VTG Interactive games thread

[APM]

Hey all. Decided that I would create a thread for discussion of all things related to the games released by VTG Interactive, a pretty nebulous company with very little in the way of documentation, in the event that anyone reading is even remotely interested in the subject. For those who are unaware, VTG Interactive was an American company that to our knowledge, only released three interactive sports games for a proprietary TV game console they also sold. The games in question are: Virtual Baseball (or Live! Baseball), Virtual Tennis, and Virtual Boxing. The games would later be ported to various generic Wii clones based on Sunplus SPG hardware that included games developed by Waixing (yes, the people who developed the Famicom games), such as the Zone 40 and Reactor 32. I go more in-depth about Waixing's connection to the VTG Interactive games as well as the little information on VTG Interactive themselves that I could find in this thread. I've also created a page for the company on the BootlegGames Wiki considering that their games and the versions that were released on the 16-bit Waixing Wii clones are closely connected (down to the tennis and boxing games being sold on Waixing's Alibaba store a year before VTG Interactive was founded in 2006, as well as some versions of the baseball game for the Wii clones still having a partially visible VTG Interactive logo present in one of the stadiums).

To start things off, I'd like to mention that I managed to secure a VTG Interactive console about a week ago from an auction site. Compared to the eBay price for the console (currently going for $50 as I write this), I was able to buy it for less than half of that price. It's currently going through shipping and will likely take a while to get to me as it's coming from California and I reside on the east coast. The listing I bought the console from didn't come with any games sadly, and I currently can't buy the games anyway because the gift card I used to purchase the console doesn't have enough money on it for that to be possible anymore (although I was pretty close to owning both the console and a game on another site before finding out it already sold...). Once the console arrives, though, hopefully I'll be able to document the hardware with what little hardware skills I possess without glob tops getting in the way. I'm particularly eager in finding out if the cartridge slot is more than a glorified jumper, which I'm hoping is the case personally speaking.

[APM]

Not too long after making this thread I learned that a version of Virtual Baseball was dumped and support for the game and the VTG Interactive console was being worked on in MAME: https://twitter.com/MameHaze/status/1802134985463206129?s=19. In case anyone isn't able to view the tweet, the first image attached contains a full screen version of the VTG Interactive logo featured on the box of the console and games (which is on the BootlegGames Wiki article). Assuming that this is a splash screen, this is a pretty big discovery as the only other visual footage of Virtual Baseball available right now shows the game booting up with an animation for a different logo (here), and suggests that two revisions of this game might exist, assuming that my assumption is correct. Don't think I can extrapolate much more from this until video footage of the game dumped in MAME comes out/support for it is released, though.

[APM]

My VTG Interactive console arrived today. The console isn't anything particularly interesting design-wise, and it's a standard cartridge system with composite A/V cables. However, it does have an actual cartridge connector (similar to something you'd find in like a SNES but smaller) with a protective flap in front of it, which is definitely more effort than I was expecting to be put into this thing. The system also has a 15-pin connector on the front side and buttons on the top for directional movement and action buttons ("O" and "X"). It also has a battery compartment, which takes 4 AA batteries. Something about the console that completely took me by surprise is that it has a power indicator on the front side at the left, which lights up whenever I turn my console on. The console doesn't appear to output any signal when turned on with no game inserted, which from what I could deduce is expected behavior. Until I can get a game for my system, I can't really do much with it at the moment. I'll consider uploading pictures of the console at some point, but I'm currently not in the mood to take any right now.

[APM]

I already posted about this on one of my other threads but I'm starting to analyze the ROM for the recently dumped VTG Interactive Virtual Tennis and have also looked at the ROM for Virtual Baseball some time back. Both games appear to be built for SPG288 hardware going by strings at the beginning of both ROMs and use UTF-16 encoding for strings used in-game. Both games in their VTG release also have added functionality for saving in certain modes, which from testing it on Virtual Tennis doesn't seem to work in MAME. The VTG version of Virtual Tennis also uses transparency for the menu options (confirmed on both real hardware and MAME), which for some reason was removed from the generic versions (confirmed for the Zone 40, Reactor 32, and Interactive TV Games 49 in 1). I suspect that this may have been the result of the game having to be backported to older SPG hardware, but I'm not entirely sure on that. Inexplicably, the generic Wii clone version of this game changes the "Select Set Count" option in Custom Match to "Select Number Of sets".

An interesting thing about the VTG Interactive games compared to their generic Wii clone counterparts is how they store sound. As a baseline, the generic versions of the VTG games on the likes of the Zone 40 and Reactor 32 in 1 (the ROMs of which are normally XORed and bitswapped) appear to use the proprietary ADPCM36 encoding for all of their sounds, which can be identified from the sounds sounding sort of distorted in Audacity with the VOX ADPCM option and not sounding audible with any other option. While the VTG cartridge version of Virtual Baseball mostly uses ADPCM36 encoding as well as a couple raw PCM sound effects, the cartridge version of Virtual Tennis exclusively uses unsigned 8-bit PCM for all audio, meaning that I could listen to it with no qualms in Audacity (although the majority of sounds I could only hear by importing the ROM into 2 channels). I wish I knew more about reverse engineering Sunplus games so I could potentially find more interesting things in these games, but that would probably require a lot more work than I could pull off to achieve. So far, both games don't appear to contain any data identifying their production to a particular group or company, but with the previously mentioned changes between the VTG Interactive games and their generic versions and the latter having Chinese software copyrights attributed to Waixing, they definitely strongly point to Waixing having access to the source code at the very least.

[APM]

While testing the VTG Virtual Baseball ROM in MAME, I noticed something very peculiar in one of the stadiums that can be chosen: one of the in-game advertisements present in the stadium is a URL - "www.sohu.com". The site in question that this URL goes to is a Chinese internet portal, which seems out of place in an otherwise English-language baseball game. The generic version on the Interactive TV Games 49 in 1 blanks out the VTG Interactive logo and most instances of this URL in this stadium, although the Sohu.com URL is still visible at the bottom. Curiously, the generic version on the Zone 40 and Reactor 32 have most instances of this URL replaced with VTG Interactive's website, www.playvtg.com, although the Sohu URLs at the bottom are still visible. The red and white VTG logo is also visible in this stadium, which is probably the result of those consoles using a different undumped revision of the VTG version of the game. The presence of the Sohu URLs in the VTG Interactive game definitely confirms without a doubt that a Chinese company was behind the production of this game. However, the question of if the game was produced for VTG Interactive in the first place is still kind of up in the air: nothing in the ROMs of the cartridge and generic versions of the VTG games suggest that the game was produced in Chinese at any point, and the usage of UTF-16 text could suggest that it was planned, but that could also just be incidental.