I thought this $4 8-bit game console was going to be total junk
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- While looking around AliExpress I found this little 8-bit handheld game console for a mere $4 shipped, so I ordered it just to see how something like this could be made so cheaply.
To buy one of these, for $4 (as of Jan 2024) pick the 1 for $1.99 banner and look through those items, and you'll see one for $3.99.
-- Video Links
The actual unit I have came from this listing:
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Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd...
Support the channel on Patreon:
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-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.co...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
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EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.co...
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/i...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfrei...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/i...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
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Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/mis...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorec...
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino
"Recommended Age: 6-12y, 14+y" Poor 13 year-olds missing out on the fun.
Hahaha 😂
if y = -1, then 13 year-olds can have fun as well.
@@proCaylak In that case only people aged 18 and 13 could enjoy it 😂😂. Imagine trying it during 1 year and having to wait 5 to finally not be allowed to play ever again 😅
Man, I love nerds.
nothing makes them happy anyway
I can't believe you don't remember when Chip N Dale got guns and hand grenades
Didn't They have a christmas war/battle with Donald* once?
*The Duck
@@dallesamllhals9161 nice of you to specify which Donald 😂
BL-5C is a very good battery form factor. I wish there were standalone battery holders for it, so it could be easily incorporated into custom projects.
There are holders available four purchase, although there isn't much of a point to it, as you'd have to integrate it properly with the overall case, and at that point, the case itself becomes the holder. The battery spring contacts can be found on the usual sites.
@@graealex well you can just buy a gameboy looking case and holder with charge circuitry built in for like 4 bucks
Have we all forgotten that they used to puff up and their capacity was drastically reduced after just one year? I would imagine the worst current chinese crappy copies may still be better than the originals.
@@dr_jaymz My original BL-5C is fine but I didn't use it much. I believe my brother's ones ended up only lasting a few days (as opposed to two weeks) but he used his phone for around 10 years.
I still have a Nokia that I believe uses just that battery model - although there were many batteries that were exactly or nearly same size, but then had some minor differences, like connectors on right instead of left side, etc.
But I think it just might be cheaper to buy this device than a new battery ;D
You mean I am not the only one who buys junk I just can't pass up while ordering chips from AliExpress?
Just checked. UK price is £0.40 plus £1.60 shipping. What?! Less than $4! Same price for an identical looking model with the second controller, too...
Raid on Bungeling Bay is interesting because while developing the game maps, Will Wright realized he enjoyed making maps more than the game itself. Thus, he created Sim City.
I loved playing this on the C64, had no idea how to play, but pieced enough together for it to be fun. Wasn't until about 5 years ago, I read the instructions online and enjoyed playing it in an emulator!
Loved it on my C64.
The NES version of Bungeling Bay is also interesting in how they implemented the scrolling. Most NES games which supported simultaneous horizontal and vertical scrolling did so using MMC3 tricks, but Bungeling Bay doesn't use a mapper. Instead, it does smooth scrolling horizontally but uses jumpy stepwise scrolling in the vertical axis, which is also surprisingly difficult to pull off on the NES.
You can really appreciate the aesthetic similarities with it and the early versions of Sim City
'Raid on Bungeling Bay' ROBB and Space Taxi are the two games that I still pull up once in a long while on a C-64 emulator. Both were great in their own respects, and it's difficult to find a similar experience on anything else.
Old clone NES CPUs had notoriously screwy audio, usually swapped pulse channel duty cycles.
That naturally persisted to the system-on-a-chip designs like this.
Perhaps that's why Hummer Team sound engine sounds so bad? It was tested only on clone consoles that had that audio issue, so if the hardware is working correctly it suddenly becomes annoying chirpfest?
Yep I was going to chime in and say that. It's a duty cycle issue which has *never* been fixed on the NES on a Chip clones. It continues to this day for some oddball reason.
@@_MasterLink_ Probably there's a lot of NOACs in some warehouse leftover from when famiclones were popular and they sell it for cheap. Modernized handhelds that don't use NOACs, but are emulation handhelds instead don't have this problem.
@@UltimatePerfection I understand emulation based (and FPGA based) don't have this issue. I wasn't referring to those nor was Skawo.
I do question though how this NOAC is capable of driving an LCD directly seemingly with digital RGB as Adrian expressed it's not composite and I trust his assessment of that, which those original NOAC's you speak of, did *not* have support for. It doesn't add up.
