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onmode-ky

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Posts posted by onmode-ky


  1. Over the years, when investigating recent plug-n-play systems, I have occasionally come across something on the Internet that sounds like a system not recorded in my files--but then when I go to add the system, I realize that it's actually already in the list, albeit with a different name from what I just saw. This has happened enough times that I finally decided to make a reference list for alternate names by which certain systems are known. For many of these entries, the alternate name just adds a subtitle which may or may not be written on the packaging. Now, this info is likely of interest to very, very few people, but I figured I ought to make it available just so future confusion can be avoided, even if only by me. So, here is the list (left side is how the system is recorded in my files; right side has the alternate name(s)):

     

    - jakks pacific alternate names
    blue's clues			blue's clues coloring with blue
    winnie the pooh			disney piglet's special day
    scooby-doo			scooby-doo and the mystery of the castle
    power rangers			power rangers spd escape of the five fugitives
    avatar				avatar the last airbender book one challenges
    thomas the tank engine		thomas & friends right on time
    sesame street			sesame street beat featuring elmo
    go diego go			go diego go rainforest animal rescue
    namco pac-man arcade gold	arcade gold featuring pac-man
    pirates of the caribbean	pirates of the caribbean islands of fortune
    cheetah girls			cheetah girls passport to fame
    dora smart cookie		dora the explorer dora saves the mermaids
    go diego go smart cookie	go diego go aztec abc adventure
    thomas smart cookie		thomas the tank engine learning circus express
    hannah montana			hannah montana one in a million
    hannah montana deluxe		hannah montana best of both worlds
    disney princess sleeping beauty	disney princess sleeping beauty tales of enchantment
    spider-man sharp cookie		spider-man great math caper
    high school musical		high school musical all together now
    scooby-doo sharp cookie		scooby-doo smart cookie (misnomer), scooby-doo the pirate's puzzles
    g2 hannah montana guitar	hannah montana pop tour
    namco pac-man retro arcade	retro arcade featuring pac-man
    disney princess cinderella	disney princess cinderella once upon a midnight
    taito space invaders		retro arcade featuring space invaders
    
    I will be replicating this info at my plug-n-play data website, and like much of the plug-n-play data I post at AtariAge, any subsequent updates will be made there only (since I'm not inclined to go requesting indefinite edit privileges on a bunch of AA forum posts). Speaking of updates, if anyone has further name equivalences they think should be added to this list, please let me know.

     

    Incidentally, a few weeks ago, I added a new pnpgames.*.txt file to the first post in this topic. Its only differences from the immediately prior file are a few AtGames systems (including the addition of their upcoming ColecoVision system) and the data I scrounged together recently about SMS/GG systems from around 2006/2007. I'm already working on the next pnpgames.*.txt file, what with the research I did on alternate names having also resulted in a few updates and new-old finds.

     

    onmode-ky


  2. Atarian63.... your post made me think about RARE and how they were perhaps the best 3rd party for Nintendo ever. I found this article http://www.p4rgaming.com/microsoft-the-only-reason-we-bought-rare-was-to-run-them-into-the-ground/ and it reminded me of things that are just disgusting regarding corporate purchases as a large number are only to destroy the smaller competitor.

    Lest anyone actually believe that article you cited was true, it would be prudent to note that that website is a satirical site, not an actual news site. Judging from the comments in various articles there, a lot of their readers don't realize that they're basically channeling The Onion, but focused on video games.

     

    Maybe Microsoft really did feel that way about Rare, maybe not; either way, no one actually flat-out said anything like that in an interview. I understand your sentiment about companies buying other companies for less-than-honorable purposes, but for the sake of clarity, let's just keep in mind that the article linked above was only for entertainment.

