For at least the past 5 years, I have been seeing kiosk vendors in malls selling special video game systems. These items boast many games hardwired into devices which are just controllers with a few A/V cables for plugging directly into a television. You know the places — kiosks staffed by shady-looking, shifty-eyed characters who greet you with the customary, “You’re not a cop, right? Because you have to tell me if you are or else it’s entrapment.” It’s obvious to any video game geek that these systems are just some 8-bit NES emulation mechanism attached to a store of illicit NES ROMs, all packed inside the controller.
Really, it’s a nifty idea, just not altogether on the up-and-up. Creating and selling hardware that duplicates NES functionality is okay since the NES patents expired years ago. But the copyrights on the ROMs are in no way expired.
I was surprised to see one of these devices in a significantly more mainstream retail outlet– a Walgreens store, specifically. It was only $9.99 and claimed 101 games.
The most vivid screenshot on the package was quite obviously Arkanoid. When I turned on the unit (which requires unscrewing the battery cover to insert the batteries-not-included), I was greeted by Pac-Man:
I gave it a whirl. There are, in fact, 101 individual games (unlike that 1997-in-1 fraud I wrote about once) which I have listed at the end of this entry for reference. As an expert in American NES games, I know that most of them are games that were never released in America. Almost all of them are incredibly simple, obviously mapper-less games (memory mappers were used in NES cartridges to effectively expand the amount of data a game could have; lack of a mapper limits the possible size and complexity of a game). The most complex game I saw in the menu was Super C which used Nintendo’s MMC3 mapper hardware. Then again, the game had been stripped of its title screen and I didn’t play past the first level; it’s entirely possible that someone whittled this down to be an abbreviated, mapper-less version of the original game. I’m fairly confident that none of these games use battery backup features, thus obviating the need to emulate any non-volatile RAM.
As for actual gameplay, the experience is a bit disappointing. The joypad is very stiff. There are 4 buttons on the right side of the controller, but they’re actually just 2 A buttons and 2 B buttons. The select and start buttons sit just above the reset button which goes back to the Pac-Man greeting screen and that’s not a very user friendly feature. I was just getting into Super C when I noticed that particular problem.
Overall, this is probably as much of a letdown as that 1997-in-1 device. This device was cheaper, sure. But this device also required a little more time to notice how bad it is.
See Also:
At MobyGames:
Here’s the full list of 101 games:
- 1942
- 10 Yard Fight
- Alpha Mission
- Antarctic Adventure
- Arabian
- Arkanoid
- Army Tank
- Balloonfight
- Baltron
- Baseball
- Binaryland
- Bird Week
- Mighty Bomb Jack
- Bomb
- Bomber Man I
- Bomber Man II
- Brushroller
- Burgertime
- B-Wings
- Casino
- Chacknpop
- Challenger
- Champion
- Chess
- Chinese Circus
- Circus
- Cityconnection
- Cluclu Land
- Field Combat
- Super Contra
- Devil World
- Dig Dug I
- Dig Dug II
- Spar
- Dongkey Kong 1 [sic]
- Dongkey Kong 2 [sic]
- Dongkey Kong 3 [sic]
- Door Door
- Lunar Pool
- Dough Boy
- Dragon Fire
- Elevator
- Excite Bike
- Exed Exes
- F1 Race
- Mach Rider
- Joust
- Tenms
- Flappy
- Kvou
- Soccer
- Formation 2
- Front Line
- Geimos
- Golf
- Gyrodine
- Hyper Olympic
- Ice Climber
- Ice Hockey
- Volley Ball
- Zippy Race
- Karaki
- Karateka
- Kung Fu
- Lode Runner I
- Lode Runner II
- Bokosuka Quest III
- Super Dynamix
- Volguard II
- Valkyrie
- Magmax
- Nibbles
- Magic Mathematics
- Throw
- Mappy
- Mario Bros
- Matching
- Exerion
- Nuts Milk
- Millipede
- Twin Bee
- Ninja 3
- Ninja Guider
- Othello
- Russian Bricks
- Pac Land
- Pacman
- Pinball
- Pooyan
- Porter
- Mouse Wrestling
- Pro Wrestling
- Roadfighter
- Shooting
- Wars
- Sky Destroyer
- Slalom
- Warpman
- Space Shooting
- Sqoon
- Star Force
Ian Farquhar says:
Mike,
Yeah, these things have been turning up in “legitimate” stores here in Oz lately.
I’ve bought a few, and most seem to be based on variants on the 6578 “NES-On-A-Chip” with a mask-programmed ROM off the side. Datasheet here, if you’re curious:
http://gannon.portablesofdoom.org/SH6578_Spec_V980826.pdf
There are lots of variants, but the manufacturer seems to be the amusingly named “Sino Wealth”. SW primarily manufactures 4- and 8-bit microcontrollers for extremely high volume apps (analog phone handsets etc.), so they probably just tacked a 6502 core on some fairly simple synthesized PPU and SPU implementation. The general discussion seems to be that the quality of the reimplementation is poor (wrong colors etc.)
As the NES patents expired a couple of years back, there is nothing fundamentally illegal about the NOAC (but note not a single refrence to the NES or Nintendo in the datasheet anyway!) OTOH, copying old games: not so legal for many decades.
I wonder if someone is confused. Or, more likely, that the distributors are either genuinely unaware of the copyrighted contents. Or assuming that these games are so old and noone will care?
Multimedia Mike says:
Check for these types of multigames-in-1 systems on Amazon.com. The place is loaded with them. They have ones for Genesis and Atari 2600 which flagrantly copy the original system styles and overtly advertise what they do.