I don't feel these are new old stock, they were re-worked to have new circuitry that the original NOAC's simply did not have. I think these newer NOAC's and older ones should be sent to Ken Shirriff to reverse engineer. It would be interesting to see what's going on.
As Adrian also expressed the LCD controller has tearing, I'd appreciate it if Adrian chimed if the tearing was diagonal perhaps? I ask this because a LOT of cheap devices use 90 degrees rotated displays, and when produced even further on the cheap, the tearing happens to be 45 degrees due to the rotation happening as it's drawing lines, creating diagonal tears. I have a feeling the tearing he saw might be diagonal, and if it is, I might actually know what NOAC this is.
@@_MasterLink_ NOACs had RGB support since forever though. That's how we got famiclones with the SCART output. In most cases though you'd need to solder RGB out to specific pins or traces on the famiclone's PCB. Looks like they use these traces to drive the LCD.
So I'm sure you found out when doing some research but Mario 14 is a romhack of a game called Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3, a Japan only sequel to Kid Niki Radical Ninja. The Qbake game is a game called Obake no Q-Tarou Wan Wan Panic, which was released in the US as Chubby Cherub. Kage was Shadow of the Ninja, and the first Tetris bootleg you ran was actually the Tengen version of Tetris. I saw Kage Legend in the list too, which is The Legend of Kage, a Taito arcade game port.
If Adrian did an _authentic_ AliExpress review it would be something like:
"Received in 10 days. Missing cables. Did not test.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐"
... followed by a single picture of the thing in it's grey courier packaging 😂
Yeah, why do people do that?! I don't care that you received it, it's the bare minimum I can expect when buying something! What I want to know is how good the product is or not! Don't waste my time with asinine "received, didn't test it" reviews! If you didn't test it, why the f*** are you "reviewing" it?! 🙄
For some reason, this happens only in Aliexpress, I can't fathom why. For example, in Amazon most reviews are actual reviews.
Ah yes, the classics, who could forget Mario 14 or Contra 7.
😂
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Or the famous "Rural Goblin".
I am particular to Mario 7, also known as GRAND DAD.
@@UltimatePerfection FLEEENTSTONES!?
Mr Mary I have fond memories of
15:12 yep, germany, Game is called "Probotector" here and all Humans are Robots. Games where you have to shoot at people are only allowed to a limited extent and are forbidden for children, especially in the 80s. So we swap the meaning and and sprites, made up some sci fi robot laser stuff, artificial life is not that sacred :D
Yes, same in Ireland. I still have the cart and the box.
i think it's all of pal region. personally I think it was cooler than the rambo dudes in contra. the contra name makes no sense to begin with of course nor does the game have anything to do with contras rebels.
@lasskinn474. You are right, all or most PAL regions. But I heard it was done due to the German Federal Agency BPjM, which would be banned it. So big sales would go down.
That's right, I like some sci fi robot laser dude more than this Rambo guy. I'm not so into the military J.I. Joe thing either, I had spaceships to play.
@@green64 yeah it probably was, but in hindsight i think it was a good move in general. rush'n'attack was published as green beret though and it's got guns too so dunno.
This device is no joke. I bought it for my 4-year-old daughter last Christmas thinking it wouldn't last long in our house and boy was I wrong. One year later it's been smashed, dropped, even dunked in water and yet it still works like a charm. Not to mention It plays all of those NES games I grew up with for only, you said it, $4!
Something has convinced me your Canadian ?
The screen tearing is actually because the scaling is "nearest neighbor" and the LCD isn't an exact multiple of the native NES resolution. I have the same issues on the GameGear replacement screen. You need a screen with exactly 1x or 2x the pixels of the NES to not get this effect, or leave black bars around the screen edges.
You're probably referring to shimmer, where you get a sort of flickery effect while the screen is scrolling because lighter and darker logical pixels are passing through different sized output pixels. Screen tearing is just that the screen is running at a different rate than the hardware driving it, or the screen is just not being filled/refreshed fast enough so you can see the process of the screen being between frames.
I never seen someone trying to change the roms of this things. Could be a cool project.
It's amazing what you can do without those pesky labour laws, environmental regulations, human rights, copyright, etc.!
Raid on Bungeling Bay was Will Wright's first game, the original version is on the Commodore 64. It actually has some neat mechanics in that the enemy city has factories which work towards building an enemy battleship to take out your aircraft carrier.
