Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - codeman38

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 6
1
Pirate Talk / Production library music in bootleg games
« on: January 10, 2016, 07:45:22 PM »
So, in this discussion of some of Lexibook's consoles, the topic of production library music came up, as several tunes sound like they could potentially be from production libraries (and taizou mentions that there's a Cube Tech rhythm game that consists entirely of production music, even).

This got me looking on the web site for Killer Tracks (Universal Music's production library), because several of the tunes that I'd heard in plug-and-play consoles sounded very much like that company's output from the '80s and '90s, as heard in the background of way too many TV shows from that era. And indeed, I found at least one track: "Technoids" from KT33: Hi-Tech Volume 2 is used in several of the sports games developed by Niutai for Qi Sheng Long (see, for instance, the bowling and golf games in this video).

Also, Cube Tech didn't just use Killer Tracks' music in a DDR knockoff, as mentioned in the above-linked thread-- they also used it for a karaoke game! See these videos from the extra-large version of the Interact-branded console, for instance.

Going to keep searching around because there certainly have to be more... but feel free to post any other findings if you come across them on the Killer Tracks site, or any other production music companies' site, because this stuff really is fascinating to track down the sources of.

(Oh, also, not related to bootleg games per se, but definitely related to bootleg something: if you've ever watched "Animal Soccer World", or any of Dingo Pictures' other knockoff cartoons, you may possibly recognize "Zip & Cindy" from KT44: Comedy/Animation Volume 1. Just maybe.)

2
Other Pirates / Waixing's 32-bit console, now in Lexibook form
« on: January 09, 2016, 01:55:04 AM »
So, I recently saw some new 32-bit plug-and-play console from Lexibook at my local Kmart in the Boston area. The games on it looked vaguely interesting, and weren't really anything I'd seen before, and I kind of wondered what they were. I looked it up on Lexibook's site, and even more curiously, it claimed to run its games from an SD card.

I wasn't quite willing to risk $40 on it, but after seeing this playthrough from YouTube user "SteeScribbles", I'm significantly more curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO-_9npCk0Q

Yep. It's that one infamous SD-card-based Waixing console-- the one which was the source of all of those encrypted .wxn dumps of VT03 games-- released by a company outside of China! With a user interface that's in...something vaguely resembling English! And a whole bunch of 32-bit Waixing games that I'd never seen in action before, to go along with it.

Incidentally, the same Kmart location also sells Lexibook's Cyber Arcade Console. Can't find much in the way of video of it, because there's no TV-out port, but what I've seen looks really intriguing-- suffice it to say, there are plenty of 16-bit CubeTac Famicom hacks included. (Eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the promotional image on Lexibook's site is a sprite hack of Chip 'n Dale.)

Oh, and if you don't have a Kmart locally, they ship these from their web site as well.
...The Mario ripoff at 33 minutes into the video. O_o That is... wow. Words do not do it justice.
Wow, this is the second plug-and-play console I've seen that had a knockoff of the mid-'00s shareware game Professor Fizzwizzle (the Pocket Dream Console was the first). Chinese bootleggers will seriously rip off anything.
Oww, the sound emulation on the Famiclone ROMs, shown in the latter half of the 2nd video, is ear-splittingly terrible. Not that I'm surprised... >_<

3
Other Pirates / Video footage of the 111-in-1 Interact
« on: December 19, 2015, 02:32:59 AM »
So some of us are familiar with the fact that InterAct, the producer of numerous third-party controllers and such, also rebranded a version of Macro Winners' MiWi console under their own name. I was only familiar with the 40-game version of this console, but apparently there's a 111-in-1 version out there as well. There's been a 2.5-hour long playthrough of it on YouTube for several months, but I only now stumbled across it just now, and figured other people might be interested. (I know that Awesome Panda has seen this, since he commented on the video, but I'm sure there are other people who somehow managed to miss it.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Dyi3prajc

Interesting things I've noticed so far:

  • The entire "15 shooting games" section is by Wellminds; their name is right there in the background of that submenu. This section also shows similarities to the Nanjing stuff from the Wow and NJ Pocket; in particular, one of the games' tunes is straight out of Tetris Attack, several other tunes are sampled from Famicom games, and "Last Mission" is straight out of the NJ Pocket. (So did Wellminds develop these things for Nanjing, then?)
  • Speaking of Nanjing, the baseball game (6:20 in the video) uses the same tune as the menu from the Wow Wireless console, which is basically confirmed to have been copyrighted by Shenzhen Nanjing. However, the baseball game itself feels more like a Cube production than a Nanjing one. (Perhaps both companies were sharing the same pool of audio clips at one point?)
  • Two of the boxing games (see, for instance, 1:09:12) feature the bass line from Devo's cover of "Working In A Coal Mine". Guess they're branching out from italo-disco into American new-wave music now?
  • One of the songs in the Taiko Drum Master knockoff game (1:57:15)-- which does seem to show the signs of being developed by Cube, incidentally-- is Hot Stuff. But it's not the original Donna Summer version. No, somehow, Cube Tech ended up with a copy of Arsenal FC's spoof of the song. (Even more amazingly, YouTube's content ID actually caught this.)
  • One of the other rhythm game tunes is "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing". Yes, as in the song from the '70s Coke ad.

Edited to add: Ah, I had completely forgotten about this thread from taizou mentioning the Wellminds-Nanjing connection. Anyway, yeah, this console seems to definitely be further evidence of that (as well as possibly a Waixing connection, given the provenance of some of the other stuff on the console?).

4
Pirate Talk / The real manufacturer of the Retron 3
« on: December 05, 2015, 12:51:06 PM »
I kind of had the feeling that a particular Shenzhen-based company had manufactured the Retron 3 console for Hyperkin, particularly given that they were also responsible for various other similar consoles.

But I didn't think that they'd make it quite this blatant:

http://qishenglong.en.alibaba.com/product/524808701-209433028/3_IN_1_NES_SNES_Genesis_Games_Console_C_12_GREY_COLOUR.html

(Gotta love the poor attempt at obscuring Hyperkin's logo in the thumbnail... when it's still visible in the shots of the console itself down the page. ~Quality~.)

[Edited to add: Apparently this is kind of old news-- at the very least, it's old news that QSL was manufacturing Hyperkin's consoles. But I don't remember them explicitly taking credit for the Retron 3 before, only the Retron 1.]

5
Other Pirates / Possible future home of Nice Code's web site?
« on: August 16, 2015, 02:17:32 AM »
So it looks like Nice Code's web site, game-nc.com, is no longer. The domain registration is completely gone. Amazingly, it hasn't even been picked up by another company or anything.

Based on the record on domainhistory.net, it looks like it just expired a couple months ago-- although the registrant was complete gibberish since 2014-06-07, so it probably was out of Nice Code's hands well before then.

So on a whim, I decided to search Google for the email address given in the historical DNS data (zongwu55 at 163 dot com). And I found a DNS listing for a completely different domain, namely nc808.com. Here's the DomainHistory page for that one.

So yeah. The domain doesn't seem to be resolving to anything at the moment, but it was registered to "Nature Color" (a name that I thought they had stopped using?!) on 2015-05-11, with apparently no prior registration before then--or at least none in the time that DomainHistory has been tracking domains, anyway. (I would've easily thought that some fan club for Roland drum machines might have registered it, but apparently it was available...)

6
Mega Drive/Genesis / AtGames consoles aren't ARM-based?
« on: July 01, 2015, 12:00:46 AM »
Interesting discussion that I happened to stumble across, via http://pnp-info.angelfire.com/, in this thread on AtariAge. To quote one of the posts from user "onmode-ky" in that thread:

Quote:
 

our assumptions that AtGames Genesis systems run via emulator on their Titan ARM have been incorrect since at least the very beginning of this topic, over 5 years ago!

Take a look at the first few posts in this topic. Do you see the references to "RedKid cartridges"? It turns out that the "RK" in the RK and RK2 16-bit chips' names is merely an abbreviation for "RedKid"! While the term "RedKid" was shortly superseded in the consumer-facing space by "Firecore," this means that since at least mid-2008, AtGames' Genesis systems have run not through emulation on an ARM but rather through Genesis-on-a-chip hardware. Obviously, it is not a 1-to-1 perfect GOAC, but then, compatibility is a frequent issue with NOACs as well.
[/quote]

Somehow it's been almost two years and I completely missed this revelation. Huh.