     

    Back on topic, Nintendo could certainly buy and/or utilize mobile developers, but that's unlikely to boost hardware sales significantly. Look at Sony and the PSV; over the past year, Sony has successfully wooed a large number of indie developers to port their games or even build new ones for the PSV, but hardware sales have seen no noticeable impact from that. Download-only titles don't seem to draw new buyers. If you meant that Nintendo ought to get mobile developers to make full-retail titles for them, I'm not sure that's a good idea, since mobile devs don't have experience in that arena. Heh, imagine a game where the disc is free, but all the content on it is behind IAPs. "Unlock main menu: $0.99"

     

    onmode-ky


  3. They definitely came together. They still have the staple holding them together. I may have just assumed that they were meant to be one shot. I don't recall what was specifically said but I do know they were not described as coming from multiple shots. I know I bought them online and I'm fairly certain I bought them prior to eBay. I likely got them from an ad on the old r.v.g.c. newsgroups.

    r.v.g.c.? Hmm. Is that rec.videogames.general.collecting or something?

     

    One last question about your cels: do you remember if they came alone? Or did they come with other stuff? You didn't mention anything else, so I'd guess not, but at least in my experience, animation cel purchases often come with pencil drawings. They're often not for the cel they've been bundled with, maybe not even from the same show/movie/whatever--and sometimes they're as mundane as a drawing just of a character's mouth--but they're pretty cool to find, too. In a way, they're "more original" than a cel; whereas most of the work on a cel is just painting predetermined areas, the original pencil-on-paper drawing that was photocopied onto the transparent sheet contains not only the original handiwork of the line art in the cel, but also the coloring directions that resulted in the fully painted cel. So if you got any pencil drawings, those would be great to share, too. But again, if you just got a mouth or some random debris, maybe not. :)

     

    By the way, now that you know your layers are from different parts of the commercial, do you plan to frame them separately? Here's my suggestion: frame each layer with a printed-out mini screen cap of the frame in the commercial from which it comes (there's plenty of empty space in each layer where that could go). I, uh, suppose this would leave the piece of cereal unframed, unless you can find a clear enough rendition of the commercial for identifying where it is. Mind you, I've never done this myself, but I've thought about it. Also, if your cels have become stuck to each other, it might be better to leave them stacked together.

     

    That's a gorgeous film cell. Fantastic find.

    Nitpick alert: these are not film cells. Animation cels are, for one thing, much bigger than film cells, and rather than being the result of photography, they come prior to any photography (animation cels are hand-painted, then assembled with a background, and then photographed, in traditional non-digital animation methods).

     

    But, I agree, his cels do look quite good. There doesn't seem to be any fading (the photocopied black lines can deteriorate over time, particularly with exposure to sunlight).

     

    onmode-ky

    • Like 1

  4. Wow! Thanks for all of that! Here are the markings on each cel...

     

    Piece of cereal ... A. 13 (1 < 6)

    Donkey Kong ... SC 13 (A6)

    Mario ... A6 (22)

    Girders...SCIA (106)

     

    Thanks again! It's very cool to see the actual commercial that these were used in!

    You're welcome . . . but wow, I . . . don't have a clue what's up with those markings. Why are there so many and seemingly in different formats? I'm afraid I'll be no help interpreting those. I only know how to read layer/sequence numbers (A3, D28, B35/END, etc.) in the corner, most often upper right. Of those cels, only the Donkey Kong one seems like it could really be layer A and sixth in its shot's sequence. And the piece of cereal being layer A seems unlikely.

     

    It definitely is cool seeing the actual footage in which a cel you own was used. In particular, you get to see how much more is visible in your cel, before the camera came in and cropped the image (and that's even before SDTV sets' inherent overscan). Note that a lot of your girders cel's image is actually not visible in the commercial itself. Granted, it's much more exciting when it isn't girders. :) Sometimes it's kind of sad what amount of detail in a cel was left out of the on-screen image.

     

    Do you remember where/when/how you got those cels, by the way? I assume they all came together; I wonder if the previous owner thought they were all from the same shot, or knew they weren't but neglected to tell you.

     

    onmode-ky

    • Like 1

  5. Turns out that there were several Donkey Kong cereal commercials. Here's one that has some animation at the very beginning that looks just like my cel (although I don't see my particular cel in this commercial).

