General News

I’ve now set up a PayPal account linked to “hazemamewip@hotmail.com” so if anybody wants to contribute towards the purchase (and shipping to Sean / TeamEurope) of Plug and Play devices, then that address can be used. It will help enormously with sourcing additional units, plus any spares we might need for experiments (sometimes dumping is not straightforward as many of these don’t use regular ROMs, but ROM globs)

As these are donations, not payments for any specific guaranteed product or service, be sure to send them as gifts. Also don’t send email to that address, it won’t be checked. If you want to discuss sending a specific unit you already own instead, please tag on on Twitter.

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One thing about the SunPlus multi-game consoles is that you can separate them into clear groups with evolutions within those groups, even in some cases clear paths back to older non-SunPlus tech.

I previously mentioned the ‘Family Sport’ ones, including the OPlayer, which typically boot to a ‘Family Sport’ title screen, but there are several other distinct families of these things.

The Fox Sports 7-in-1 unit comes from another one of these families. One of the telltale signs of this tech is that there appears to be a security check related to the inputs on startup, and the input reading isn’t quite as obvious as I’d hope. I have a feeling there’s some kind of MCU in one of the blobs acting as an IO controller.

The WiWi, by Hamy System is another system where the included games are based on this tech, or at least 18 of them. The system boast that it comes with 87 games ’18 Hyper Sports, 69 Arcade’ and while that is true, only the Hyper Sports ones are SunPlus tech, the others are supplied on a Famicom multi-game cart and are simply NES based titles. This works because when the SunPlus based Hyper Sports cartridge is inserted the console turns into a ‘reverse console’ where all the game hardware is in the cart, and the internals are almost entirely bypassed. This isn’t like NES carts with mappers in, where they boost the system capabilities, this is literally bypassing the internal architecture entirely. For the sake of simplicity, and because sometimes you also found these without the extra cart, but instead the SunPlus cartridge PCB attached to the system and the slot glued shut, MAME treats these as a machine rather than jumping through hoops to treat them as a cartridge.

Another unit, this one dumped by Team Europe presents itself as a ‘Fitness console’ and has more Fitness themed based games. It uses your typical floor mat controller and was put out by Lexibook. The codebase however seems very similar to the previously mentioned WiWi and Fox Sports units so this is certainly derived from the same base. This shows that these units were not only trying to cash in on the success of the Wii, but also the Wii Fit unit when it too proved popular. As with the above the I/O isn’t fully figured out on this yet, meaning you can only select the games, not yet play them.

One of the things of note about the above units is that there is a version of TV Virtual Tennis. TV Virtual Tennis was also released as a standalone game, but using the older SPG1xx level of SunPlus tech, for which there are currently very few dumped games. The original copyright on TV Virtual Tennis was Conny, although no Conny logo is shown in any of the previous devices covered. Furthermore, these standalone Conny devices do have actual I/O MCUs in regular packages, not globs, although there’s no in-game security check (the MCU is read protected tho) The motion controls so far remain unemulated, it is unclear if there’s any genuine motion detection of if they just send button presses over the IR. One of the most frustrating things with the SPG1xx series is the colour encoding, although some of the JAKKS games using it do have a proper palette test which could help once they’re dumped, we have sourced a number of them but none of them have been easy dump cases.

Another Cony product, also on the older tech was TV Virtual Fighter, which boots to a title of Free Form Kung Fu.

Finally the SDW distributed Ping Pong game was also developed by Conny, and also actually identifies by another name on the title screen.

Conny would go on to be responsible for the ‘Pocket Dream Console’ units, which also do feature the Conny logo. The PDC100 was dumped, and emulated and as this one is a handheld with simple controls it works fine, everything here is fully playable. Some of the games here are actually very playable indeed, and the Puzz Loop clone ‘Jo Ma 2’ actually carries a license from Mitchell Corporation, the original developers of the Puzz Loop arcade game which is where this style of gameplay originates (even if it’s more commonly known as Zuma due to the PopCap titles)

Conny would work with VideoJet in France to produce a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles licensed unit, based on the rebooted TV show. This combines a side-scrolling platform / action title with several minigames. There were quite a few Turtles themed Plug and Play and I’ll be covering another one in a later part.

This unit is surprising because unlike many other licensed units it resists the temptation to load the device with all the common minigames from other units and instead sticks only to themed games. One or two are clearly reworked versions of games in the regular PDC, but they’re not zero effort hacks as found in many similar offerings from other manufacturers.

Switching back to ABL published games, Decathlon is a Track & Field style game that utilized a floor mat. The events here are actually well presented, and function as you’d expect, although as the original used a floor mat they’re very easy with keys, however if you were to hook up an authentic style controller some decent 2 player competitive action can be found in this one. It’s also one of those cases reminding us that even for these cheap Plug and Play units there were multiple versions, sometimes with subtle differences. Here we had 2 units, one showing ‘Arcade Mode’ on the titlescreen, the other showing ‘Decathlon Championship’ It is not clear which is newer or why the text was changed, or if there are any other differences of note.

The Decathlon story does not end there however. ‘Simba’ put out a unit called ‘TV Sports 10 in 1’ which is also a version of the Decathlon game, but with adjusted visuals and no ‘down’ direction on the floor mat controller, meaning some of the movements needed have been simplified. Otherwise this is clearly based on the same code as Decathlon and uses the same audio. This unit was found in Europe, and I have a feeling the ‘Decathlon’ game Excalibur put out in the US is based on this version of the game too. I’m not sure what the motivation was behind creating 2 versions of the game with different visuals, but both are clearly original products rather than one being a bootleg reskin of the other. I suspect, based on the test mode style which is common to these and sevearl other games, that the original developer of these was V-Tac Technology Co Ltd. although that is not 100% proven.

I’ll wrap up part 3 there, because again I feel I’ve covered a variety of things, both from the ‘not yet working and might have been missed’ category, and the ‘was listed as a new working machine so you might be curious to see what it is’ category. I think this part also starts to highlight how many of these seemingly throwaway games must have a deeper story behind them, how code evolved and ended up on devices published by a variety of manufacturers which to any digital archaeologist is fascinating stuff and by having it emulated MAME becomes a useful resource for furthr investigation.

