While this post is about a game a bootleg company made, the game itself isn't bootleg or unlicensed in any sense of the word, hence why I'm posting this thread here. :p
So for some time, the Hummer Team page on the BootlegGames Wiki mentioned that the company supposedly worked on a XaviX game. For those not in the know, this was derived from claims by Hummer Cheng himself about working with SSD Company Limited, the company behind the XaviX technology itself, during a correspondence conducted in 2017 (I only know about this because the person who conducted it shared most of their conversation with Hummer to the BGC Discord). While the claims about Hummer Team working on XaviX games was essentially proven, it wasn't exactly known
what game or games they worked on for XaviX hardware. The most that was provided for the longest time was a single bullet point in the XaviX section of the Hummer Team article that said "XaviX Ping Pong", which was directly quoted from Hummer Cheng in the correspondence, and not only did a game under that name not exist, but could have meant anything as multiple ping pong games that are known to use XaviX hardware exist, ranging from high quality Japanese productions to generic releases. The supposed ping-pong game that Hummer Team worked on remained nebulous... until now.
While looking through MAME's source code at random one day, seeing a comment for one of the ROMs in a driver I was looking at mention "Hummer Software" set me off and inspired me to look at the data for a game that I had figured could have been a candidate for the XaviX ping pong game developed by Hummer Team: Radica Play TV Ping Pong/ConnecTV Table Tennis. Once I tried to search for the word "simmer", I stumbled across this block of text (the "^" is a replacement for a non-ASCII character):
SSD COMPANY LIMITED^SIMMER TECHNOLOGY^Coordinator^ Koichi Sano^^Chief Programmer^ Lawrence Su^^Programmer^ Chris Ho^^Artists^ Akiko Kataji^ Naomi Sawada^ Kenichi Yasuda^ Mitsuru Okayama^^Sound Coordinator^ Teruya Ida^^Project Engineers^ Shuhei Kato^ Yoshiaki Nakanishi^^Special Thanks to^ Hiromu Ueshima^^^^Radica Games LTD.^^Engineering Director^ Larry Cheng^^Designer^ Kevin Johnson^^Special Thanks to^ Christian Holljes^ Ron Bagley^ Robert Suarez^ The HK Engineering team^ Mom, Dad, Bob, Nikki &^ Michael Alison^^^Copyright 2000^SSD Co.,Ltd.^ and Radica China Ltd.^All rights reserved.
Actual credits to SSD Company and Simmer Technology it seems, as well as additional ones for Radica China. Simmer Technology is a known name that Hummer Team would later go by when they registered as a formal company, and if there's any doubt that the Simmer Technology in these credits is the same one as what we know as Hummer Team, Chris Ho is credited as a programmer. Many of the Japanese sounding names in the SSD/Simmer credits seem to be linked to people who worked for SSD Company directly, so perhaps Play TV Ping Pong was a co-production between them and Hummer Team/Simmer Technology, with Hummer simply programming the game. In any case, this confirms at least one game Hummer Team developed for XaviX hardware. This probably isn't the end of Hummer Team's work on XaviX games, as it is known that at least five games were developed by them for XaviX hardware, including Play TV Ping Pong, and as it stands, most of the XaviX plug and play systems aren't dumped. From what I have personally looked through, most of the dumped XaviX plug and play games either credit a different company for development or don't mention Hummer or Simmer anywhere, so it may take a while before Hummer Team's other XaviX work is uncovered, if that will be possible at all.
As an aside, I was surprised to find out after discovering the credits that they were already documented on
another forum in 2018 by people who dump plug and play games for MAME, which likely explains why MAME credits Play TV Ping Pong to Simmer Technology. I had been aware of the credit in MAME for some time, but until now never knew where it came from, so this at least provides some closure on that.