The city aspect of the game became the inspiration for SimCity and you tell the similarity with the tile graphics used in the C64 version of SimCity.
What I really want to know is where Adrian is finding cups of coffee that are under $4 nowadays...
@@IntegerOfDoomWhat? 5 rubles? Do you mean belarusian rubles?
@@kirusyaga I mean, Adrian is up in the PacWest, who knows what kind of strange, foreign currency they use up there. It's like Jefferson CA or Louisiana, no one knows.
@@slightlyevolved Here in Louisiana we use alligator skins ;p
Bungeling Bay is a pretty significant game. Max Wright's first game, and it was the inspiration for SimCity, after he found the animations for the cities in Bungeling Bay to be so intriguing.
The power and scale of China’s vertical integration machinery is pretty insane. The fact that we get stuff like this for like $4 is crazy! Even considering the lack lustre quality which honestly for the cost is still impressive!
I mean...they make iPhones for like $4, why couldn't they throw these together for pennies?
raid on bungling bay was one of my favorite C64 games when I was a kid.
I bought that EXACT model, red and everything, in December. I was just as impressed (and unimpressed) as you were. DigDug and Joust are enough for me. I have spent $20 in quarters on just those two games on single nights back in the 80's.
$20 was a fortune then lol
@@Lbf5677 Yeah. I had a paper route and I would blow my profits at the arcade! I make better decisions these days.
@@RyeOnHam that's good 👍🏻
I would have spent it on home games. Would have cried if I spent it at the arcade :D
I have at least 10 of those, some in the walking bag, some in gaming room, some in work, some in the toilet....and so in love with them (despite having much more advanced handhelds). It's fantastic emulation, lightweight, long battery life, ability to connect second USB gamepad to play 2-player, ability to connect to TV et. You can play 2 player on TV, this is fantastic.
Have 400 in 1, 500 in 1, 800 in 1....
You bought not the best model those, can link you to the best one (I tried them all). Other model has better dpad and buttons (due to how pcb and body is built).
For a family who are struggling with money. For $3 you can't go wrong. If this was out in the 80's you be the BOSS OF THE PLAYGROUND .
Playground Emperor
Raid on Bungeling Bay was one of my fave early C64 games, and trivia the engine was used to make the first incarnation of Sim City!
I was watching patiently just for the tear down 😂
Some of the later Russian NES clones had improved hardware. It could be that the extra buttons are for games for those systems.
They could also just be auto-fire as they are on a lot of the Chinese clone systems.
I guess it's because they're made with same form factor of "better" stuff like the Miyoo Mini or the Anbernic line.
They use four buttons plus "shoulders" to be mapped with Retroarch
I have one that's almost identical to this (my cardboard box is a bit different, but everything else looks the same) and Y/B are the B/A NES buttons, and X/Y are turbo.
Contra here in Sweden is named Probotector and you play as Robots.. Thanks for another greatt video! Greatings from Sweden.. 😊🇸🇪
The low price isn’t that amazing. Slavery really cuts down on production costs.
Reminds me of this video by BlindBoy: ua-cam.com/video/CfhWhGJOmxg/v-deo.html
They're like $17 on Amazon, but come with the second controller. I grabbed one off Ali from your link for $3.61 lol
ROTFL! I can't believe i overpaid by 28 cents!!!!
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 what a rip-off! 🤣
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Price shown to me right now is €2.2 including shipping and VAT, thats US $2.37
Most of the modern NES clones with this sort of large Flash use a VT-02/03 SoC, that is a series of NES clones manufactured by a company called VRTech. In the early 2000s they implemented something called the OneBus, essentially a programmable mapper that lets the system address an 128Mbit memory space. This means that anything other than MMC0 needs to be hacked to run in it (for example, certain portions need to be repeated and some of built-in games PPU data is interlaced with other games that share the same mapper type) - it is a slightly larger undertaking than just flashing the ROMs. Later on they went as far as building a non-NES compatible SoC called the VT1682 that drove many chinese handlhelds and Wii clones in the early 2010s - I actually reached out for them on the topic of building a hobbyist computer based on that chip.
And how'd that go
This sounds like a very cool project!