I’ve now set up a PayPal account linked to “hazemamewip@hotmail.com” so if anybody wants to contribute towards the purchase (and shipping to Sean / TeamEurope) of Plug and Play devices, then that address can be used. It will help enormously with sourcing additional units, plus any spares we might need for experiments (sometimes dumping is not straightforward as many of these don’t use regular ROMs, but ROM globs)

As these are donations, not payments for any specific guaranteed product or service, be sure to send them as gifts. Also don’t send email to that address, it won’t be checked. If you want to discuss sending a specific unit you already own instead, please tag on on Twitter.

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Recap time. Around the end of last year the Play Vision “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Plug and Play unit was emulated. I did a video on it where, spoiler, I cheated my way to £1 million. This was a UK unit, designed for the UK market. At the time we knew there were units released for other regions too, the assumption was that they would be the same, just localized. The game ran on SunPlus hardware.

Senario also put out a number of games on SunPlus hardware, we’ll get to some more of those in another part, for now the focus is on the Millionaire games. Senario put out a Millionaire game on SunPlus hardware. Was it the same as the PlayVision game, also on SunPlus hardware? No. It’s an entirely different piece of code. On the surface this seems a better presented game, but the audio is weaker, and there’s an annoying delay before you can answer questions. It also lacks the LED on each controller to let a player know when the game is waiting for their input. Overall I’m less impressed by this one.

Another device we knew was going to be different just from the packaging. Character Options put out another UK Millionaire game, developed by 2waytraffic, but this one was a single controller rather than a base unit with each player having their own controls. In terms of being an effective ‘party’ game this limits what can be done, and in multiplayer mode this becomes apparent when each player is presented with a different question, which doesn’t always feel fair. On the plus side the lifeline ‘Phone a Friend’ feature performs a virtual phonecall rather than simply giving you extra seconds on the clock. There’s no speech, and generally weak audio. This is also SunPlus hardware, which I was surprised by, because many of the questions and answers do not fit in the boxes without scrolling which initially suggested to me that it might be weaker, lower resolution hardware.

Now we have the one that was most surprising. Haluatko miljonääriksi? A Finnish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? put out by Play Vision. Santeri Saarimaa (aka Gridle who maintained the official MAME site in the earlier days of the project) picked this one up for us in Finland. Physically the unit resembles the UK Play Vision game, same shape, same style of controllers just with Finnish stickers etc. This had to simply be a localization of the UK Play Vision game, right? No. It runs on entirely different hardware. This does run on the lower resolution, less capable Elan type 6502 based hardware. As a result it’s also the only one that isn’t currently playable as the emulation of that platform is much more preliminary. This does make me wonder if there was a UK version on this weaker hardware too, but so far there’s no evidence to support that making this one a real oddity. It is worth mentioning that this shows a 2005 date on the boot screen, not 2006, so if there was a UK release using this hardware, maybe it was earlier too.

Not straying far, another thing yet to be promoted to working state, also on Elan hardware type is Cadaco’s Buzztime Trivia.

An 8-Player trivia game for the home sounds on paper like it could provided a decent level of family entertainment, heck, even the Playstation 3 is limited to 7 controllers due to some strange design choices. That said, some equally poor design choices seem to hold this one back.

First of all, you don’t get 8 players out of the box, you get 2 controllers by default, maybe 2 extra in some of the bundled versions. The controllers are also colour coded, you can’t just source 8 random controllers cheap, it seems you need 1 of each colour if you want 8 players, and of course the ones that weren’t bundled with the systems are now more expensive.

Second this Elan hardware just isn’t very good, it’s barely a step up from a NES, and arguably worse in some ways, and while this is fine for a quiz game it does mean you’re going to get a very bare bones quiz game, and that’s exactly what you get.

Third, and possibly due to the above and a lack of general interest in the platform, only 4 cartridges were released with a single category of questions in each. These provide different selections of questions, but even then one of them is an ‘Everything Trivia’ general knowledge cart which doesn’t even mix up the presentation from the built in ‘Everything Trivia’ instead simply providing a different set of questions (not even the ‘Fireworks’ animation at the end is updated). The cartridges are all marked ‘Series 1’ so there were probably plans for more but nothing materialized.

Something I did notice with the cartridges is that while they boast ‘550 extra questions’ they appear to contain more. Each question is stored with a “xxx OF 550” after it in ROM, but in Sports Trivia for example that number reaches “598 OF 550” I haven’t checked if there are any numbers skipped, or if all these questions are used, but it seems strange they had an advertised number then exceeded it. The cartridges, which are 2Mbytes each, could have stored many more questions, and even categories as there’s no attempt to compress the data or store it efficiently at all, but I guess there was a cost to licensing the questions, or Cadaco felt it would be more profitable to sell multiple carts.

In the end if you wanted a complete set for this system back in the day it would have been both expensive and unrewarding, a missed opportunity.

Another thing running on Elan type hardware that still needs work is the “All in 1” developed Sudoku. The original version of this was sold as “Carol Vorderman Sudoku” in the UK, although contains no branding. These Sudoku products are a good indicator of the period in which these Plug and Play devices were popular as it coincided with the Sudoku fad, meaning that there are many different dedicated Sudoku units, or Sudoku games found in the multigame units. This specific one is known for having an overly complex button layout, when in reality a simple stick and 2 buttons would have been less confusing. The inputs are not currently mapped properly, and it requires a hack to boot at all.

The unit above was also released in the US by Senario, it is unknown if the ROM is the same, although since there was no branding it’s possible. Senario also put out an ‘Ultimate 3-in-1’ version with different game modes, although it also doesn’t work at present. There is no Senario branding so maybe this too got a UK release under a different name.

