Greetings, folks. It's been a while since I last made an interesting post on here. Most of that can be attributed to a major crash my laptop suffered near the end of last year, which thankfully hasn't rendered the SSD in it completely useless but prevents it from booting, and has basically thrown me and my research efforts in regards to bootlegs off by a lot. Since then, I've been using a backup PC running Windows 7 until I can gather the nerve to recover what hasn't already been backed up from my laptop and get it in working order again.
Anyway, the subject of this thread. Following some major reorganizing of the game lists on the BootlegGames Wiki's JungleTac page, I ended up discovering by complete chance while looking through archives of JungleTac's website that they developed of all things, a V.Smile game, after reverse image searching one of the images on a
page showcasing their software work. The game in question was released in English as
Learnin' Wheels, and received German and French localizations as
Freds Zahlen Rallye and
Apprenti' pilote respectively. The game itself from what I can find was released as early as 2004 (going by
the manual) and seems to be very obscure, with English copies of the game in particular not being very common, although French and German copies slightly moreso going by a quick eBay search in both regions. The only comprehensive documentation on it that I could find is an old YouTube livestream by who I am certain was a child at the time, available
here, which covers both the Learning Adventure and Learning Zone modes. On the plus side, all known versions of the game are dumped (although MAME doesn't have the English version recognized for some reason).
What's interesting about this game and its connection to JungleTac is that the screenshots of the game shown on their website seem to be from an earlier point in development and majorly deviate from the equivalents in the final game. The images from their website are included below (direct from the Wayback Machine, so keep in mind that not all images will load at all times):
Considering the major differences and the fact that JungleTac's screenshots were clearly taken from a direct source (likely an emulator), I am not convinced that JungleTac is unaffiliated with the game and simply repurposed screenshots of the game for their own benefit. There's also the fact that they
repurposed the sheep sprites from the game for their own games. The earliest instance of this that I could find was in the Pluto mini-game in the licensed Disney Game It! Classic Pals handheld from 2006 that JungleTac developed, where the sheep are clearly based on the sprites for them in the "Number Path" mini-game from the Learning Zone section of Learnin' Wheels (the last photo from the above images being from an earlier incarnation of the mini-game). There's also their generic 16-bit game "Hide and Seek", where the dancing sheep animation that plays when the haystack it's hiding in is selected is definitely traced from the one shown on the results screen in Learnin' Wheels for when a Learning Zone activity is completed. Images of both instances will be attached below.
As of writing, it is unknown if JungleTac developed additional V.Smile games. I'm certainly not qualified to find that out as idk how to disassemble Sunplus SPG-based games in general. I did find out however that there is an interesting pattern in the dumped V.Smile games where graphics for a "VTech Electronics Co., Ltd." copyright notice are in the ROM data for some of them (which to my knowledge are not shown in any final V.Smile games) while others appear to not have it at all (which includes Learnin' Wheels), and going by the fact that it is also present in the graphics area for what I assume is a test program that is included in some V.Smile games, with at least one game (Care Bears - A Lesson in Caring) having both kinds of copyright notice graphics, I have my suspicions that they might not only suggest that some games were developed internally by VTech but that they had third-party developers at all, although without anything concrete I can't say for certain. Should share what I have of those findings at some point somewhere once I'm ready, although idk if just sharing them here would be appropriate.
