What's this thread

[Awesome Panda]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Huang-Di-Famicom-NES-Gaiapolis-9-in-1-ASDER-NTDEC-SACHEN-game-boxed-famiclone-/221609131254
I've just found this on eBay. I'm guessing that the seller imported it from China but does seem weird that someone would make a multicart with a whole bunch of Asder games, especially as (I think) all of those games use weird mappers that wouldn't work on a multicart.

[taizou]

hmm i guess someone was able to hack the Asder games to work on MMC3 .. but a lot of stuff doesn't make sense about this cart. especially the packaging.

like the company name given on the back is "Wiioscoo Technology Co. Ltd", but the only references I can find online seem to imply it is/was a scam operation, pretending to sell electronics at cheap prices but never actually shipping anything; the address and phone number are actually for Netac (a legit company) but it looks like Wiioscoo had used them as fake contact details at some point.

so why would a company that presumably never existed and was made up to scam people on the internet also get into the business of manufacturing real famicom multicarts? my hunch is they didn't - the box and label were probably made either by the ebay seller or by some taobao seller they bought the carts from, and they just pulled the Wiioscoo company details off some random website to make it look more "real", or at least more like a real mass-produced pirate product rather than a homemade one (little did they know they'd taken the name of a scam company)

and as for whether the cart pcb itself was a homebrew-ish effort by the same person as the box/label, or if it's actually being mass produced somewhere and they just repackaged it.. i have no idea. mysterious.

(come to think of it, it's also v unusual for a modern boxed pirate cart to come in a cardboard box rather than one of those mega drive-style ones made out of the cheapest plastic in the world)

[codeman38]

As a random aside, the bar code on that multicart (671860013624) officially belongs to the CD "The Assemblage" from Cryptogramophone... but, judging from a Google search, it's also appeared on some very dubious-looking bottles of steroids. And possibly a voltmeter for electronic cigarettes.

...This just keeps getting weirder and weirder, doesn't it?

Also, that menu screen is kind of interesting in itself-- it uses both the Bubble Bobble 2 font (as frequently seen in Nice Code's stuff) and the PC Paint text font (rarely seen in Nice Code's work, but frequently seen in other companies').

[taizou]

codeman38

Dec 4 2014, 08:44:16 PM

As a random aside, the bar code on that multicart (671860013624) officially belongs to the CD "The Assemblage" from Cryptogramophone... but, judging from a Google search, it's also appeared on some very dubious-looking bottles of steroids. And possibly a voltmeter for electronic cigarettes.[/quote]hmm, I think I may have an answer for that one - if you do a Google image search for "barcode" it appears within the first 50 or so results.

but yeah, as for the fonts, that's certainly a weird combo - the Bubble Bobble font seems to show up reasonably often in generic multis, but I've never seen it paired with a PC Paint font before.

[fcgamer]

taizou

Dec 4 2014, 06:34:18 PM

so why would a company that presumably never existed and was made up to scam people on the internet also get into the business of manufacturing real famicom multicarts? my hunch is they didn't - the box and label were probably made either by the ebay seller or by some taobao seller they bought the carts from, and they just pulled the Wiioscoo company details off some random website to make it look more "real", or at least more like a real mass-produced pirate product rather than a homemade one (little did they know they'd taken the name of a scam company)

and as for whether the cart pcb itself was a homebrew-ish effort by the same person as the box/label, or if it's actually being mass produced somewhere and they just repackaged it.. i have no idea. mysterious.

(come to think of it, it's also v unusual for a modern boxed pirate cart to come in a cardboard box rather than one of those mega drive-style ones made out of the cheapest plastic in the world)[/quote]The box and labels were NOT made by the ebay seller, I can guarantee that.  The carts did come from the mainland though, but apparently some had been circulating around Russia at one point as well, according to some contacts.

Just because Wiioscoo scammed people doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't exist / was only a scam company.

The cart is mass produced, in some quantity, I can tell you that.  Also, it includes games from Asder, Sachen, and Waixing.

taizou

Dec 4 2014, 06:34:18 PM

so why would a company that presumably never existed and was made up to scam people on the internet also get into the business of manufacturing real famicom multicarts? my hunch is they didn't - the box and label were probably made either by the ebay seller or by some taobao seller they bought the carts from, and they just pulled the Wiioscoo company details off some random website to make it look more "real", or at least more like a real mass-produced pirate product rather than a homemade one (little did they know they'd taken the name of a scam company)<br /><br />and as for whether the cart pcb itself was a homebrew-ish effort by the same person as the box/label, or if it's actually being mass produced somewhere and they just repackaged it.. i have no idea. mysterious.<br /><br />(come to think of it, it's also v unusual for a modern boxed pirate cart to come in a cardboard box rather than one of those mega drive-style ones made out of the cheapest plastic in the world)[/quote]The box and labels were NOT made by the ebay seller, I can guarantee that.  The carts did come from the mainland though, but apparently some had been circulating around Russia at one point as well, according to some contacts.

Just because Wiioscoo scammed people doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't exist / was only a scam company.

The cart is mass produced, in some quantity, I can tell you that.  Also, it includes games from Asder, Sachen, and Waixing.

Oh, and the cardboard boxes are cheaply made.