Does anyone know if this is an NES-on-a-chip or something different,
Got your PM, but I saw this thread upon logging in and figured I may as well just respond here. It isn't a NOAC. Anonymously provided information from someone in the know, posted in a different forum well over a decade ago, reported that the early Jakks Pacific TV Games systems (including this first Namco unit) were built on Winbond microcontrollers. Jakks only did a few models on that architecture before switching to Sunplus, and then Generalplus microcontrollers. I have a lot of data on these later systems, but that's as concrete as it gets for the Winbond-based models. I suspect that the original source of the info is someone I've spoken to before, but this person is reluctant to discuss specifics nowadays, so the best detail I can offer is that I believe the Winbond chip in question is a member of the W55
x family, like the W55V91, a 65C816-compatible chip targeted for "TV-toy applications," as its datasheet says.
Incidentally, if I remember right, the only Jakks Namco systems that had 8-way joysticks were the 2004 model headlined by
Ms. Pac-Man (light blue case, yellow ball-top joystick) and its wireless (infrared) variant, which looks quite different and adds
Bosconian and
New Rally-X to the game selection. This
Bosconian is not the same port as the one in Jakks' first Namco unit, due to the underlying hardware switch; the games from the original model were reprogrammed for Sunplus architecture in the later models in Jakks' Namco series, and thus this
Bosconian gets a boost not only from the 8-way controller in the wireless
Ms. Pac-Man unit, but also from its inclusion of voice alerts like in the original arcade game.
I had no idea that the Radica Taito system (which I don't think is rare, or at least it wasn't) had been added to MAME compatibility. Judging from YouTube search results, it looks like that was fairly recent, about a year ago, and the system was, as I'd thought, based on a NOAC.
User onmode-ky on here. Shoot him, he's friendly.
Fixed; I know what you really mean. ;)
onmode-ky