King game. While this is disappointing news to hear, it does make me wonder if the publisher behind this bootleg cart also published the originally developed games due to the similarities with the label and such. SNES bootlegs in general are such an odd and niche corner of bootlegging that learning anything new about it would be great.

A while ago I ended up finding downloads for most of the iGame Family games after finding out that the system was sold under a different name (Funhom) in different territories. Not only were some of the games archived on the Wayback Machine on a Russian version of the Funhom site, but as of writing there's also a working mirror of said site that has most of the entire game library still uploaded, although some downloads are either dead or download completely different games. The funny thing about these downloads are that they're completely free, while on Elonex's iGame Family site, some of the same games from Funhom were required purchases. Totally not a rip-off. Anyway, here are the sites in question:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://funhom.ru/g/*
http://funhom.sdlc.ru/games.htm

Games for the i-Game systems are downloaded as .zip files, which contain the main program as a .bin file and a folder with all the game's data in it, similar to the Subor/Lexibook games. Like those games, the iGame games also store graphics data in separate files, with most games using RGB565 encoded graphics from what I've analyzed. Most of the games appear to use MIDI music as their .bin files contain unsigned 8-bit PCM samples for various instruments, and a good chunk contain a separate "SNDDATA.BIN" file with additional unsigned 8-bit PCM audio samples, usually for voice clips. At least one game, Tank Storm, uses .drm files for music. I was able to find at least one video with gameplay of some of the games, which gives us an idea of how these games play and sound: https://youtu.be/8luCGmTvk3s. As an aside, they totally ripped off the Subor Darts game at 0:23, down to the sound effects...

In addition to this discovery, I along with gatecat from the BGC Discord also figured out the developers behind (most of) these games: one Seewo Games from China. Not only did they prominently feature the consoles their games were designed for along with characters from their games on their website, but "CVTGAME" strings are present in the .bin program for games and the games include .cvt files in their .zip packages, which is likely a reference to a name Seewo went by: CVT (mentioned here).

I already posted about this on one of my other threads but I'm starting to analyze the ROM for the recently dumped VTG Interactive Virtual Tennis and have also looked at the ROM for Virtual Baseball some time back. Both games appear to be built for SPG288 hardware going by strings at the beginning of both ROMs and use UTF-16 encoding for strings used in-game. Both games in their VTG release also have added functionality for saving in certain modes, which from testing it on Virtual Tennis doesn't seem to work in MAME. The VTG version of Virtual Tennis also uses transparency for the menu options (confirmed on both real hardware and MAME), which for some reason was removed from the generic versions (confirmed for the Zone 40, Reactor 32, and Interactive TV Games 49 in 1). I suspect that this may have been the result of the game having to be backported to older SPG hardware, but I'm not entirely sure on that. Inexplicably, the generic Wii clone version of this game changes the "Select Set Count" option in Custom Match to "Select Number Of sets".

An interesting thing about the VTG Interactive games compared to their generic Wii clone counterparts is how they store sound. As a baseline, the generic versions of the VTG games on the likes of the Zone 40 and Reactor 32 in 1 (the ROMs of which are normally XORed and bitswapped) appear to use the proprietary ADPCM36 encoding for all of their sounds, which can be identified from the sounds sounding sort of distorted in Audacity with the VOX ADPCM option and not sounding audible with any other option. While the VTG cartridge version of Virtual Baseball mostly uses ADPCM36 encoding as well as a couple raw PCM sound effects, the cartridge version of Virtual Tennis exclusively uses unsigned 8-bit PCM for all audio, meaning that I could listen to it with no qualms in Audacity (although the majority of sounds I could only hear by importing the ROM into 2 channels). I wish I knew more about reverse engineering Sunplus games so I could potentially find more interesting things in these games, but that would probably require a lot more work than I could pull off to achieve. So far, both games don't appear to contain any data identifying their production to a particular group or company, but with the previously mentioned changes between the VTG Interactive games and their generic versions and the latter having Chinese software copyrights attributed to Waixing, they definitely strongly point to Waixing having access to the source code at the very least.

Huge news regarding the WiWi 65! Thanks to taizou, we now have high res images of the WiWi 65 packaging and game screenshots as well as what seems to be an Excel spreadsheet with a full game list. These were originally sent on the BGC Discord, with taizou mentioning that he received these files back when he tried to directly contact Qi Sheng Long about buying the WiWi 65. I'm reuploading them here for anyone who isn't on the Discord and is interested in looking at the files. I've also uploaded the images to the wiki and added them and the full game list from the Excel file to the QSL Wii clones article. Still no concrete information on where it was actually sold or what hardware it exactly uses yet, but this is a huge step forward in documenting Nice Code's 32-bit games in my eyes.

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Quick edit to note that some of the names in the Excel spreadsheet are inaccurate to the actual names Nice Code gave the games. For example, Altar Puzzle (the title screen of which is shown on the WiWi 65 packaging) is named "Alta Puzzle" and Pounce is named "Pouke".