I looked at some ABL things in the first part, and another that still hasn’t been promoted to working yet is Air Blaster Joystick. Dumping this was actually Morten’s final contribution, so it’s a shame that I haven’t got it to a state where I feel it can be promoted, but at the same time I’m not sure at what point that would be. The reason for this is that the game code is an unmitigated train wreck. It was apparently developed by “XiAn Hummer Software Studio(CHINA)” for ABL, but even on real hardware the game suffers from a number of softlocks, and the coding is so bad that the overall flow of the game depends on the exact speed the processor is able to run at, untied from the video update rate. These Elan System on a Chip platforms performance seems to also depend on how much else is enabled. Checksum tests in some games indicate a fairly fast 6502, but in cases like this it clearly must run at a much lower rate or the game logic is broken, simply making sounds seems to cause the original game to have further slowdowns, and sprites frequently flicker or vanish on the original unit when more than a few are on screen meaning that if anything the emulation in MAME is painting a better picture of this game than it should. Some issues that are baked into the software are just as bad in MAME as on the real thing however, for example, on the vertical scrolling levels if you lose a single life on one of the bosses the game will enter a loop whereby it strips your lives and continues one by one automatically until you have none left. The manual attempts to explain this by saying you can’t continue on bosses, but it’s clearly a bug being explained away as a feature.

I could write an essay on all things this game gets wrong, but for everything bad there is to say about the game, it was extremely useful to have it dumped as it told me a lot more about the video modes supported by this Elan platform, but it’s a very poor piece of software. If you want to play it in MAME it’s probably better now than it will be once I decide to promote it, as promotion in this case relies almost entirely on documenting and implementing hardware limits (unless I decide to just flip the switch anyway, but I’d at least like to verify the timer rates first)

Sticking with Elan hardware, a contribution from GameHistory.org saw us with a Carl Edwards’ Chase for Glory Plug and Play to dump, which Sean dumped. I was at the time aware of a Carl’ Edwards game from Excalibur, as there are videos on YouTube of said title, what I did not know is that there were actually 2 Carl Edwards’ games from Excalibur and this was the one I wasn’t aware of. As with other games this one helped show how some featured worked, although currently still needs work in order to promote it to working state.

With this Carl Edwards’ game dumped I decided to pick up the other one, which was a wheel type controller. I expected it to be a SunPlus based system from screenshots, and with single game SunPlus systems it’s always a gamble whether or not they’re easy to dump cases or not. In this case, it was not an easy to dump case, so Sean was not able to dump it at this time.

Around the same time I realised that Excalibur actually had 2 ‘Wheel’ type controllers, which at least in photos look the same externally apart from the license attached to them. The other Excalibur wheel, rather than having a Carl Edwards’ license was branded as Ford Racing. I picked it up expecting it to be a difficult to dump case due to the external similarities with the 2nd Carl Edwards’ game, but instead it turned out to be one of the easier to handle cases.

The Ford Racing did turn out to be a SunPlus based device, although at present the controls aren’t fully mapped, so you can’t accelerate or steer, although that’s something I’ll look into fairly soon.

Flipping focus entirely to the Winbond hardware covered in part 1 for the ABL 4 Player System another game using that hardware was dumped, but like the rest it still lacks sound emulation as I can’t see any sound related writes. The game this time is “Shoot n’ Score” which is one of those games which wants to appear like a motion controlled game, but actually just has a sensor that detects when your foot passes over the unit and sends a button press. 8-bit versions of the same basic game exist on NES derived platforms, and were distributed by the same company as this, but those aren’t dumped. Ideally I’d like to find how sound works and hook up some scrolling before promoting this to working, even if the basic functionality of the game is already correct. Emulating this was useful as it showed me a sprite pixel doubling feature that none of the other games using the hardware had enabled, it’s used for the close-ups of the keeper attempting to save the ball.

That’s it for this part. Personally I think there’s some fascinating stuff here. One of the things I love about working on MAME is making new discoveries. This time last year some people might have owned a Millionaire Plug and Play and not thought much of it, never bothered to talk about it, certainly not made any YouTube videos of it, and therefore it was very easy to assume that they were all just the same thing. By gathering units from different parts of the world it has been discovered, and documented for all to see that there are actually many different versions; if you grew up in the UK you’d be getting not only different questions, but a different game to the one found in the US. I believe that to be important. Furthermore if you look at something like Air Blaster Joystick it’s a lesson in how NOT to design something, and while MAME still only tells half the story of just how bad it was, I still hold hope that budding programmers can look at such things and realise that games do need thought behind the logic that goes into them; with the unprecedented level of awful ‘AAA’ software of late I feel many may have forgotten that.

I’ve now set up a PayPal account linked to “hazemamewip@hotmail.com” so if anybody wants to contribute towards the purchase (and shipping to Sean / TeamEurope) of Plug and Play devices, then that address can be used. It will help enormously with sourcing additional units, plus any spares we might need for experiments (sometimes dumping is not straightforward as many of these don’t use regular ROMs, but ROM globs)

As these are donations, not payments for any specific guaranteed product or service, be sure to send them as gifts. Also don’t send email to that address, it won’t be checked. If you want to discuss sending a specific unit you already own instead, please tag on on Twitter.

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It’s easy to miss a lot of MAME development, either because it isn’t clear from just reading release notes exactly what something is, because it’s early progress that hasn’t been highlighted anywhere aside the odd Twitter post, or because issues with the emulation mean while things work for the most part the overall system hasn’t yet been promoted to working. While I tend to post short snippets of progress in YouTube videos or on Twitter I’ve noticed that quite a lot of people seem unaware of some of the recent progress, especially that which hasn’t made it into videos, so I’m using this site to put up some bits of progress from the last 6 months or so with screenshots. Doing this also gives me a pool of screenshots to transfer into the yearly writeup articles if I ever get back to finishing the current ones (this work has been keeping me very busy)

At some point I’ll likely put up a donation link as ideally we could do with some extra funding to help cover some of the more interesting items that can still be picked up, however I think it fair to at least give a good overview of what has been achieved so far first. PayPay details added, see above.