7
Mega Drive/Genesis / Bomboy level layout weirdness
« on: June 16, 2015, 01:05:28 AM »
So thanks to this post from Lunatic Obscurity, I discovered something really weird about Gamtec's Bomboy-- or at least the dump that's currently circulating around the internet, anyway (md5sum = c5816740d93932870c5c466ea2931a4f).

Specifically-- through some quirk of programming that I'm not fluent enough in Mega Drive assembly to even begin to comprehend, the level layouts are completely different depending on which emulator is used. And even weirder, none of these match the introductory demo, which is consistent across emulators.

Attaching some screenshots to show what exactly is going on, because this is definitely interesting.

Edited to add: Versions used: RetroArch "stable" cores (v1.0.0.2), though I checked the latest nightlies and they produce the same result; Kega Fusion 3.63i; Genesis Plus 1.3.0 (all under Mac OS X).

Edit #2: Naturally, none of these emulated versions-- including the demo!-- match the layout shown on actual hardware (via Nusutto's footage).

Attachments:

8
2000-present / Nanjing connection to "LEE" cartridge IDs?
« on: March 02, 2014, 01:16:46 PM »
I was randomly surfing around the Pirated Game Museum wiki and happened to notice this cartridge for "Ninja Cat" (a.k.a. Kyattou Ninden Teyandee):

http://piratedgamemuseum.wikia.com/wiki/File:Ninjac.png

Aside from the fact that bootleggers who made this cartridge couldn't tell a cat from a fox to save their lives, I noticed something else vaguely interesting: the sidebar reads "LEE02014 - NILEEA CAT".

At first, I thought, "wow, that's an even worse spelling of 'ninja' than is usual for bootleggers", but then I realized what must have happened. niNJa --> niLEEa. Which suggests that this cartridge probably had the ID NJ02014 at one point, and that this line of cartridges is probably connected, directly or indirectly, to Shenzhen Nanjing.

(Interestingly, this alternate version of the cart also has a LEE id, but spells "ninja" correctly.)

9
Other Pirates / Mars: the Taiwanese bootleg take on Doom
« on: September 05, 2013, 11:49:54 PM »
Found via the Tumblr "bootleg" tag, here's a video of exactly what the subject line says. Be sure to read the video description for even more info, including the equally bootleg plotline!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TUO56YOyjg

Edit: More gameplay footage! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aDckM-PaxE

10
The Big Old Arcade / Time Trax (Gen/MD) finally dumped
« on: July 08, 2013, 11:51:21 PM »
For those who haven't already heard about this, the Genesis/Mega Drive port of Time Trax-- which went unreleased on that system, but which was released on the SNES-- has finally been obtained and dumped.

http://segaage.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Blog.View&Blog_Id=2&Id=1223

For the most part, it's similar to the SNES version, with one very significant exception: THE SOUNDTRACK. This is the only soundtrack on that system to have been coded by Tim Follin, and oh, does it show. Only five music tracks (and one short jingle), but each one lasts well over a minute before looping--and there's a sound test to hear them all.

11
Other Pirates / Wellminds, Nanjing, Jiuyang (& more?)
« on: July 07, 2013, 12:47:25 AM »
taizou
Jul 5 2013, 12:45:50 PM
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm//151063621185 - "MiTouch" 16 bit console with touchscreen + regular games. Games are developed by Shenzhen Wellminds I think, they're not too bad. excluding repeats there's about 100[/quote]You've got me wondering about this Wellminds company now - I hadn't really heard anything about them, and decided to go look them up, because, well, that's the kind of thing I do. :)

So Wellminds does have this Alibaba-hosted site, on which they claim credit for this 52-in-1 which seems to match the screenshots on the MiTouch. But they also claim credit for the Power Player Portable (or is that "Protable"?)...a console from Qin Sheng Long, featuring games by Shenzhen Nanjing. O_o

Edited to add: Hm, they also claim credit for the PVP Station, which was pretty much determined to be a Nanjing thing. So maybe Wellminds is Nanjing?