Hey I had the same thought ! I have a bunch of famiclone UMC chips and I watched ben eater's 6502 breadboard computer, and it got me thinking I could just make one myself out of these :D
There was a NOAC (or FOAC) that could use the proper ROMs. It was typically packaged into a fake N64 controller (with a fixed "joystick" in the middle) with a Famicom compatible slot on the bottom. I had one with one Famicom game cartridge, sold it for cheap. It had the usual huge number of games in one built in, which were multiple minor hacks of 100 or so games. I assume it could have worked with a NES to Famicom adapter.
It isn't worth ruining my eyes.... It's definitely cheap and for that you might be very forgiving but It really doesn't give me the playing pleasure I hoped
I gave 10 for mine I hate it I wish I could get my money back but totre the box up to badly opening I was so excited thinking it would be a lot like the Gameboy man was i forever wrong though
I want one for sure. I would totally remove the flash and see if i can dump it. If i can dump the flash then maybe i can reprogram it with some actual good games. Having a cheap portable with Little Samson would be amazing. Or a bunch of other rom hacks, there's even a pokemon yellow rom hack for NES.
I think the sound might be affected by the famous Reversed Duty Cycles issue which NES clones had for many years.
Damn i bought it 2 years for around $20 in my local currency, dont increase the brightness too much it will affect the sound playback lol
Well I don't know if you got 4 bucks of fun out of this but I sure did :) God knows how many copyright violations are in this little toy :)
For anyone wondering about the Contra Force review, it was most likely part of Game Sack's “Left in North America 4” video.
I was thinking it was from Inglebard gaming, he did contra force very recently
In Europe Contra was called Probotector, it has Robots (not Zombies) instead of Humans. 15:17
Famicom clones in the asian market always had 100 or 400 games, circuis charly was popular
well £2.42 had to get one just to mess with
In regards to the sound, I heard that on some cheap handhelds they are designed for stereo sound but only have one speaker hooked up.
Hacking that into a TV would make a great video, man! Thanks for sharing this with us.
35:11 the interesting part starts :-)
HUH!!! I just bought 3 of these, thinking i would give one to my grand daughter for her birthday, and i would have some spares. Then i realized that my wife's mini van has a rear seat "tv" display, a cigarette lighter socket, and an A/V input jack!!! So basically i can power it off the cigarette lighter, plug it into the A/V input, and watch it on the rear seat TV screen, with sound through the factory "quadraphonic" sound system!!! I told her that she would be doing the driving duties on long trips, and i would be in the back seat!! It will definitely keep the grand kids busy and out of our hair! I paid $27 incl. shipping for three of these. Would probably make GREAT stocking stuffers at Christmas time! BTW.... Mine came with 500 games built in.
The word you were looking for is "Sokoban"
The CMOS NES on a chip clones always have something wrong with the sound. They don't implement all of the effects that the Ricoh can do, and for the effects they do support, a bunch of them are just wrong. It makes games sound "weird" for sure.
This Famiclone has Reversed Duty Cycles.
Got one if these 400-in-1 few years ago on Amazon, for under ten dollars, and it came with the second controller for two player play.
Still impressed it can be done for such an insane price. Just try buying the components for that little, not to mention the custom cases, packaging, and cables.
Similar story, bought one (shaped like an N64 controller) at the swap meet from a guy working out of a shipping container back in the mid 2000s. Got a surprising amount of fun out of it with my friends.
I bought a similar one just now from the corner shop. It has a controller included although not mentioned on the included list. Has 500 games but I think Adrian's is better selection. Mine doesnt have that moulding easter egg. I am guessing there are many clones of the clones. My audio is far better though and the composite video looks better or ot could just be that my crt 14in just works well with it.
I love your channel Adrian but the $3.99 device is bad news for the planet. Too much non recyclable plastic and shipping from around the world. Sure its fun reviewing the machine but please, we all need to stop buying this sort of stuff..sorry to be so downbeat!
🤡🌎
Nice game console for it's price.
This kind of battery indeed seems to have long life. A (fake?) battery (ZMC BL-4C) was in my 1st cheap "Made in China" dashcam already in 2012. It didn't keep the dashcam powered very long, just couple of minutes, but when I replaced it with real Nokia BL-5C battery from Nokia 1600 cell phone, I recall it kept it powered up at least ten times longer, maybe even an hour or so.
Usually of course dashcam is powered from the car's 12V socket, but when parked, there's no power coming from that socket. If you'd like to use the motion sensor, or G-sensor mode, long lasting battery inside the dashcam is useful.
Nice to see this kind of battery is still powering up devices, at least inside this handheld game console.