I’ll say straight away that a lot of the things covered here are awful. A lot of things covered in future parts will be awful. There are good, original titles in the mix too, but that’s the thing with these Plug and Play devices, the quality goes from novel original titles which can be quite enjoyable right down to things that are worse than a simple unit full of NES bootlegs would have been. Exploring and documenting all of this, and seeing just how bad some of it can be is one of the most enjoyable parts of this work, so when I say something is awful don’t think I’m being negative, I find this stuff fascinating and I’m really glad it’s being documented as it shows a different side to the industry, and how popular games and systems influenced the market and IP related to them was often abused.

The following is meant to show progress made on emulation, not every device covered here was purchased by me, plenty were from ClawGrip, TeamEurope or other sources, however it gives a good idea of what’s being worked on, current targets etc. and things you might have missed.

On the SunPlus / GeneralPlus front there have been a decent number of games dumped based on the GPL16250 (aka GPAC800) technology. This is a much more capable chip than the earlier SunPlus SPG2xx devices, offering higher resolutions, sprite scaling and a much faster overall processor with extended instructions; needless to say emulating it is a fair bit of work but many of the dumps have contributed to the knowledge pool and allowed for progress to be made. Several of the JAKKS Pacific games using the tech are showing promising progress for example.

Golden Tee Home Edition:
This is actually a respectable port of the Golden Tee Fore style of game to a plug and play unit with presentation closer to the 32-bit Golden Tee Games rather than having true 3D graphics, currently you can leave it cycling the score tables. This is a significant improvement on Radica’s Golden Tee licensed offering.

Cars 2:
One of the later releases on this hardware, which for some reason does away with the motion controls. It did used to go ingame too looking similar to the other perspective driving games on the hardware, but it regressed when I fixed something else.

Spider Man Web Master:
JAKKS put out a large number of Spider-Man licensed games, including 2 on this hardware type, only this one is currently dumped. It’s a motion controlled title.

Toy Story Toys on the Move:
Another Disney license, another motion controller game.

Spongebob Bikini Bottom 500:
Maybe the most impressive lookng of the games on this hardware this ends up looking like a Kart racer with good use of the hardware. The main issue here is lack of a 2 player mode, which is unfortunately often the case with Plug and Play units as most didn’t support linking, and as such you only had a single controller.

Phineas and Ferb: Best Game Ever!
There are videos of this on YouTube, it’s another licensed game although I’m not familiar with the source material. This one seems to have more sprite rendering issues than the others at the moment.

There are also dumps for many other JAKKS Pacific games using the tech, some of which upload palettes but don’t currently display anything, others which still fail to boot entirely at this point in development.

Bandai also used this tech for the Pac-Man connect unit, which unlike earlier ports is actually an emulation based device. This has been progressing nicely, but again still lots to do here with various obvious game-breaking issues still present. Emulating things like this is also interesting because you can compare the quality of the emulation to that offered by MAME (and it isn’t very good) Emulating this is also demanding, this was the first real proof that these later SunPlus chips run at closer to 100Mhz, as any lower and the actual emulators run the games far too slowly. This means that at present MAME only just reaches 100% speed on my 4ghz machine when running this. It’s possible we can win some performance by using the SunPlus recompiler, but it’s currently disabled for the later SunPlus cores as many opcodes are unimplemented.

This SunPlus tech also found its way into some one-off Plug and Play units from lesser known manufacturers, for example, the Gormiti Game Arena. Here we see sprites being rendered (with bad colours) and backgrounds missing for a similar reason to why some other sets aren’t displaying anything yet. Of note the die markings here were different to the above units, however functionality seems the same.

Other apparent one-off uses include Tiger Electronics using it for their Lazer Tag Module game (which I was expecting to just be regular SPG2xx hardware like the Paintball Powered Up, but turned out to be this instead) That one uses opcodes that haven’t yet been implemented. Some of the newer Family Sport 220-in-1 units also make use of this tech, again those currently show nothing.

Looking at the older SPG2xx SunPlus tech there have been a number of things dumped there that haven’t yet been promoted to working for various reasons. The JAKKS TeleStory is a TV Storybook system for kids, for which at least one version of every known story cartridge has been dumped (although a number of localized ones have not been) While some of these run (and others need a debugger trick to boot) there’s an unemulated audio decoder chip used for the speech that needs to be emulated first before they can be promoted. Current theory is it might be something similar to Speex due to terminlogy used in the hidden test modes.

The 3 JAKKS Pacific TV Touch units were also dumped; these are re-released versions of classic JAKKS units but with a touchpad instead of Joystick. The original releases aren’t yet dumped as they’re difficult dumping cases, and these ones require the touchpad emulating to be playable, which is trickier than it sounds as it appears to support multiple simultaneous touch points etc. JAKKS did plan a 4th game on this hardware type, a port of the mobile game Cut the Rope, but it never materialized, leaving just these 3 curious reworkings. The touch concept was abandoned after this.

Advance Bright Ltd’s “4 Player System” is an interesting one in that it isn’t the typical NES based hardware multi-game, nor is it even a SunPlus or Elan type system, but instead some Winbond type hardware using a G65C816 derived CPU as previously seen on Konami’s Track and Field Challenge. Currently we don’t emulate sound for this platform (I can’t see any sound related writes, it might be there’s a small piece of internal code missing) and also there are some video issues and some timing issues to due lack of software to draw any solid conclusions. All 10 mini-games in the collection do run tho, some are playable. As the name would suggest the games here are all designed for 4 players to compete against other, and as such, when combined with the less common architecture they’re actually all original pieces of software (albeit with some stolen graphics / ideas)

Another ABL system that is far more interesting than it should be is the Wikid Joystick. This runs on SH6578, which is a NES clone, and many of the games are indeed NES hacks, but the chip has some significant video hardware differences making it incompatible with unmodified NES software, unlike the VT based chips which were basically 100% software compatible with a NES if the enhanced modes weren’t enabled. Many of the games in this 14-in-1 collection are playable, but some still have major errors due to not understanding the hardware properly yet (documentation is a little vague in places) as a result it’s still marked as not working.

