End of September Update

> text about plug and plays…

Neither the PJ Masks ‘300 in 1 console’ or the ‘150 game handheld’ are dumped (several other similar Lexibook units are, although they use a more advanced VT chip so emulation work is still needed to get them running)

The 220-in-1 is not dumped.

The 200-in-1 looks like a rebrand of a common unit, 2 versions are dumped mc_tv200 / unkra200 with the latter using slightly newer hardware and the menu code glitching in the emulation (protection against it being used on an older hardware type maybe) Chances are the ROM will match one of those (we’ve already seen MGT units and one other that do)

> they were conversions of Spectrum tape games to disk format (and, in some cases, patched so they could run). Although I’m glad about being thanked in MAME project, I guess they are out of MAME scope (they are hacked/pirated games).

It’s important for MAME to document the current scene as well as the older one. I’d say they were eligible, although might need marking clearly to say what they are. For other platforms MAME has ‘clean crack’ lists for example, which are often modern cracks to improve software accessibility (run without the copy protection causing issues for example) The computer scene is a bit different to the arcade scene in the sense that it was always just as much about what people were doing at home, so new software, cracks, conversions etc. are still part of that to this day. It can be a bit of a minefield tho, with people putting things behind registration walls, or sites such as itch.io and the like (which I fear risks causing older versions of the software to be lost, as it doesn’t get catalogued or archived anywhere)

.> AT Games one

Mostly depends on the generation, but I think the majority of AT Games units are ‘enhanced hardware clones’ rather than emulation. There’s not been a huge focus on studying them at the moment. The Reactor MD ‘Firecore’ thing is definitely a hardware clone (with the menu running in a custom mode, and a SunPlus bolted on for half the games) Some of the most recent AT Games ones look to be emulation. Battery Life can be a good indicator, with emulation based products typically having much shorter battery life.

If you’re located in Europe then I’d recommend Team Europe in Austria ( https://team-europe.blogspot.com/ ) they’re capable of handling pretty much all Lexibook and Dreamgear stuff.

I dropped you a mail to the address you filled in here with the same reply, did you get it? I can provide details of where to send things via email if you reply there.

I don’t have that document, and I think, from memory, that it might have been in Japanese based on what others said at the time.

Honestly I feel this is where the Chinese community needs to step up a bit.

If you’ve got basic electronics skills, some 68k & ARM coding ability, and can hack the code, then you can set something up to extract the internal ROMs and submit the data for inclusion.

Outside of China these boards are becoming prohibitively expensive (you could get most of them for as low as $10 about 10 years back, but now people want much more) so we’re not going to be buying them up to study.

There’s a point where the local scenes / communities need to step up, and help preserve what is close to them.

It’s also important that they do properly, not by then trying to lock up their findings in some commercial hacked up piece of junk as we saw with PGM2 (which was a shameful abuse of the work we’d done in the first place) Nor do we want people trying to produce closed source all-in-one builds that use HLE instead of properly extracting things, those aren’t helpful at all.

MAMEdevs aren’t some kind of magicians, and there must be hundreds, if not thousands of people better positioned who can do this work, and can do it to the required standard. I’d like to see more high quality submissions from your part of the world, because at the moment it seems more of a 1 way street, with China making heavy use of MAME (usually unauthorized) while not contributing anything back, even if many are in an ideal position to do so.

We’ve provided countless assistance to developers in China over the years, only to find them not contribute anything back to the project, but instead use what they’ve been given for their own commercial gain. This has not helped relations. I urge you to look within your own community for people who can assist more with this, and help build a stronger relationship. My feeling is there’s a lot of material in China right now that’s going to rot where getting it outside of China would be difficult.