I still have the Nokia 1600 phone and battery for it, altough I don't use it as a phone anymore. I also have later Nokia C1-01 phone which has 3,7V Nokia BL-5CB version of the battery, but never tried this in that old dashcam.
I have one of these from a friend lmao. This thing is atrocious.
400 pirated games. They paid for none.
It's a pile of crap, but for the price it's not that bad really.
I played a TON of Raid on Bungling Bay on my C64 - what a blast from my past! :) I never had a game console after my Intellivision until I bought an XB1 - cool to see a console version of that game. Thanks Adrian!
When Broderbund was just starting out, the enemy of the player was quite often the "bungling empire." I actually bought an early Broderbund title. Which was rare back in the day, because i was poor and had no money.
I'm gonna guess it's Lode Runner, because that was a great game and that put Broderbund on the map.
@@rommix0 Sadly, no. But Lode Runner was an amazing game. And it came with a level editor, so you could make your own levels! Amazing for it's time.
In fact, i can't even remember the name of the game i purchased. It involved a jet flying horizontally, and you could shoot and drop bombs. There was a tank that was as fast as you, so you either had to drop a supply crate on it, or fly down and release the bomb after diving to give it extra speed.
That and we didn't have joysticks, we had paddles (school system). So one person controlled the horizontal speed, and the other the vertical position. Way harder that way.
@@jeromethiel4323 > It involved a jet flying horizontally, and you could shoot and drop bombs.
Sounds kinda like Defender, but that was by Williams Electronic so it couldn't be that.
Adrian, did you menage to change the games?
For less than $5.00 to get an LCD display is probably a good price as well. It looks like the Unihiker might fit in the box which might be interesting as well.
These are totally worth it just for the exploration of the weird roms. After you get your fun, they're nice to give to kids without fearing them wrecking such a cheap device. I also got into an argument with someone about it being an emulator, which it absolutely is not, but I think the young kids don't understand quite what a NOAC clone is and why they are so cheap vs an ARM based emulator.
The character underneath the battery is Doraemon in space. I love your videos although I understand maybe 10% of what's going on, but I'm learning. Love from Poland.
Looks like a little doraemon on the back there.
You really really really to stop...
Designed for kids....who would enjoy it. NOT FOR YOU....
ITS PUT TOGETHER BY SOME POOR PERSON WORKING FOR .50 AN HOUR.
STICK TO PCS 😢😊
the other 2 buttons are "turbo" buttons...
Okay. You talked about building it into a tv. So let's see you do it.
That Super Mario Bros 3 was the Japanese region version. It's weird that the sound effects were so wrong, but everything else seemed fine. The audio between the regions is supposed to be identical.
I have the radio stack challenge game(pretty much a direct Tetris copy) from 1991(still have it). Iirc radio shack got sued for copyright infringement over it
I had that one two, played until my eyeballs dried out and got bloodshot
I got one of these a few years ago for around 6 dollars. Its held up better then expected. For the price, its a fun toy that I use when have to take wife to the doctor. Sure controls better then a smartphone using an emulator.
If you can figure out how to interface with the flash memory, it's most likely a standard FAT volume. So as long as you can talk to it, swapping out the roms should be easy. The part that might present a bigger challenge is if the multi-cart menu needs to be modified.
Best case scenario: It just reads the roms from flash memory and dynamically creates a menu.
Worst case scenario: Some things are hardcoded and the menu resides in the blob chip.
If you have any idea how you might read the flash chip, that would make for a very interesting video.
I'm from Brazil and I am an Electronic Engineer. I'm also surprised with the quality of this stuff. I added a real lithium charging circuit because the charging is rediculously simple and might under charge or overcharge the battery. The vídeo on a CRT TV is wonderful except the levels are a little bit low and might get a little dark in some old TV, most newer TV set Will compensate. Overall is a good toy for little kids but I would prefer normal AA battery because lithium may explode and It is risky for little kids.
$3.99 ?? April Fools, right? Wait... it's January. My bad. Ok, I'll bite. Time to get comfortable. Now where are those Cheetos....