    Actually, that commercial is indeed the source of what you have--except that the layers that you have do not all come from the same shot. Here's a somewhat clearer rendition of the commercial (FYI, I enclosed the clip's URL within BBcode "media" tags to get it to embed):

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj5Lncx4IBU

     

    My first clue, prior to seeing the commercial itself, was that Mario's shadow in your picture doesn't align with the girder on top of which it lies. Sure, it could have been just an animation error, but it seemed a bit too obvious a mistake for a professional commercial, so I went looking for the footage.

     

    Here are your layers and where they appear in the commercial (using timings from the clip directly above):

     

    - ladder and girders: 7-second mark

    - Mario: 18-second mark

    - Donkey Kong and Pauline: 27-second mark

    - piece of cereal: can't tell, and don't really care :)

     

    If you freeze-frame just right, you can see the exact moment where your individual layers are used.

     

    Can you post the sequence data for each layer, the stuff written at the top and bottom? It does look like you have two A-layer (bottommost) cels.

     

    I have a small (anime) cel collection myself, along with some original source pencil drawings. Most of my cels are single layers, but I do have a multi-layer shot from the opening titles of El-Hazard: The Magnificent World, which is my single most expensive cel purchase. I've gotten a couple of my cels signed as well (not by that given cel's particular artist, no, but by notable staff members for the given show).

     

    onmode-ky

    • Like 1

  6. I have no modding experience, and I thought at first you just meant using a real Golden Tee ball--as in replacing only the ball, not the whole trackball assembly--but yes, I think it could be done. At least, as long as the real GT ball assembly's current and voltage requirements can be met by the Jakks product. That's a consumer product that runs on 6V (4 AA batteries), right? An arcade trackball runs on whatever comes out of the AC/DC converter in that cabinet. I've never installed an arcade trackball in anything, so I don't know what the numbers are, but if it all fits and you can figure out how to match up the pinouts (another potential hard part), I'd guess it's doable.

     

    onmode-ky


  7. I have one UMD Video disc, the first two episodes of Trigun, and I bought it from RightStuf a few years ago specifically just to have a UMD Video disc. The PlayStation Store was already offering video content by then, so it wasn't that I wanted to check out video on my PSP, but rather the curiosity that was UMD Video. That was how I discovered that their video resolution was a full-SD 480 lines, even though the PSP itself only had a 272-line display; this was before the PSP had AV-out cables, too, and there were obviously no UMD-format devices ever released besides the PSP. At any rate, if you have AV-out cables for your PSP, UMD Video is the same visual quality on your TV as a DVD without upscaling.

     

    UMD Video overall was a failure, but in the realm of anime releases, it looks like Samurai Champloo may have been an unusually good seller. For most anime TV series released on UMD, there was only ever a single volume put out. Samurai Champloo had a volume released every 2 months, ending at Vol. 4. Of course, the way Geneon did their UMDs, this only meant 8 episodes total, in comparison to the 4-5 episodes per UMD that Bandai did in their brief venture into the format (in which they never released more than one volume of any series).

     

    A nice touch, I thought, with my Trigun volume--and I don't know how common this was in UMD Video releases, though it was fairly uncommon in UMD games--it takes advantage of the clear UMD case by having an illustration on the reverse side of the cover insert.

     

    Incidentally, Metal Jesus, the scrolling screen of Japanese UMDs that you have at the end, when talking about anime releases, almost all of what you're showing are actually visual novel games, not UMD Video. You can tell because they have a CERO (Japan's equivalent of ESRB or PEGI) ratings symbol in the corner of the cover. Also, it's worth noting when discussing other-region UMD Video that, unlike UMD games, there's region coding there, using the same regions as DVD. A certain region (guess which) allowed pornographic UMD Video content, but it won't play on a North American PSP.

     

    onmode-ky


  8. I knew I could do better on Pac-Man, so I gave it another go:

     

    54,890

     

    Incidentally, kane's Pac-Man score is 50,260, not 54,260.