The ‘Family Sport’ units are SunPlus based, usually advertised as ’32-bit’ to differentiate them from older units, and come in many different form factors; many of them are Wii-clone units with fake Wii-remotes, often offering some basic form of motion control, others are handhelds. The OPlayer is a handheld 100-in-1 version, which overall functions more correctly in MAME than the ones that have basic motion control as all the sports games are designed to work with just the 2 buttons. There’s an issue with the low battery indicator always flashing at the moment, but that’s minor. By this evolution it’s fair to say that many of these games, while simple, are actually well made and presented in an appealing way, they’re not going to win any awards but at $10 you’re not going to feel too ripped off with one of these units. Several other units using this tech were also dumped, I’ll cover them in another part.

(TODO more screens)

One area where the quality really isn’t there comes in the form of the VT1682 based devices, which are amazing to see for entirely different reasons. The “InterAct Complete Video Game – 111 Games & 42 Songs (G5410)” is the pinnacle of this, throwing together a number of other multigames into a single unit with a tree of menus of mismatched styles and more stolen assets than it’s even possible to comprehend, not just visual, but Audio, with the Karaoke section (and several others) simply having awful quality rips of popular music as the only sound on offer.

It’s almost impossible to believe this existed on the US market at all given this was released in a post-Napster era yet what’s even more amazing is that even here some things were censored, there are earlier verisons of some of these games in other units with content that has been changed here, for example HighWay Racing has the top of the car graphic clipped on the title screen; in other units, such as the MiWi you can see the uncensored version, which is simply an advertising banner for Vodafone. Somehow the Vodaphone logo was deemed to be unsuitable for inclusion but heaps of unlicensed music and stolen game assets was considered just fine.

Currently, while the majority of the games are playable, the games under the ‘Shooting Games’ (lightgun accessory) menu do not have the controls properly hooked up, so the overall status of the thing remains NOT WORKING in MAME, even if there’s plenty to explore outside of the ‘Shooting Games’ menu.

(TODO more screens)

One example of where even the above doesn’t have everything is Drum Master, where the version found on the MiWi2, which is clearly based on an older codebase for other reasons (the graphic for the ‘Arcade’ subgames menu uses the spelling ‘Arcase’ for example) has additional mini-games hidden under the Drum Master menu, as well as different music on some of the Drum Master games. The Pinball game is one example of this. At this point the case for needing to pick up different variations of these things when they’re available becomes clear; they might be junk, but there are stories to be told, history to be documented.

(TODO more screens)

In terms of pure absurdity, the “InterAct Complete Video Game – 89-in-1” even manages to take things to another level and include a game where you must move left and right through traffic by using a 2 button to change lanes while Nirvana’s “In Bloom” is blasted at you. This is hidden away in a submenu called ‘Fun Games’ (does this mean the others aren’t meant to be fun?) This ‘Fun Games’ section actually launches something called ‘Aero Runner’ and the games seem to have originally been designed to work with some kind of fitness mat (maybe it was an optional accessory, maybe this was a standalone product at some point that’s been integrated and butchered)

Even the naming of these products is nonsense, as you’d expect a ‘Complete Video Game’ with 111 games to fully include everything in the ‘Complete Video Game’ with 89 games, but it does not, meaning even this lower capacity one has content worth exploring for the morbidly curious.

(TODO more screens)

The VG Caplet is a system that did get added with a Working flag, and on the surface it appears mundane – the usual selection of SunPlus games (albeit with different titles) and 3 licensed games from Taito and Data East. The licensed games are Space Invaders (actually Space Invaders Part II), Bust-A-Move and Burger Time.

What makes this unit remarkable is just how poorly done those ports are.

First it’s unclear why Space Invaders Part II was chosen rather than the original, and you don’t see this until the title screen, but the real crime here is the gameplay implementation, nothing feels right. The first thing you’ll notice is just how laggy the controls are, there is a measurable delay to moving and firing, and when you fire the shots only update every other frame, enemy shots likewise meaning the game doesn’t feel smooth to play at all. Even the scrolling as the invaders move between rows is wrong, they all scroll down as a single block. It feels like Space Invaders programmed by somebody who has never played Space Invaders and the degree to which things are wrong has to be played to be believed.

Bust-A-Move is up next, and this one gets off to a promising start, it has the title screen animation from the original arcade “Puzzle Bobble” albeit with the text changed from Puzzle Bobble to Bust-A-Move, which is a little odd because Bust-A-Move doesn’t actually use that style of title screen or animation (which makes me wonder if there were units of this in Japan with an actual Puzzle Bobble title) That said, it looks good.

Then you get to the game. It’s the same game as Squirrel Bobble in so many of these other SunPlus devices, and anybody who has played Squirrel Bobble knows that isn’t a good version of the game. I say the same game, this naturally has Bub and Bob instead of the Squirrels, but as Squirrel Bobble already stole the rest of the assets from Puzzle Bobble that’s the only observable difference. This actually makes me wonder, did this come first, with Squirrel Bobble being a sprite replacement job on it, or did Squirrel Bobble come first with this simply restoring the proper Puzzle Bobble sprites. Either way, aiming is awful, imprecise and laggy, there is unbearable slowdown if you attempt to aim while pieces are falling, the music is all over the place and not correctly timed / sequenced. It’s a mess and it’s barely playable.

Burger Time. I’ll start by saying I’ve never been a huge fan of the original Burger Time, always found it to be stiff, slow and frustrating, I much prefer the follow-up “Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory” however we’re not here to talk about that. After Bust-A-Move I was expecting this to just be ‘Big Burger’ from the other SunPlus units but with a Burger Time license attached to it but to my surprise it wasn’t. I’ve only played the first two levels of this but of the 3 licensed games I’d say this was the one that actually turned out the best. The visuals are close to the original arcade, but with an added bezel area to avoid blank space (something Space Invaders could have done with) and the gameplay seems smooth and responsive, albeit just as stiff as the original. What lets this one down is the sound which has been recorded / played so loud it distorts badly, and that doesn’t seem to be an emulation issue as videos of the hardware sound just as bad. It’s a playable game.

I don’t think any of the SunPlus games are unique to this compilation, and they’re all ones that have been emulated for a few years in other compilations, so don’t really need covering individually.

