Pirate Discussion > Mega Drive/Genesis
AtGames originals
taizou:
i've been doing a bit of investigation into original games from AtGames' Firecore systems (their licensed Mega Drive clones, which are apparently really some kind of ARM based thing running an emulator). some of their newer systems have SD card slots, and an SD adapter is available for older ones - this is all ostensibly for playing these legit original games (but obviously the thing they're not telling Sega is that it also allows you to play thousands of illegally downloaded roms)
Anyway I just recently came across this video of the games from a Firecore SD card:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzQfSsKVVxo
& you can download the games here:
http://elektropage.ru/index.php/gopoher (second link)
AtGames themselves also have some games to download from this site:
http://www.mugaatgames.net/Free_Trial.html
& my Firecore Super Arcade console has a fair few included as well.
Bomber from the SD card is playable on standard Mega Drive emulators and has a Tectoy copyright in the ROM, and many of the games on the Super Arcade are credited to Tectoy & Devworks Game Technology (another Brazilian company), so I think those particular games were developed by Tectoy for their own endless MD variations and licensed to AtGames.
but! everything else is unplayable on an emulator, and all of those games, for some reason, have a "Chu Chu Rocket" header (remnants of some licensed port that never happened?) a "FVRING" copyright and the same font near the start of the ROM, which I guess are probably both from the dev kit.
now a lot of those games on the SD card and the Super Arcade are renamed ports of Shenzhen Niutai's games from various 16-bit systems (the Wiii3 has them for instance). they look nice enough, but, well, they sucked on the Wiii3 and they suck even more ported to the Mega Drive.
(edit: oh and, kind of amusingly, Niutai's Ping Pong is based on Cube Tech's one which samples Fable (Dream Version) by Robert Miles. because stealing music is Cube Tech's whole thing. and for the Mega Drive port they recreated that same song, not particularly well, with the MD sound hardware)
The ones on AtGames' site seem to have been developed by someone else, theyre all puzzles and they look more like flash games or something.
There are a couple of unique games though - "Fish Story" from the SD looks an awful lot like Nice Code's only listed Sega game. I kind of have a soft spot for Nice Code, its a shame their 16-bit/32-bit/Mega Drive/VT03 games don't show up more often. they've improved a hell of a lot since their earlier NES games, which were mostly terrible to be fair. And then there's Mahjong Solitaire on the Super Arcade which is the only one credited to AtGames themselves. (its fairly poor.)
also the Sega Reactor has some of the games from the Zone 40 built in, which I think is a VT168 - I haven't seen enough of that one to tell if they're ports or not, but I kind of suspect theyre not. I couldnt imagine Waixing going to all that effort. the Firecore seems to have the ability to switch to another system - the Super Arcade has a built in famiclone with 95 games - so they may well have done the same with the VT168 there.
Awesome Panda:
I could be wrong, but I suspect most of the games don't work because of an abnormal file size. Bomber is 128KB (the smallest size a Mega Drive game can be, I think) but all of the others are weird sizes like 894KB, 799KB, etc.
codeman38:
Incidentally, it sounds like Niutai used the GEMS sound driver-- some of those instrument patches are very familiar-sounding from legit games that used that driver. Not surprising, really; that one was part of Sega's official dev kit.
And Fish Story both looks and sounds different from the Niutai stuff (among other things, "Start" is in an ugly bitmap font, not the usual smooth font of Niutai's games), so yeah, that one probably is Nice Code's.Oh, and that font from the beginning of the ROM? Taken directly from an Atari 800.Oh, another puzzling thing! In all the Niutai games-- as well as Fish Story-- there's nothing coherent that's visible in a tile editor other than the Atari font. Guessing there's some sort of weird encryption used in these or something?
Awesome Panda:
codeman38Jun 30 2011, 08:53:15 AMOh, another puzzling thing! In all the Niutai games-- as well as Fish Story-- there's nothing coherent that's visible in a tile editor other than the Atari font. Guessing there's some sort of weird encryption used in these or something?[/quote]I could be wrong, but I think Nice Code's VT03 games did the same thing.
codeman38:
Aha. A bit of quick Googling reveals that "FVring" was Fonzie Voltonov's (apparently now defunct) Mega Drive homebrew site, which included, among other things, a development kit.
Edit: And Voltonov made a homebrew prototype version of... you guessed it... Chu Chu Rocket. It's available on his new site, Genny4Ever.
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