     

    For most of these games, I was using my Logitech Rumblepad 2, but I almost immediately switched to the cursor keys for Pac-Man. After setting my initial Pac-Man high, I went back to Berzerk and played using the cursor keys, leading to the updated score for it. Outside of a good joystick, I think cursor keys work best for games that require a lot of quick, precise turning. I don't think they could help my Donkey Kong, though; hours of trying, and that's all I got! My crapola ability at Super Mario Bros. is backward compatible with DK!

     

    onmode-ky

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    • Like 1

  9. Berzerk - 5900 6790 (updated)

    Defender - 21,025

    Donkey Kong - 23,000

    Pac-Man - 42,160

     

    This is my first time ever playing Berzerk. Entering a new room sure is nerve-wracking. Defender, well, after the first stage, it's nerve-wracking the whole time.

     

    I haven't played Donkey Kong since the 80s, at which time I probably played it less than 5 times total. Today was definitely my first time making it past the second stage (the run which set the high score above was the only time I ever reached the fourth stage, my first time seeing the elevators), and maybe even the first time making it past the first stage. I'd known from the Internet that the gameplay changed after the first stage, but the only part of DK that I ever remembered was the first stage. I don't have a clue how you people can get such high scores! Half the time, I don't even pass the first stage!

     

    Incidentally, I was surprised that no ROM names were specified for anything here, but I'm using berzerk, defender, dkong, and pacman (with puckman parent).

     

    onmode-ky

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    post-8302-0-75709300-1389424472_thumb.jpg

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  10. I'm surprised that no actual owners of a Flashback 4 ever answered your question. I don't have one, but I've been assuming that the Adventure II on the FB4 is the same as the one on the FB3, FB2+, and FB2 (and now also on the ill-named FB64). That is, it's a game created by Curt Vendel, lead engineer on the FB systems done by his firm, Legacy Engineering (FB1, FB2, FB2+), and I believe it was partly inspired by the Adventure II homebrew for the 5200, which was in development at the time (and would not be finished for a few more years). I have a FB2, and I was able to finish Adventure II way back when without drawing a map; it isn't really all that big a game world, though it is bigger than the original Adventure's. You should be able to play through the game just drawing yourself a mental map as you run around.

     

    That said, if you are interested in a map of FB Adventure II just for mappiness' sake, I'm not aware of one. :)

     

    onmode-ky


  11. If anyone's curious how the various SMS/GG plug-n-play and handheld systems over the last few years compare, I've updated the Retro Plug-n-Play Video Game System Contents page at my website with the game sets for all the models I know of (searching the page text for "sms" will get you all the systems minus the two by Techno Source). There have essentially been 6 models, plus 2 repeats under different brands, all of which were licensed from AtGames or directly sold by them.

     

    - Two of the earliest models were released by Techno Source (who had previously worked with the Blue Sky Rangers on Intellivision plug-n-play systems): one with Sonic Blast alone and another with Sonic Chaos and Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball. Incidentally, these two were remarkably ugly.

     

    - Two handheld models with identical 20-game sets were released in or around 2006, one under the Coleco brand name and one under the PlayPal brand name.

     

    - Two plug-n-play systems shaped like Sonic's head, one with a joystick (the top of which was shaped like Sonic's fist) and one with a joypad, were released at around that time as well, and these two have the same 20-game sets as each other, but they're different from the handhelds' sets. The joystick model came under the PlayPal brand, while the joypad model was under the FunPlay brand. For a long time, I thought PlayPal was a company that disappeared after releasing the handheld and joystick plug-n-play, but it was actually just a brand; the company behind it was Kobian Canada. FunPlay was a brand of Freetron, which I believe was also manufacturer for the PlayPal-branded model. Edit: the joystick model was also released under the Power Shock brand, by Monolith Industries (it looks like these were sold in Mexico); that's the one Curt Vendel mentioned back in 2007. I haven't been able to tell if the handheld model in Curt's picture (in the post right above that one) was also released, though if it came with Sonic Blast, that would mean it had the plug-n-play game set, not the Coleco/PlayPal handheld game set.

     

    - A few years ago, AtGames released a 30-game plug-n-play system and called it "Poga." I'm not sure what part AtGames played in the original Noza SMS-on-a-chip project, I mean beyond the game licensing, but by this time, it seems they owned the chip itself as well.