Another that is going to need some thought is Radica’s “GirlTech” Digi Makeover. The unit uses a Camera and Touchpad style input and allows you to take your photo then apply various accessories to it. It’s a SunPlus based system.

A 200-in-1 Retro Game unit, still quite commonly found in high street stores and on eBay boots to a title of Supreme 200, but the only thing Supreme about it is the amount of copyright infringement, plenty of hacked versions of first party Nintendo games here, including Donkey Kong Jr, Popeye, and Balloon Fight, as well as some others such as Blob Buster which is a hack of Namco’s Dig Dug II.

Speaking of copyright infringement there’s the 110 Song Super Step Mania, a VT1682 based dance mat. This has been sold by various companies over the years (most recently Orb Gaming, who seem to be king of unlicensed rebadged Chinese bootlegs at the moment) There’s no sign of any license agreements for the music on the packaging, many of which are obvious rips of commercial Songs (YouTube’s copyright algorithm had fun with this one) It doesn’t stop there however, there are a bunch of bonus games, the majority of which use completely unlicensed assets. There are actually newer versions of this in China with even more songs, but those haven’t been dumped.

While many of the game here might look the part, with graphics ripped straight from the arcade games there is little to no gameplay on offer. These are significantly worse than the games found in even the InterAct V1682 based unit previously mentioned. The Puzzle Bobble rip-off (called Mind Bender) here makes the version in the previously featured SunPlus based Caplet look like a masterpiece! The ‘Rally’ game, which just like the games found in other VT1682 based devices steals graphics straight from Thrash Rally has weaker gameplay than comparable units and the one with Metal Slug graphics is nothing but shooting down the same chopper over and over again. The game stealing Mighty Pang graphics looks awful in motion, flickering the sprites to simulate transparency. This is shameless, minimal effort garbage.

The above Dance Mat isn’t the only place some of those bootleg games would appear tho. A unit called the WOW Wireless has 5 sports games as well as another selection of VT1682 asset stealing abominations. Even more amusing is that even on real hardware the Bomberman clone doesn’t work properly here as the raster timing programmed into the game is still that of the NTSC unit which causes the raster split to not work. This one remains NOT WORKING because it uses high colour mode for the main menu and some of the title screens, this feature is not yet emulated.

Maybe the most surprising thing about this collection of games however is that one of them rips assets from the Back to the Future game. I can understand assets being stolen from popular games, but the Back to the Future game was almost universally hated, although this implementation is so bad it almost makes you appreciate the original. Almost. Other rip-offs include another single screen shooter using Metal Slug sprites, and a Columns clone with just about the least fitting music you could imagine. If you want to try these minigames for yourself you’ll have to go to the 6th panel on the incorrectly rendered main menu.

That’s enough for the first part, a lot of ‘In Progress’ and ‘sub-bootleg’ levels of stuff here, but hopefully some of it was interesting at least. Many of these could be covered in more detail, maybe one day that will happen.

NMK’s GunNail is an often overlooked shooter. Released around the 1992/1993 period the visual style always reminded me of a mix of Toaplan’s Dogyuun and NMK’s own Thunder Dragon 2, both of which were released around the same period.

Maybe it gets overlooked because for scoring purposes it’s a little broken. The game substitutes the usual ‘lives’ system for a ‘shields’ system, rewards you more for playing with only a single shield left, but also plays a loud incessant warning siren the entire time that condition is met.

Maybe it gets overlooked because it’s wildly inconsistent. While all the stages are well designed there doesn’t appear to be any reason of rhyme to them; some bosses are even conditional and won’t spawn if you don’t play the stages properly, while the majority will spawn regardless.

Either way, a prototype of the game was recently dumped by CPsystem3 and trap15. Prototypes can often tell us things about the development of a game and help explain things that don’t make a great deal of sense, so what does this one tell us?

Well first off, just like the release version, it contains a “28 May 1992” string in the ROM. This isn’t too significant, in the majority of cases for NMK games all revisions contain the same string, so it clearly isn’t the release date. One of the only exceptions is actually a single Thunder Dragon 2 set which is starting to look out of place to the point where I wonder if the one with the different string has actually just been hacked.

(Left, release version | Right, prototype)

Well first off, the introductory screen is different. The large NMK logo isn’t there, but instead we get this odd screen of a laser being fired against an otherwise empty landscape, followed by a large explosive shockwave. For a game that doesn’t attempt to tell any kind of story this seems out of place, not fitting with anything in the game. It’s no real surprise that it was dropped.

(Left, release version | Right, prototype)

The title logo, when set to Japan does not display the Tecmo license in the prototype set, the tiles are there, but unused. No, the title isn’t changed to Nailgun, although I felt that to be a witty and appropriate title for the article due to nature of the rest of the changes.

Rest of the changes? Well, yes, if those minor details were the only differences here I wouldn’t be covering this prototype, but those certainly are not the only differences. trap15 was kind enough to supply a list of changes he had personally observed, which I have pasted below.

– Different introduction scene
– Many unique enemy types that ended up unused
– Tweaked enemy attack patterns
– Tweaked boss behaviour and attack patterns
– Dramatically different stages (and only 7 of them):
– Stage 1: Became Stage 5, very different layouts
– Stage 2: Became Stage 7, with mostly slight enemy layout changes
– Stage 3: Became Stage 6, almost the same as final
– Stage 4: Stayed as Stage 4, with very minor enemy layout changes
– Stage 5: Entirely unique stage, majorly reworked to become final Stage 2
– Stage 6: Became Stage 3, many enemy layout changes
– Stage 7: Entirely unique stage, majorly reworked to become final Stage 1
– No ending, instead loops forever
– Loop has extremely fast bullets
– The difficulty seems the same on all loops
– Player’s blue shot has a wider maximum and minimum spread
– Player’s main shot hitbox is symmetrical and wider than final
– When the hitbox was shrunk for the final, it was only shrunk in one direction, making it extended to the right

In short, there are a lot of changes, and yes, some of them explain oddities but in practice it means that playing this version of the game feels more like playing a remixed version than playing a prototype, everything is in a different order and rearranged.

