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Messages - codeman38

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31
Other Pirates / Waixing's 32-bit console, now in Lexibook form
« on: January 09, 2016, 01:07:39 PM »
The LPer is Irish and says in the video that he found it in a convenience store there, so there's at least some chance they might have made their way to the UK as well.

Edited to add: Of course Argos sells it. (Though £49 is a bit much!)
There is some impressively broken English from the announcer in the bowling game in part 3 of the playthrough, starting at around 30:00 in. I still have no idea what he's saying after the gutter balls, and neither does the LPer. (My best guess is "misplay, please eject the throw gesture", but that doesn't really make any sense either.)

(Also, the music is exactly the same as in the bowling game on the Zone 40. Not entirely surprising, since Waixing was responsible for both...)

Edit: The quote after the spares is just as inscrutable for that matter. I think it's "Hit the remaining ball, cute! Go on!"...?

32
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... >_<

33
Other Pirates / Video footage of the 111-in-1 Interact
« on: January 02, 2016, 02:48:06 AM »
Awesome Panda
Dec 29 2015, 04:52:58 PM
One of the sound effects in the skiing game 1:47:30 in is literally taken from Windows 3.1 of all things[/quote]Heh, that reminds me of something I meant to mention but forgot to: the sound effect at 4:38, used in several of the other games as well, is the new message alert from '90s-era AIM. (I spent way too much time on AIM as a teenager...)

Quote:
 
The music 2:14:30 in was also ripped off for Magic Jewelry, but I don't remember what the song was called off-hand >_<[/quote]Greensleeves!

34
Other Pirates / Video footage of the 111-in-1 Interact
« on: December 20, 2015, 06:01:25 PM »
Another random amusing thing I noticed while re-watching: the copyright registration number on "Protean Girl" (43:37)-- which, incidentally, is a Thin Ice clone-- seems to be... not quite right.

2007SR12345 does exist as an actual registration number by sheer chance, but it's for "World Internet Pay". As it turns out, Protean Girl is actually registered-- by Waixing, of course!-- but it's 2007SR13838. Guess they forgot to update the placeholder on the title screen after the registration went through. Typical Waixing ~quality~.

35
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?).

36
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.]

37
Game Boy / Unused drums and strange song found inside Digimon Advenure
« on: November 19, 2015, 12:33:22 AM »
Figured I'd check Digimon Ruby, out of sheer curiosity, since that game uses PCM drums as well as a PCM title theme. (Even if it does play the latter-- the original Japanese TV series' song "Brave Heart"-- at a much higher sampling rate than it should...)

As if we needed any more proof that Vast Fame helped out with the sound programming on these platforming abominations, the drum samples are exactly the same between the two games, and in the same order. And as I expected, "Brave Heart" takes the place of the tune from Digimon Adventure immediately after the drums-- though in this case, there's only one loop of it, not two.

Come to think of it, the Digimon Adventure tune does kind of have a similar melody to "Brave Heart". Anyone with more knowledge of the series know if that's where it came from?

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, and based on the original recording of "Brave Heart", 11025 Hz is almost certainly the sampling rate they intended to use.

38
Famicom/NES dumps / CaH4e3's Dumps
« on: September 09, 2015, 01:17:02 AM »
Oh, hey, on the "Doctor Mary 9 in 1" title screen, that's the same sign from the Mickey Mousecapade level titles that Waixing also used in their Wizard of Oz game.

Edit: And yet again, I see Awesome Panda already mentioned it after I posted that. But yeah, more evidence of a Waixing connection!

39
2000-present / Panda Adventure - hidden track mysteries
« on: September 07, 2015, 01:18:18 AM »
Apparently the Uz tune was only in the registered version-- I discovered it via Famicompo Mini 10, where one of the tunes was a cover thereof. The MIDI from Uz can be found floating around the net under the name "UZ3-PIPS.mid".

Given that The Games Factory was released prior to Uz, though... I'd say you're correct about the former being the real origin of the tune.

(Wow, we're really going down the stolen music rabbit hole here, aren't we?)

40
Famicom/NES dumps / CaH4e3's Dumps
« on: September 07, 2015, 12:21:58 AM »
So, I have a suspicion that Doctor Mary II may indeed be the work of Waixing! To quote my comments that I just made on the Wiki article talk page:

Quote:
 
Something I noticed almost immediately in this game is that the fonts used for the titles are straight out of PC Paint, and according to the pause screen, this game is "PRODUCED BY ES".

This seemed awfully suspicious, given that some of Waixing's earlier games had graphics made with PC Paint, and that their product codes begin with "ES".

So then I did some more looking around, because I knew people had transcribed the credits for some of Waixing's games, and found the credits for Super Contra 7. The producer for that game was Fu Zan, and the musician is Mu Kai, both of which match the respective initials shown on this game's pause screen. Seems far too much of a match to be a coincidence, though I'm curious who artist LQ and programmer ZYJ might be.[/quote]

41
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...)

42
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.

43
Mega Drive/Genesis / Bomboy level layout weirdness
« on: June 30, 2015, 11:29:33 PM »
@fergzilla, I edited your post to add spoiler tags around the images, because they added a ridiculous horizontal scrollbar at my screen size.

The levels being different on each startup is something that I noticed in several emulators that I tried as well.

I'm still curious as to whether the procedural levels happen on an original '90s Genesis, or at least a system that's compatible at the hardware level (e.g., the Retron 3). The AtGames consoles are well known for using an ARM-based processor with imperfect emulation, so maybe there's still something weird at work-- but it's looking really likely that this may be the case even on original systems.

Edited to add: Hm, looking at some of the notes on this page on plug-n-play consoles, it may very well be that AtGames' consoles aren't ARM-based after all, despite what was once believed. (Still less perfect emulation than other hardware clones, but it's not because it's in software.) So that's a further boost to the theory that this happens on real hardware.

44
Mega Drive/Genesis / Bomboy level layout weirdness
« on: June 26, 2015, 10:32:59 PM »
fergzilla
Jun 25 2015, 11:47:32 AM
I wonder which set of levels load up on the original cartridge on real Sega Genesis (maybe it loads up different levels based on the model used, official or no, perhaps even the Dynacom Megavision, which Bomboy was once packed in with).[/quote]The video I linked to in the original post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jaQBO8AXp8) is from a real system - not sure which specific model, but it's one of the versions that has the TMSS license screen.

45
Mega Drive/Genesis / Bomboy level layout weirdness
« on: June 16, 2015, 09:07:03 PM »
Memory initialization was definitely one of my theories.

Another thing I'm thinking it might be is differences in memory addressing-- like the thing where some of Gamtec's games would only play music when the ROM was concatenated to itself, due to memory mirroring that occurs on real hardware but not on emulators. (Hm, I should try doing that with Bomboy to see if it has the same result on the level layouts...)
Nope, concatenating two copies of the ROM together didn't change things. (Hey, it was worth a shot.)

As for memory initialization-- one of the things I was noticing was that in several of the emulators, the layout will be diagonally offset by a different amount depending on when you actually press start on the title screen. It's as if the memory register that's used as a pointer to the level data is one that's also being altered while the title screen is running (?!?).

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