     

    - The AtGames handheld which started this topic is the latest SMS/GG handheld.

     

    I haven't included the 3 SMS/GG Arcade Nano keychain systems which AtGames' website lists, because I still have found no indication they ever reached market. The only blip on the search radar is this eBay Buy It Now listing for the model that contains only Sonic Blast. With this being the only one I've found, I think it's probably a marketing sample. If anyone actually buys that, by the way, $40 + shipping for just Sonic Blast on a keychain, please tell us about it when you get it.

     

    onmode-ky

    • Like 3

  12. I don't think they Hyperscan could have possibly succeeded with most kids having a real console. But it's awesome that it exists, it's an interesting part of history. The hardware isn't terrible, It's definitely better than most of the plug and plays out there.

    Back then, the 32-bit SPG290 was the next generation of Sunplus' gaming microcontrollers, yes. Its descendants are part of the current generation of those chips, like the SPG293 that's in some of Jakks Pacific's post-2008 TV Games systems. The Generalplus GPL16250, which is what underlies most of Jakks' more recent plug-n-play output, has pretty much the same capabilities, as I understand it, even though it's a 16-bit chip; it's sort of like the previous generation but loaded with extra features. For example, it can do basic polygon graphics. Here is some example footage I found of a polygon-graphics GPL16250 game.

     

    Wow, that's pretty interesting. Did they mention any of the unreleased games?

    One of the developers I talked to is recorded in history as never having had any involvement with the Hyperscan--because the game they were working on didn't get released. :) Unfortunately, because of NDAs, the fact that they worked on something was all that they could tell me about it.

     

    If you poke around the Web, there are pictures of boxes for two Hyperscan games which never released, an Avatar: The Last Airbender title and a Nickelodeon Extreme Sports title. Both boxes have an ESRB rating mark printed on the cover, but as the ESRB ratings database itself only contains the 5 games which actually released for the Hyperscan, those marks are not a true indication of those games being finished.

     

    onmode-ky


  13. The Game.Com may very well have been capable of providing some games that ran nice and smooth. I'm not 100% sure, but weren't the games contracted out to some no-name Asian company?

    Maybe you're thinking of a different system? Brandon Cobb of Super Fighter Team interviewed a few people (Americans, I believe) involved with developing Game.com games here. And, I've talked to a couple of people either at or contracted by Handheld Games (now defunct), who developed at least two Game.com titles.

     

    onmode-ky


  14.  

    You keep talking about the sense of depth added by the curvature, but I don't see what you mean. The screen is convex; the only depth it adds is some warping at the corners. There is no depth added to the image itself, but rather the image "paper" is being curled up, away from the viewer. Are you talking about something else?

    A convex surface has depth, by definition; a flat surface doesn't. If you don't get a sense of depth from something that physically has depth, then I don't know what to tell you.

    So the sense of depth you were talking about really was the corners of the image curving away from the viewer. Hmm, I'd assumed you meant something like tunnels looking deeper on a CRT, as in enhancement of an image's depicted depth, but you're talking about the warping effect applied to all displayed imagery. Well, if you prefer the look of scanlines, I guess this is part of the same package. I prefer the flat image, personally, though LCDs mean I do miss the intense Asteroids torpedoes of a solid vector display.

     

    onmode-ky


  15. mk so I looked up the 6578 and what little I found on it, it seems to be a generic 6502 core micro, with ram and rom, intergrated video (undescribed) and a generic gate array (aka small fpga) mostly used in picture frames and small embedded touchscreen solutions for kiosks, not exactly what I would call a from the ground up recreation of the NES hardware.

    The text above that I boldfaced was gnawing at me. The specs of the NOAC 6578 chip have a TV-out encoder, but the chip has no LCD driver; it shouldn't be able to be used in picture frames and touchscreens. I went and searched "6578" and "lcd" on Google, and the reason became obvious: there is a chip called "PT6578" that is an LCD driver (just an LCD driver, not a NOAC of any kind). That must have been what you were seeing. The NT6578 and SH6578 are NOACs, but PT6578 is not. Unfortunately, it seems to have been the first "6578"-named chip you found.