I think it’s fair to say that the game was already far into development at the point this prototype was made, possibly only a month or two before release. The graphics ROMs, aside from the 8×8 tilemap were already finalized, the sound program was finalized, as were all the sample ROMs, so all difference in content come from the program ROM and which assets contained within the already finalized graphics ROMs the programmers wanted to make use of.

While trap15 asserts that the prototype only has 7 levels, work on the 8th, final level was already well underway, and you can hack the code to display it. If you do so the enemies are incorrectly coloured and there’s no Final Boss to defeat, but the backgrounds, overall sequence control and certain interactive elements contained within the level are already present. The lack of a final boss does likely explain why this version simply loops back to stage 1 instead of going to stage 8. If you do use hacks to play stage 8 in the prototype the (missing) boss sequence will eventually time-out and you’ll end up on another level which is an invalid mix of enemy patterns from one stage and backgrounds from another but it quickly softlocks. This suggests no ending was programmed at this point either, again likely explaining why the game just loops instead.

The stage order changes are probably the most curious thing here, and the extent of them suggests that the developers of the game weren’t really sure what order they wanted the stage to be in, either that, or the order presented her was specifically chosen for a show / location test to highlight certain things, rather than present a natural flow, although the difficulty balance of the stages does suggest maybe it was originally intended to be closer to what’s on offer here – the changes made to the final stage, which was to later become the first stage are extensive, throwing away a lot of work, yet at the same time the first stage presented here doesn’t flow well from the initial launch sequence.

That stage is probably a good starting place anyway

(Left, release version, base near start | Right, prototype, extra enemies + starfield section)

As soon as the stage starts you can see an immediate difference. The release version scrolls quickly to the ground-base, offering some weak air targets. The prototype version has a much longer star scroll with several tough enemies prior to the ground-base section.

(Left, release version, boss straight after base | Right, prototype, barrage of enemies)

The whole stage has different enemy patterns, but one noticeable thing missing in the final version is this asteroid like field of enemies prior to the boss. The is also one of those conditional bosses where if you don’t meet stage conditions it fails to appear. This almost makes more sense if it were intended to be a later boss as it is in the proto, but it’s also the first demo to appear in the game attract sequence, meaning that in the prototype version you see what is the final boss of the prototype without even having to play the game, again suggesting it probably wasn’t intended as a late boss as that would be anticlimactic for the player.

Looking at level 2 from the final, which is level 5 in the proto shows very similar differences. The prototype start off in space with several small floating islands, and many enemies before you get to the main water-based island. As this is the 5th level that makes sense.

(prototype – early start, small floating islands, lots of enemies)

For the final build of the game the early part of the stage is cut entirely, starting you at the larger floating island with the waterfalls, even giving you a breather before any enemies spawn.

(release version – no smaller floating islands, fewer enemies)

Of all the stages this one is probably the one where it’s easiest to see just how much was changed. In the final version the stage is very short, it opts for a ‘base’ section with the sea on the left, and base on the right, the enemies are generally those seen elsewhere.

(release version – left/right divide of water and base, standard enemies)

The prototype instead divides the stage into several more distinct segments, with sections consisting entirely of sea and entirely of land base, with specific enemies that fit with the backgrounds. Just like with the previous stage, there’s also a barrage of enemies right before the boss, this time some missile type enemies.

(prototype version – stage divided into water / base segments, unique enemies)

As you can see, this is a non-trivial amount of level content that ended up being cut for the final game.

The two timed levels, 3 and 6 are the ones that were simply swapped around, so you still have timed levels in the same place, but as mentioned, there are layout and enemy changes to accommodate their difference placement here. In general the stages are less complex, so there much to show in screenshots tho.

Level 5 in the final, which is level 1 in the prototype does have some of the tougher enemies in the final (recoloured versions of ones that were scrapped from the stage that ended up as stage 1) but it also seems to use fewer platforms in the background in the approach to the boss. I don’t know if this was done to make the boss walking up the screen move obvious, but again it makes the final game seem a little empty compared to the prototype.

(release version – tougher enemies that were removed from other stage)

With the prototype you can see it has easier enemies, but it’s a lot busier, unusual for a first stage. This stage is generally interesting because it has the whole boss march thing, and the stage transition where you drop down before the boss. Typically you see this kind of thing on the later levels of shooters, although trap15 mentions that, based on discussions with the original developer, this was intended to tie in to a story as the first level. My gut feeling would have instead been that maybe it was considered one of the more technically impressive levels they wanted to show off early in the location test.

(prototype version – easier enemies, but more going on)

There are more level changes than I could possibly cover here, and things like rank, and the conditional bosses make it difficult to simply show the levels as a series of screenshots, but rest assured, if you’re familiar with the level layouts from the original these prototype ones will surprise you and in many cases provide a good chunk of additional content which was subsequently cut from the game. It feels very much like there wasn’t enough development time left to flesh out the newly established later levels once things had been moved around, or simply a case of the existing assets not really fitting as they’d all been designed for stages which were now much earlier, and shorter in length – clearly an issue if you finalize your art assets too early.

Moving on from the level layouts, the detail trap15 picks out about the shot hitboxes is interesting too, and while I doubt anybody aside from an experienced player is going to have noticed the change it does suggest that it was a rushed, last minute decision as there’s little excuse for having a wonky hitbox on your bullets. This was likely part of some late difficulty tuning, as a smaller shot hitbox makes it more difficult to hit enemies with your shots.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about the game myself to detail the different boss patterns and attacks, nor am I aware of every enemy type used in each version of the game to cover the specific ones that are used in the prototype but go unused in the final – that’s more the level of detail you’d associate with an article on The Cutting Room Floor (and this would be ideal material for one) but if you’re a fan of GunNail then this prototype is worth checking out.

