|
|
Post by zilliont on Sept 7, 2014 11:10:03 GMT -5
(I don't know if this is the appropriate forum to post this on, buuuut) Have you ever had contact with these thingamajigs? If so, are they important/special for you in any way? They sure are for me. My first contact with the NES (and retrogaming in general) was through a 99-in-1 plug-'n-play controller that looked like the Genesis' except it was blue and silver with three yellow buttons and it had the mandatory turbo trigger. While most of its library was composed of the "classic" multicart mainstays, it also had Contra without the logo and with a level select screen built-in... labeled as a Hello Kitty game, IIRC  This was waaaay back in 2005/6, though. More recently, I've acquired a Tectoy/@games Master System/Game Gear plug-'n-play device for my younger brother (who's actually pretty into retrogames too), and boy is it a peculiar one. First off, the controller has (besides the usual start and reset buttons and on/off switch) three buttons labeled A, B and C as opposed to two labeled 1 and 2 (I suppose it's the same framework used for a Genesis version), the PCM emulation on it is crap and its library of 30 games contain quite a few Game Gear exclusives and the Model 1 Master System BIOS ROM, with Snail Maze included. While I was playing The Ninja on it, I accidentally held the reset/menu button for more than one second and the result was the discovery of a hidden, undocumented test screen! It's a really simple sound/image/button test, but I found it cool nonethless. Besides, it helped me find out that the buttons are getting kinda faulty and that my TV's AV sound channels are actually reversed - red plug goes in white port, white port goes in red plug. This isn't apparent with my N64, though, so I guess it's one of the device's many quirks? But anyway, have you guys ever experienced something like this in real hardware OR in emulators? |
|
|
|
Post by PooshhMao on Sept 7, 2014 12:06:58 GMT -5
I've played my share of Famiclones back in the day. Pretty much all of them had the usual 100-in-1 thing going on, but in reality featured just a few old Famicom and NES games listed multiple times on the game select screen.
Actually, when you think about it, these probably weren't all that easy to make. The NES's chipset was definitely not off-the-shelf, with a unique sound chip not used anywhere else (?) and a proprietary version of the MOS 6502 cpu, built by Ricoh.
I would guess most people with a degree in electronics would be capable of reverse engineering it without too much trouble given enough time and sufficient motivation, but manufacturing chips in quantity is not something you can do from your garage.
Modern plug-n-play things are supremely uninteresting from a hardware point of view, they usually feature a very common ARM cpu, a dirt-cheap glued-on SD card for storage, a DAC for sound and that's pretty much it. The emulators they run are usually nowhere near as good as the best ones for PC's, I read a review about the official Midway Mortal Kombat plug-n-play console which featured the first arcade game, but the music synthesis was quite off and unlistenable. I guess at some point some exec said 'right, that's good enough, we need to ship these now in order to make the holiday season'.
Strange, since MAME supports Mortal Kombat flawlessly for a very long time now and the source code is out there for all to see.
Overall, I would advise any serious gamer to stay away. They're not even all that collectable and I seriously doubt their value will ever go up.
|
|
|
|
Post by Weasel on Sept 7, 2014 14:04:17 GMT -5
I own this ridiculous one called the GameFillip 2010. It looks like a very small Super Famicom, has a Famicom cartridge slot, and the controllers are obvious clones of the PS1 controller (sans triggers). Video quality's a bit off, and the 88-in-1 ROM on it pretty much only has the really obvious stuff, and all of it's the Japanese versions. And, of course, things that are reskinned into Contra for no reason.
|
|
|
|
Post by zilliont on Sept 7, 2014 19:46:38 GMT -5
I've played my share of Famiclones back in the day. Pretty much all of them had the usual 100-in-1 thing going on, but in reality featured just a few old Famicom and NES games listed multiple times on the game select screen. Actually, when you think about it, these probably weren't all that easy to make. The NES's chipset was definitely not off-the-shelf, with a unique sound chip not used anywhere else (?) and a proprietary version of the MOS 6502 cpu, built by Ricoh. I would guess most people with a degree in electronics would be capable of reverse engineering it without too much trouble given enough time and sufficient motivation, but manufacturing chips in quantity is not something you can do from your garage. Modern plug-n-play things are supremely uninteresting from a hardware point of view, they usually feature a very common ARM cpu, a dirt-cheap glued-on SD card for storage, a DAC for sound and that's pretty much it. The emulators they run are usually nowhere near as good as the best ones for PC's, I read a review about the official Midway Mortal Kombat plug-n-play console which featured the first arcade game, but the music synthesis was quite off and unlistenable. I guess at some point some exec said 'right, that's good enough, we need to ship these now in order to make the holiday season'. Strange, since MAME supports Mortal Kombat flawlessly for a very long time now and the source code is out there for all to see. Overall, I would advise any serious gamer to stay away. They're not even all that collectable and I seriously doubt their value will ever go up. Nintendo actually lost the proprietary rights to the Famicom/NES hardware and architeture (at least in Asia) in 2004 and made them public domain, didn't they? That was the start of the famiclone boom, IIRC. Before that there were only multicarts and a few clone consoles. And about Mortal Kombat's sound emulation... The board that the first three games run on uses a Yamaha FM soundchip, doesn't it? This hardware line/technology is notoriously difficult to emulate for one reason or another - most Genesis/MD (Yamaha 2612) emulators have innacurate sound up to this day, and Toaplan's later games (Yamaha 2510, the most advanced in the line) currently have no sound in MAME. The latter example is particularly weird, as most of Raizing/8ing's games (that run on the exact same hardware) have perfectly fine sound in almost all versions of it... |
|
|
|
Post by PooshhMao on Sept 7, 2014 20:18:32 GMT -5
Yeah, but that's not because they don't know how to emulate it - it's because some Toaplan games (Vimana comes to mind) employ some pretty effective encryption. With most other Toaplan games, they managed to work around this because they found bootleg boards with decrypted sound cpu's.
|
|
|
|
Post by jorpho on Sept 7, 2014 23:34:36 GMT -5
Nintendo actually lost the proprietary rights to the Famicom/NES hardware and architeture (at least in Asia) in 2004 and made them public domain, didn't they? That was the start of the famiclone boom, IIRC. To put it more accurately, the patents expired. Patents typically expire after 20 years, and there's pretty much no straightforward way to extend them; there are many cases in which the patent for a popular item has expired, and subsequently clones flooded the market. |
|
geishaboy
Full Member
Like that movie Drunken Master, minus the kung-fu
Posts: 190
|
Post by geishaboy on Dec 7, 2014 22:57:07 GMT -5
I remember buying a polystation from some shady looking Chinese dude at a flea market years ago. Best $10 I ever spent.
|
|
|
|
Post by vetus on Dec 26, 2014 15:31:05 GMT -5
My first touch with NES Contra at its original form (in Europe it was renamed Probotector and replaced the Rambo-like characters with robots) was in junior high school at a Famiclone. Since I didn't knew about the re-skin fact, I thought that Contra was Probotector's clone where they replaced robots with human characters. Kind a funny irony, isn't it? Also my first touch with Bonk was with an NES Bonk game at a Famiclone.
|
|