     

    so fine someone actually spent the time to design a already designed generic part from the ground up just to mimic a shitty pirate NES (unlike the more likely option that this specific make and brand has just been mask programmed)

     

    grats you win

    I didn't mean for you to feel offended by my attempts to convince you that NOACs are ASICs. It was just that I couldn't understand why you were so dead set on the stance that they had to be FPGAs, so I threw as much evidence to the contrary at you as I could.

     

    As for why someone spent the time to design a NOAC, the business reason is simple: if you invest in designing and setting up to produce a cheap TV gaming chip, you can sell tons of cheap game systems chock full of already-finished games which you don't have to pay for because you steal all the software. The high initial investment pays off when you flood the market, and no other games system can compare to your products because yours have hundreds of proven games, none of which cost you any royalty payments. Beyond that, you can even make money selling your chips to companies that, for some reason, want to develop hardware with their own games instead of stealing someone else's. If your intention is to manufacture lots of cheap junk for years on end, you spend the money up front to make actual production cost as little as possible in the long run, right?

     

    I should also point out that NOACs are not the only ASICs made for playing games on TVs. They're just the most notoriously used ones. Winbond has a series of 65816-compatible TV gaming chips, and Sunplus and Generalplus scored a hit with their SPGxxx and GPL162xx TV gaming chips running the u'nSP instruction set. Many millions of those have been used in the last decade in Jakks Pacific's TV Games line of plug-n-play game systems, as well as systems by other toymakers--the China market for these has been very big, from what I hear. These are ASICs that are really designed from the ground up, not based on some existing games architecture, and they're made to service a legal (i.e., having IP overhead costs) market. In contrast, compressing the NES, an existing design, so that you can sell unlicensed product, that sounds pretty cheap.

     

    Those pre-programmed multi-games (that look like n64 controllers) are running an emulator. It's probably some small custom linux OS with a simple frontend (list of all 64000 games) to load the roms and play them in whatever pirated emulator they use. They don't use carts though.

    Er, if you're talking about the plug-n-play units that look like N64 controllers and boast 9999 or so pirated NES games in 1, those are indeed NOAC-based, not emulator-based. I think they run a front end which is itself an NES program (I mean it runs directly on the NOAC, not that it was originally a cart released in the 80s), and once you choose a game, the system reinitializes to a different location in the ROM and plays that game. Some of these N64 wannabes do take carts, too; I believe the cart's presence just triggers the NOAC to load from it instead of from the onboard ROM.

     

    No, I didn't miss anything you said. I pointed out that the "3" in SMB3 wasn't perfect in itself. Look at it closely. The top of the "3" is flat and some of the pixels jut out slightly further than the others on the curves. The video smoothing just "copies" that with smooth lines. The smooth lines are only "wobbly" because the original "3" isn't perfectly rounded itself, even if it's "intent" may be.

    You didn't miss anything he said, but it sounds like you're misunderstanding what he likes and what he does not like. Assuming I'm understanding him properly, MaximRecoil appreciates the square look of pixel art and the absolute smoothness of hand-carved vector art; that wobbly smoothness that is in between the two, he does not like that. Telling him that the smoothing mixes the two together does not make him like it. It's the two extremes that he likes, so if you smooth out one extreme so that it ends up in the middle, it becomes unattractive to him. An analogous situation might be a person who likes the sound of both very primitive speech synthesis and actual human speech, but the sort-of realistic sound of Siri bothers him. Repeatedly telling this guy that Siri takes the simple tones of primitive synthesis and smooths them out won't change his mind.

     

    My apologies if I've actually misinterpreted you both.

     

    While the curvature of the screen isn't something you consciously notice in real life (unless side-by-side with a flat screen, in which case the flat screen looks concave until you get used to it), it is a subtle effect that adds a bit of a sense of depth.