Even with the additional development background provided by the prototype a lot of things about the game still don’t make much sense, it seems fairly clear that the developers didn’t have a solid vision for things like stage order, or at least never got around to implementing any kind of story to tie it all together, which probably explains why even in the final game the overall flow feels a little like it was thrown in a blender, but none of that stopped that from being an enjoyable game and one that doesn’t deserve to be overlooked in a crowded genre. The prototype enhances things, giving the game more of a fighting chance of standing out, and I feel does manage to provide a more enjoyable experience as a larger amount of the content is used. It appears likely many of the stage designs found here are closer to as originally intended, prior to location test feedback forcing changes.

How interesting a prototype is often depends on how chaotic the development process was. Maybe in this case we were lucky to see the game released at all, it feels like the budget wasn’t quite there for what the developers had envisioned, and that location test feedback meant further changes that disagreed with the original vision had to be made, long after that had been finalzied. I’ve often felt that location testing, beyond simply ensuring that the game didn’t have major bugs ultimately led to poorer quality games as players are often going to be at odds with the development vision, preferring things they’re already familiar with, and not really having an understanding of the internal process and how difficult it can be to make major content changes late in development. We’ve seen similar elsewhere, with prototypes providing a more memorable experience than the final games, LED Storm comes to mind, a game which seemed to get progressively more generic with each iteration, but also things like Trog, and the Android prototypes that appeared a few years ago all follow a path whereby the later versions of the game ended up much more forgettable.

Unrelated to this post, but it seems to go under the radar that NMK, UPL and Jaleco games are an area where we’ve not yet seen any real results from decapping efforts; for protection many of them use MCU types where dumping attempts have failed, or even where the MCUs might not actually be what we believe them to be. Games like Thunder Dragon, Hacha Mecha Fighter and Task Force Harrier actually have some pretty extensive protection on the original PCBs, and while we have simulations partially based on bootlegs and unprotected versions it would be great to one day see those devices properly dumped and emulated. It will be interesting to see if the new year brings any new developments in this field.

Again thanks to CPsystem3 for buying and dumping the PCB of this and trap15 for his preliminary analysis of it.

I just wanted to write a brief thank you to Morten Kirkegaard who passed away earlier today, at 12:45 on Wednesday 27th November 2019 after a drawn out battle with cancer.

While I never knew Morten personally outside of contact on IRC and emails, he was a key part of the team of two man Danish team featuring Peter Wilhelmsen who together overcame some of the toughest challenges emulation faced in the time they worked together.

Even knowing his own chances of survival were low, his interest in both technical challenges, and the retro scene was such that he made the choice to pour his remaining time and money into doing something that would outlast the days he had remaining, and make a long term difference.

That he did, with magnificent results. The DS5002FP protected Gaelco games for example could only be dumped thanks to the work he put in, a path full of setbacks, boards suiciding and even once a working setup was found there was still a high risk each time. To put things into perspective, prior to Morten and Peter taking on the challenge it was one that most people had already written off as simply impossible.

For the games themselves, thanks to Morten’s work we’re fortune enough to have dumps of all the known ones, including the rare Goldart, which I regret not being able to finalize the emulation of while he was still around to see it, still, Morten did understand the challenges involved, and the part of the that task could only be done with him present was complete, so he excitedly continued to work on other things.

His final contributions, included working with Peter on dumping the Air Blaster plug and play, which even in a severely weakened state he opted to take home for a weekend, and work well into the night on finding a dumping solution that worked, debugging the FPGA based dumper and tangle of wires until he had a dump we were satisfied with in what can only be considered an act of complete selflessness, pushing past the pain barrier making light of his rapidly declining and severely debilitating condition.

Between that other contributions included fathoming the Gunpey Arcade decompression scheme, and likewise doing the same for Sega’s Decathlete (and I hope we can finish off that work for the Print Club games using the same type of chip) as well as work on more obscure titles such as Hoei’s Future Flash, the Gamate handheld and many other important pieces of work.

As a person, he always came across as incredibly skilled, and self-motivated, but still humble and happy just to see things progress; a rare mix that made him a joy to work with. If at any point I wasn’t convinced by the results of something being presented to me I only had to say and he would take another look.

In the end he didn’t win his own battle, but certainly achieved his goal of keeping other things alive for as long as people still have an interest in them.

I know Peter was a lot closer to Morten, and considered him a good friend, and so has been hit hard by this, regardless of how expected it was, but even as a distant colleague in another country I can honestly say his presence will be missed both on a personal and technical level.

Thank you for everything.

The Huntin’ series are, as the titles suggest, Hunting games. Specifically they’re deer hunting plug and play titles released by Radica.

Huntin’ 1 and 2 run on XaviX hardware, whereas Huntin’ 3 appears to be a cost reduced version of Huntin ‘2 running on Elan EU3A14 hardware.

Both Huntin’2 and Huntin’3 were giving me some issues with emulation. Huntin’2 would crash if you opened up the pause menu or Trophy Room screens while Huntin’3 was missing many video emulation features.

I’ve spent the past week improving both of them. For Huntin’3 I added Ram based tiles, proper palette selections, proper priorities, proper bitplane depth selection and a rowscroll mode. There is still some kind of Windowing effect missing (used on the Trophy Room screen for highlighting and the timer in the Target Range mode)

Debugging Huntin’2 was trickier, as the CPU emulation would just crash when entering the screens and the underlying code on the XaviX titles is far from simple (it’s a complex task based engine with many pointers etc.) I figured out in the end that it appeared to be crashing as a result of stack corruption, with the stack descending too far in some cases and overwriting pointers that had been placed to other tasks. I had a hunch that maybe the extra bytes used by the extended Far Call and Far Return opcodes on the XaviX processor might be to blame, so I tried placing those in an extra, private, stack, and the crashing stopped. I don’t know for sure if that’s the correct solution, but it does solve my issue and seems feasible as it would maintain 6502 compatibility better that way.

I haven’t yet mapped the guns in any of the games, but it’s getting to the stage where that should be more realistic. Sound emulation on Huntin’3 is very poor due to incorrect ADPCM decoding.

Huntin’2 is on the left, Huntin’3 is on the right. I’ve tried to pick similar shots for each game so you can easily see how Huntin’3 is just a reskinned uglier version of Huntin’2 (and both are inferior games to the original Huntin’)