Can you change the crystal in it? You think? down clock it?
i'm really invested in the x86 infrastructure (Ryzen 7000) but its sheer power such as what brought us HD Mode 7 due to the stupefyingly awesome accuracy(-at-no-price) of its base emulator, bsnes has me hooked opposed to the polar opposites of the spectrum and staggering volume of different (seeming?) Android(-oriented) ARM CPUs out there (not helped by Amazon's charlie-foxtrot of a marketplace)
also, the frustrating part of that "$3.99" price is that .cn is (as it feels to me) raping the US (and other nations towards the top) via the UPU, the Universal Postal Union, which offsets the price of shipping from lesser well off countries. however, if you ever need to warranty return ship something to said subsidized UPU country, you're paying far above the price of the item originally just to ship it back.
and as a point of reference, it costed me ~$17 to ship a 4oz item (specifically, a "SCAM4-1000B" adaptor) from the US to Lithuania a couple of years ago.
also2: yes, i also see QUITE a few products in my (scrappy T1 Amazon) department, "VRETs" quite a few products like that that i'm sure are housing that many to ">1000" sus "games" in a little plastic box, i think entirely ALL for destruction, liquidation, or donation. p sure i haven't seen any being shipped back on a pallet (including the pallet's freight shipping price)
Europe had robots.
The fact that something like this can be manufactured and shipped all the way from China for that price boggles my mind sometimes. What a time to be alive.
Would a micro usb OTG cable work? With a relatively new controller, like a logitec f310, maybe even a hub?
What was the clock crystal frequency? Maybe could be swapped?
Zoomed in 21.47727mhz which is actually the SNES crystal frequency. 39:09
Little character is Doraemon perhaps? Also, do you remember what the NES was like playing through an analog TV via antenna adapter? This looks like IMAX in comparison!
So your title is "i thought this thing was going to be total junk"
And your reaction is: this is a turd.
I guess that's not clickbait, but with a title like that, we are lead to think that it wasn't a turd.
I guess I'm just salty because after seeing the title and not watching the video, i used my rent money to buy 300 of these things, i was sure that i could sell them at $20 a pop in dark alleys and bars locally.
I wonder how much the plastic is worth if i throw all these into the fire. That'll probably recoup my investment, and i can sell the batteries to illegal fireworks manufacturers. They don't care as long as it explodes.
The Mario 14 game is actually a hack of Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3. Also known as Kid Niki 3.
I would suggest ditching the external video cable for a regular 3.5mm-to-RCA breakout cable of better quality (you just have to check which jack is which).
8:11 "input lines: 262p"; confirmed, it's a PAL rom. Were it NTSC, it would say "240p", which is the native Famicom resolution (NES games are al technically line-doubled, turning their native 240p format into SD just by virtue of treating the progressive image as an interlaced field). PAL games had, at best, patches fixing the audio speed and, if really lucky, slight timing changes for some graphics (twinkles, timer faces...), but they were otherwise basically the same as their NTSC counterparts, which means that, when run on matching hardware, PAL games allowed for longer time limits and more forgiving timing. The catch is, if you run a PAL rom on NTSC hardware, any changes made to suit 50Hz-land get screwed. Not every PAL game was tweaked, but all Mario games from the Super Mario Bros series were.
It's $4. As a novelty item (and you should obviously expect it to be just that given its price), I think $4 shipped is perfectly fine. It's important to recognize that you're getting what you pay for. While it's subjective, for me, it offers more value and entertainment than what I could find here in the States for the same amount. Sure, you could get a bunch of tacos from Jack in the Box, but this still seems like the better choice.
It's interesting that there's still a connotation of "Chinese" being synonymous with "low quality". While that might have been the case 20 years ago, the landscape in 2024 is quite different. Yes, this is a four-dollar piece of crap, but it's worth noting that China also produces high-quality products, including handheld game consoles, at a fraction of the price compared to those made by non-Chinese companies. I've been learning more about the EV brand BYD, and it's been quite eye-opening.
The fun fact about the SUP 400-in-1 (and clones of it) is the form factor.
Almost the same of Chinese consoles in the 50$ range (Miyoo Mini, Miyoo Mini +) and the 150$ range (Anbernic).
Same "kinda a four button GameBoy with a central button", however whille on the SUP! the center button is just reset, the more you spend, the more it becomes some kind of advanced menu.
Seems there's some kind of "Average Enclosure" who gets reused
nice little system to have fun, now day i just wanna have fun,, i dont care anymore if games dont sound right or the screen is not perfect, games just plays fine, im in 😊
Yes, Germany was the Game that had NOT Contra due to "Violence", the people were changed with Robots.
Ah yes. Probotector.
Great, went from "Fight the aliens" to what sounds like something a proctologist needs....