    You keep talking about the sense of depth added by the curvature, but I don't see what you mean. The screen is convex; the only depth it adds is some warping at the corners. There is no depth added to the image itself, but rather the image "paper" is being curled up, away from the viewer. Are you talking about something else?

     

    onmode-ky


  16. Wow, a clone handheld system that actually has, *gasp* handheld games on it?

    i have one that has most of the same games on it,but looks completely different and say coleco on the front.

    wccw mark's Coleco-branded handheld was the first licensed SMS/GG system (the PlayPal-branded ones may have been concurrent, or slightly earlier or later), so it was a handheld reproducing handheld games as far back as 2006. :)

     

    Here are the games that come with it:

    [snip]

    It looks like the library is mostly the same as the 30-in-1 "Poga" (Poga = POrtable GAmer, maybe?) that AtGames has sold for probably a few years. I discussed the Poga with gamecat80 in this post in a Dedicated Systems topic (he has one), and the PCB's revision date was mid-2009. In that post, he listed the system's game library, and there are only two titles switched between this Arcade Gamer Portable and the Poga:

     

    - Arcade Gamer Portable exclusives: Golden Axe and Ecco: The Tides of Time

     

    - Poga exclusives: Sonic Blast and Fantasy Zone: The Maze (a different game from Fantasy Zone and Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa)

     

    Falconhood, in the system menu, are the games listed in the order shown on the back of the box, or is it alphabetical order? Or something else?

     

    I do wonder about the quality of the emulation, though... is the sound kind of wonky like it is on the Genesis handheld?

    The SMS/GG plug-n-play and handheld systems since that Coleco one mentioned earlier until now have not run on emulation, but rather on a SMS/GG-on-a-chip implementation, which AtGames calls "Noza" (it's named after the enemies from the SMS game Zillion). Whereas AtGames' Genesis-on-a-chip implementations (RK and RK2, where the letters stand for "RedKid") are notorious for their screwy sound, I've never heard any complaints--of any kind, not just sound--about the fidelity of Noza-based products. Then again, maybe it's just that no super-hardcore SMS/GG fans have played one and reported on its problems before. That I've seen, anyway.

     

    I can't see the value in a unit that should have an SD card slot. I bought the keychain mini SMS game machines instead.

    Whoa, whoa, whoa--you actually HAVE one or more of AtGames' Arcade Nanos that run SMS/GG games? Through all my searching on the Internet, I never found proof that those were actually released; the only ones that I could be sure were more than just AtGames prototypes or marketing samples were three Genesis keychain models. No online stores offered any SMS/GG ones for sale, and no one wrote or filmed reviews for them. If you do in fact have some of the SMS/GG ones:

     

    - which ones?

    - what games are on them?

    - when and where did you get them?

     

    Does anyone else have any SMS/GG Arcade Nano models?

     

    onmode-ky

    • Like 1

  17. Mine is also from 2013, so maybe they fixed the problems?

    Well, that's not outside the realm of someday possibility, but it's overly optimistic when we're talking about a company that hasn't fixed their sound problems in, what, 7-8 years of making Genesis plug-n-play systems? If AtGames ever fixes the problems, great, but I think their history should prematurely kill any thought that a minor difference in game lineup might indicate substantial changes under the hood. In other words, believe it when you hear it. :)

     

    Interesting. Virtua Fighter is new. It looks like the rest of the lineup is the same, taking out Wiley Wars and the two versions of Street Fighter for Virtua Fighter. Unless there's a game on the menu not listed on the box.

    The game lineup is different from the Capcom-equipped handheld's 37 Sega + 3 Capcom + 40 generic in that it's now the same 40 Sega + 40 generic lineup as was on their 80-in-1 plug-n-play unit from last year. The two Street Fighter games and Wiley Wars have been swapped out for Ristar, Sonic 3D Blast, and Virtua Fighter 2.

     

    I always thought it odd that they opted to give the portable system the pair of Street Fighter games, instead of giving them to the plug-n-play; the plug-n-play is the one where you can have 2 human players face off, not the portable.

     

    onmode-ky

    • Like 1
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