Gil Galad has this collection of various video game source code findings around the 'net; it can be found here.

On the NES source code page, there's a file called "VT02/03 OneBus Clone Unit" which contains various official demos and such from VRTech, makers of the OneBus hardware.

Interesting thing is, this doesn't just contain source code-- it also contains documentation.

The most interesting documentation is that from the Pic32 utility, a tool for creating the 4-bit graphic sprites for use in the VT03 chip. It includes EmuVT screenshots from two games created using the tool: a Dance Dance Revolution game that I hadn't yet seen (one of the official Konami-licensed famiclone DDR mats, possibly?) and... Pink Jelly. As in the game on that ABABsoft multicart. Same character and everything.

Incidentally, the package also includes an older beta version of EmuVT, and a full 8-megabyte Korean multicart ROM (!).

Don't know how I'd never noticed this before now, but as "andlabs" points out on the Project2612 forums, there's actually a credit to Never Ending Soft Team buried as ASCII text in Yase Chuan Shuo:

"BATTLE SYSTEM*  Written by TSUI-ChienHua NeverEnding-SOFT  TAIWAN,TAICHUNG   1994,1995"

So yep, there's a Never Ending Soft/Chuanpu Tech connection right there-- and before 1996, at that! Not as if we hadn't already figured out the two companies were somehow related, but still, nice to see it confirmed.

In pinyin, incidentally, that'd be Cui Jianhua (崔建華), who's also credited for the battle engine in Barver Battle Saga.

Edit: Sure enough, an almost identical credit's also buried in Barver Battle Saga! "*BATTLE SYSTEM*  Written by TSUI-ChienHua         (C)1995 NeverEnding-SoftStudio  IN TAIWAN,TAICHUNG"

Edit #2: Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan, the only game explicitly credited to Never Ending Soft, also has a hidden credit for Tsui: "SUIKODEN (ACT. GAME) Written by TSUI-ChienHua (C)1996 NeverENDING--SoftTEAM   IN TAIWAN,TAICHUNG"

Edit #3: Oh, wow, Conquering The World III is actually newer than Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan, and thus probably post-Chuanpu as well: "*BATTLE SYSTEM*  Written by TSUI-ChienHua         (C)1997 NeverEnding-SoftStudio  IN TAIWAN,TAICHUNG"

I was looking through the List of Undumped Games on the wiki, and one particular game caught my eye: a little-known Korean Famicom game by Zemina called Magic Kid Googoo.

Y'all may notice something vaguely familiar about the screenshots here, but... I'll get to that in a bit.


A Korean gamer posted a video and some screenshots of the game:
http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogTypeView.do?blogid=0L8pu&articleno=4880815&_bloghome_menu=recenttext#ajax_history_home

One of the screenshots is a credit screen.

Koo Eun-joong, the lead developer of this game, was also lead developer on Buzz & Waldog. Even the music has the same composer, Kwon Dae-yong.

Now you see the similarities, right?


Edit: I'd read about this, but totally forgotten it till now-- Open, the developer of Buzz & Waldog, was founded by a bunch of former Zemina developers. So yep, this is definitely the team that split off to become Open.

Ooh, here's an interesting one.

It's pretty common knowledge that the Russian (mis)translation of Barver Battle Saga, "Final Fantasy", was released by a company called Glorysun; the Russian ROM starts up with that company's logo. They've put out a number of other pirates, too-- mostly hacks of legit games, like that Wario Land hack of Puggsy.

However, the ROM header of Final Fantasy tells a different story:

"SEGA GENESIS    
(C)SEGA 2003.OCT
Dragon Software"

So does this mean Dragon = Glorysun? Or that, at the very least, there's some sort of relationship between the two companies?

The header also includes what seems to be some sort of ID number: "GM MK-1054". Don't know what that's about.

In trying to find out more about "Happy Biqi" from Waixing's famiclones, I discovered this list of games on Waixing's web site:

http://www.waixing.com.cn/cn/bjd1.htm | Google translation

A lot of the games listed here are things we already knew about-- Wizard of Oz, Doraemon, Phantasy Star, Biohazard.

But then... there's the section of Game Boy games, most of which I've not heard of at all. Such as "仙剑E时代" ("Legend 'E' Age")-- which, from what I can gather on Google, is a port of "Sword & Fairy", the Taiwanese DOS RPG, and is not the same port as "Heroic Sword".

I had linked this a while back in the thread on the Arcade Action 101, but I just discovered that there's even more to it:

YOU2HP's blog-playthrough of the Subor D30

This console is a VT03-based Famiclone by Waixing (natch), with a bunch of games that were licensed to them. Seems to be about an even distribution of Stuff Licensed From Nice Code and Stuff Licensed From Cube Tech, with a few leftovers from Inventor that filtered through one of the two devs.

The blog posts are all in Japanese, of course, but there are screenshots. Including a few Cube Tech games that I hadn't seen elsewhere, such as X-Ball, Water Fire, Cat Vs. Dog, and Underwater Rescue. Oh, yeah, and fan art for the little anime-styled girl in Way Out. (Seriously.)

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Huh, something I actually learned from these posts, even via a bad Google translation: "assart" is an archaic word for digging up trees. Suddenly the title of that game makes much more sense.

We're all probably familiar with the packaging for Soul Falchion that's featured on the Bootleg Games Wiki, and that's also used on Taizou's multicart containing the game:
http://bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/File:Soul.jpg

In searching for the game's Chinese name, though, I came across this Taobao auction for the game with a completely different package:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=7848143809

I'm guessing this is probably Li Cheng's mainland version-- it looks a lot like some of the other Li Cheng boxes I've seen. (Interestingly enough, it still uses the traditional Chinese character for 'fight'. Go figure.)

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And on that note, I assume this must be one of the alternate mainland versions of Zook Hero 2:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=7850601997

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Not VFame, but I seriously wonder what this is: Lord of the Rings 3 by Xing Xing Technology, with a similar box style and similar product numbering to Li Cheng. (Li Cheng = Xing Xing?). Probably an alternate version of Sintax's LOTR, which I also have never actually seen in play.
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=7850603421

Edit: Oh, right, the Wiki's already confirmed that Li Cheng and Xing Xing are indeed one and the same. ::facepalm:: Somehow I'd forgotten that.

A while back I'd noticed that a lot of the educational famiclone carts used the same sound driver for their music, and that this engine was also used in the menus for various X-in-1 carts as well. You know the ones: they all use various traditional/folk songs for the background music.

Naturally, that one's stolen too. Somehow, I'd completely missed a post by maxzhou88 showing just where it was stolen from: As he discovered (Google translation), that particular sound engine was identical to the one in Bandai's "Toxic Crusaders"!

I'm curious if this is actually the identity of the mysterious Nanjing sound engine, which I had once credited to Beam Software. The drums sound very similar, but the synths are different-- but maybe it's just different parameters or something.