15:13 in Germany, Contra was heavily censored, you played as a robot against other robots and it was called Probotector.
You know what though, the display might be poor compared against the latest and greatest OLED and IPS displays, but compare it against the Sega Game Gear and OG Game Boy and this display is absolutely next level phenomenal. Not to mention the grain and drift you got on your TV over RF from NES and Master System! Would've given my left arm for clarity, response times and viewing angles like this as a nipper
The screen tearing is definitely an artifact of using NTSC ROM on PAL and vice versa, happens on real NES as well. I think the best use of this would be to re-flash the chip with better ROMs and a nicer menu. Does anyone know how to do that, since I'd love to do it on my 128-in-1 cartridge of my real NES, and place the games I actually like, and correct region versions, rather than incorrect regions and games I don't care about.
I got two of the "500 game" versions from banggood for maybe $10+ each. For the price they are great. I did have a few problems that I solved.
One problem was that one of the consoles had a misaligned screen right-shifted up to 4 mm. I discovered that if I hit the reset button a random number of times, it would line up.
The second problem is that the battery is garbage. They would last under an hour. I ordered "authentic" nokia batteries from ebay for $7 each and now it can last for a week or more (relative to how much I play it).
The third problem was that one of the battery covers was loose to where it would rattle. I just put a spongy pad on the inside and now it's tight as a drum.
My favorite game is a version of Defender called "Star Gate".
I tell people that this is like being in a video arcade where your favorite game has worn out controls *BUT* the coin slot is broken, so you get infinite games.
Playing Devil World now. Kill the CYCLOPS!!!
PS - Thank you for opening it up. This helps me to decide how hard it would be to swap the direction "+" sign for a 3D-printed joystick. Decisions, decisions ...
Heh..I have something *nearly* like this that was $10 at Wal-Mart...exact same case, but branded as being from 'Merkury'...and only 200 games, not 400.
My sometimes resets from nothing. Is very low quality, but is is ok for the price. Too bad super mario 1 speed is way too high. I also wish they have 30 games rather than 400 variations.
Adrian, I wanted to let you know that "nibbles" is apparently a port of a MS BASIC or QBASIC game that was released by Microsoft. with MS DOS or Qbasic as "Nibbles.bas" in the 80s or 90s, on PC before it was on nokia phones as snake.
I very distinctly remember Mario 14 from my childhood 🤣 my friend and I called it "kung fu Mario" there was also a Flintstones knockoff we called "caveman Mario"
15:16 “Was it Germany, or was that in Europe?” I didn’t realise there was more than one Germany! 😂 I think you mean Probotector - all the characters were replaced with robots. This was the version released across the PAL region on the NES. On other platforms (arcade/home computer) it was known as Gryzor, and was unadulterated.
judging by the sounds, this actually seems to be based on a dendy on a chip, rather than an NES on a chip! the dendy was a russian clone of the NES, which had a few chips that were different. notably, the replication of the audio of the 2a03 (CPU) was mostly-right, but the pulse waves were indexed incorrectly from how the NES did it. From what I know, since the dendy was how most chinese and russian people experienced NES/famicom games in the days when the console was relevant, these games having what *seems to be* scuffed audio is actually accurate for the chinese market, as this is how you know these games to sound if you're from china and know these games.
The Nibbles game was originally (as mentioned on the screen) a Microsoft game written in Qbasic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)
I have one but I just play Galaga on it! I have PAL but is PAL-M so is 60Hz and the Mario seems a little fast to me. The composite video out is pure crap....horrible. Mine too had the controller with a bad contact I used Deoxit (in fact another one used in Brazil that is not toxic or flammable) and it became worse, maybe the conductive rubber didn't like it.
It has not low battery indicator the screen becomes dimmer and dimmer until you realize that is the battery! Mine came with an extra controller NES like that it is only used for the second player.
You can't complain for $4 or even $9.88, amazing really, but technically piracy however even though it's emulating games that would be classed as abandonware.
What an anti-nostalgic experience for the Asian market. Back in the day, we usually had 60hz games that were run at 50 (and I remember things feeling a bit off when I tried emulators in the late 90s and early 2000s).
And this is the opposite of that, 1.44 times faster effectively.
PAL Guy here: no manufacturer ever fixed the speed issue. we always played nes/snes/SM/MD, etc. 20% slower than it was meant to be.. also the music was 20% slower