12
The Big Old Arcade / Retron 5
« on: March 24, 2013, 12:13:20 PM »
So, for those who haven't heard... Hyperkin, the company that markets a whole bunch of Famiclones, has announced a new system called the Retron 5 that's coming out this summer. Which is compatible with 60-pin Famicom, 72-pin NES, Genesis/Mega Drive, SNES/SFC, GBC, and GBA cartridges.

Here's the video of the official announcement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OcNy7t17LA

I'm very curious as to how their system-on-a-chip handles GB stuff, now! Especially the unlicensed games, which tend to be finicky even on official systems...

13
Game Boy / VFame's Pokemon Ruby box art reused for a PocketNES hack?
« on: March 14, 2013, 12:45:51 PM »
OK, this is an interesting one. While Googling to find some old forum threads related to bootleg games, I stumbled across this one where someone posted about finding a "Pokemon Green Diamond" cart for GBA (actually a PocketNES cart of a Keroppi hack):

http://s15.zetaboards.com/Tulunk_Village?topic=515226/1/

I think I remember stumbling across this post back in 2008 or 2009. But I just noticed something new about it now that I'm even more familiar with Game Boy bootlegs.

Specifically: check out the back of the box. It is taken directly from VFame's Pokemon Ruby for GBC. Like, they just photocopied the box and added new logos on top of it.

Which, of course, leads me to wonder just how these bootleggers even had access to the box from that particular bootleg...

14
Game Boy / Super Mario DX for GBA
« on: March 10, 2013, 08:45:12 PM »
So a few people here might have seen pictures floating around the internet of the box art for a "Super Mario DX" game for Game Boy Advance. I think the consensus had been that it was either a PocketNES cart, or possibly the original Mario DX for GBC inside a GBA case.

Nope. Turns out it's neither of those. Someone has posted a video of it on YouTube...and, well, suffice it to say, it's a GBA-native platformer made by Sintax.

Yes, folks: it's that engine again...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggKYArHtjI8

15
Game Boy / BBD and Sintax: an attempt at historical reconstruction
« on: December 23, 2012, 04:38:27 PM »
(This post is sort of a continuation/split-off of Sintax and their 93+ games.)

So I was looking through the recently dumped ROM of Sintax's "Little Taichi" (here, for those who missed it), and noticed that there are quite a few leftovers from that unlicensed Harry Potter platformer which has already been dumped--most notably, the large images from the game's opening sequence. This seemed particularly curious, since according to its product ID (ST-0206004), Little Taichi is only Sintax's 4th game--and Harry Potter was not one of the previous three.

However, as taizou pointed out in the above-linked thread... this is explainable in that Harry Potter does not appear to have been a Sintax game! It may have been re-released by Sintax at some later point, but the original version appears to have been purely a BBD production. Indeed, the boot logo embedded in the dumped ROM isn't the "Kwichvu" that normally characterizes Sintax games, but rather, "BBD".

This actually makes sense: BBD reused one of their pre-Sintax game engines to create a new game for Sintax when requested! The leftover images aren't the only thing from Harry Potter remaining in that ROM; the engine itself is clearly lifted as well. (Note, in particular, the similarity between the two games' status bars.)

BUT WAIT. There's more!

Remember Digimon 9 2002? Well, there are some graphics from the level intros to that game lying around in the Harry Potter ROM as well! (In particular, the old man who appears just before the first level is clearly recognizable at location 0x3C914.) And this, too, is an engine that BBD just kept reusing over and over in Sintax games as well.

And it may very well be that Harry Potter, in itself, is a hack of still another game. Elsewhere in the ROM (0x10142), there's a somewhat scrambled character selection screen featuring...Harry Potter and three Teletubbies. And, of course, some Teletubby sprites to go with Harry's later in the ROM.

Edit: And just remembered about this video, where someone found (and destroyed) a copy of the original (non-Niutoude) release of Digimon 9. The boot logo? BBD, of course.

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 6