miscellaNEouS files

[blootooth]

Does anyone have the extracted SD card contents of the "Retro Arcade FC A6Plus - 8Bt Game Console" (ROM name "a6plus")? According to MAME, the console uses a VT369 menu interface, but reads most of its games off of a MicroSD card. Going by a Reddit post, the games seem to be standard .nes files, albeit very poorly-named (https://www.reddit.com/r/Handhelds/comments/1bu06a1/what_the_heck_is_this_aliexp_mini_arcade_with_tf/).

If the game list beginning ~FA400 in the ROM is accurate, it appears that a number of games are rare (e.g. Air Raider, Pikachu5) or potentially undocumented (e.g. "Bomb-Mar", "Video Player"). The ROM itself does contain ~6MB of Nice Code games (some being Qi Sheng Long variants), but I did not see anything undumped at a cursory glance.

if you still need it, here's the contents extracted from its CHD file
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EK2quaXaUA4jKkaFNEQtttjQtpIbZUXm/view?usp=sharing
tried to send it thru attachments but it would not post it no matter what, prob because of the size

[forgotusername]

Thank you for providing it. I managed to identify every Famicom/NES ROM within the code (sifting through loads of junk data), mainly done by just searching for common .nes file sizes (e.g. 25k, 41k). Games of particular note include the following:

*Three uncommon Inventor hacks: Air Raider, Dream Rapid, and a variant of Rush Hour featuring motorcycles (whereas the prior known version uses cars). The early version of Boat Race mentioned a few posts back is also present here in working order.
*Anger Bird, Khresna, and Upin & Ipin Adventure 3, three hacks which are affiliated with the "Play Vision Portable" systems.
*The 8-bit version of Waixing's Explorer (AFAIK, the last remaining undumped VT02 game in the set), as well as an MMC3-based version of Tank. Unfortunately, both ROMs do not run standalone; I assume this is initialization-related, though I could not determine a fix at a cursory glance.

Some additional technical notes that I found interesting:

*As mentioned in MAME's notes, remnants of what appears to be a Linux system are scattered across the SD card; with the NES ROMs haphazardly thrown in alongside the Linux data.
*Every ROM contains space for an iNES header, though in some cases it is overwritten with other data, presumably used by the VT02 menu system.
*Some of the games are duplicated multiple times across the SD card contents. While some duplicates are merely unaltered ROMs, others seem to be in varying states of removing the games' copyright information.
*All of the games are either NROM or MMC3, without support for CHR-RAM; which is to be expected of a VT02 console, but still a bit jarring given its SD card compatibility. There are quite a few MMC3 conversions on here as a result, including some games that are not commonly converted (e.g. Kero Kero Keroppi 1, Tetsuwan Adam).
*The ROM of Fish War features a Nature Color Game copyright, but it was blanked out via PRG (because of course it was). I did attempt to restore the notice, but it required more guesswork than usual...
*The ROM of Bolt Action is massively overdumped, and inexplicably, appears to have overwritten the data of "Mechanical Invader", a Nice Code game that is almost completely undocumented. The CHR is largely intact, though no portions of the PRG are present.

I have attached the most notable games below. I will likely compile the mapper hacks at a later date; if not a full release of the extracted contents. _{(Also note that with all of that, I still have no idea what "Video Player" was supposed to be...)}

[codeman38]

Note that the Smart Millionaire game has a tendency to crash on certain questions; the MAME team states that this is just how the game plays (great quality control), and is not an emulation/dumping issue.

I did a bit of digging into how the questions are stored, and wrote up a script that prints them and their answers (attached, along with its output).

Some of these have incorrect answers, likely due to off-by-one errors on the developers' part:

Question 36:
What is the lower voting
age in U.S.A ?
  A. 18 years
> B. 24 years
  C. 27 years
  D. 21 years

Question 641:
Which is the largest bone
in the human body?
  A. Stirrup
> B. Hammer
  C. Femur
  D. Humerus

But the best case of a nonsensical answer is question 645:

Question 645:
Which gas is used in
 Electric Bulb?
  A. Nitrogen
  B. Hydrogen
  C. Oxygen
  D. Inert gas

This is one of the questions that crashes the game, and that is because the correct answer is not A, B, C, or D, but N (hex value 0D).

Edit: Oh no, I just realized why that last one probably happened, and it's very similar to the off-by-one errors. "Inert gas" is the most reasonable answer to that question, but instead of putting the correct index for "D" (3) in the answer byte, they put hex value D.

[May_Morals]

Does anyone have the extracted SD card contents of the "Retro Arcade FC A6Plus - 8Bt Game Console" (ROM name "a6plus")? According to MAME, the console uses a VT369 menu interface, but reads most of its games off of a MicroSD card. Going by a Reddit post, the games seem to be standard .nes files, albeit very poorly-named (https://www.reddit.com/r/Handhelds/comments/1bu06a1/what_the_heck_is_this_aliexp_mini_arcade_with_tf/).

If the game list beginning ~FA400 in the ROM is accurate, it appears that a number of games are rare (e.g. Air Raider, Pikachu5) or potentially undocumented (e.g. "Bomb-Mar", "Video Player"). The ROM itself does contain ~6MB of Nice Code games (some being Qi Sheng Long variants), but I did not see anything undumped at a cursory glance.

a Handheld with an VT369 and an SD Card? i wonder if i could run other VT369 NES Roms such as Wave Tiger by Cubetac on this?

[forgotusername]

A bit late here, but thank you for analyzing the Smart Millionaire code. Does correcting question 645 by HEX seem to fix performance in any way? It seems to crash after the fourth question in "Player Mode" every time I start a new game, including in MAME.

a Handheld with an VT369 and an SD Card? i wonder if i could run other VT369 NES Roms such as Wave Tiger by Cubetac on this?

Going by the games included, I would imagine it only works with ROMs that use separate CHR-ROM, whereas most originally-programmed VT369 games (including the Wave Tiger example) use CHR-RAM. I don't have a unit to check myself, though.

[forgotusername]

Here are the unique games ripped from the "G3" 800-in-1 handheld. This console had a staggering amount of undumped Nice Code variants, including some that were entirely undocumented. Some of the more notable titles include "Fishing Challenge" (an advanced variant of Atlantic Fishing Tournament 2005), "Boat-Race-Pika" and "Teletubb" (uncommon Inventor hacks), and a few games which were previously only known to appear in Timemax-affiliated game sets. In addition to these games, a lot of the variants here are quite subtle; most of them have been added to the wiki, though I can clarify further information if needed.

The extracted games are attached below; I have also included a few ROMs that are altered to restore copyrights and whatnot.

[forgotusername]

A pretty random duology here, but I don't believe I've published them before:
*The current extract of Gem (Mowing variant) is a bad dump, and does not run correctly when applied to a multicart menu. I have attached a good dump from the base ROM data of the Retro Arcade FC A6Plus.
*I created a custom hack of Fruit Tree (Toy Factory variant) that makes actual sense to play. In the original game, all of the colored pots are not color-coded to the falling fruits; meaning that you'd have to memorize an illogical pattern of mismatched colors to play. In the attached version, the fruits are properly color-coded to match the pots.