Here in Brazil, consoles like this are often bought for the child because the father often doesn't have the money to buy a popular one. It was like that in the 90s and it remains that way to this day. That's why TecToy (which has always been a Sega representative) still sells Master System and Atari Flashback here.
This is a good point. Bootleg consoles like these can sometimes have a positive impact. For me, I got access to make Japanese-exclusives that happen to be great games.
“Why did they model the controller after an N64 controller?” Simple to make money. They never intended to sell this as a famiclone per se , they intended to trick people into thinking they were buying an N64 ( at the time a modern console ).
I always wondered why it was model after a Nintendo 64 and a Sega Genesis controller also these things break easily but I remember me and my twin brother had a couple of these my mom used to buy these from the flea market and I always thought it was bizarre that has Star Wars picture on it because it clearly has no Star Wars games on it
3:00 the reason the batteries dont fit is pretty simple and is the case for lots of late-90s technology: it needs R6P batteries, these batteries are carbon zinc based and are just a tad but smaller than alkaline batteries. if you're having trouble telling if a battery is an R6P (somehow... they say the kind on the battery itself most of the time), try seeing if you can squish the battery a little with your hands or compare it to an alkaline to see if its noticably lighter than an alkaline or not
@@nehemiahpouncey3607 The NES's patents expired sometime in the mid-2000s, meaning that nowadays famiclones only have to worry about legal issues if the games themselves are pirated. The arrests occurred BEFORE the patent expiration.
LOL I used to have one of these. I believe most companies are getting away with it now because the patent for the NES expired in 2005. I could be wrong though.
Nintendo simply does not care enough to fight so many bootleg devices. It would be different if they would be on one market place, but amazon is not an online store, nor a market place, their are a web hoster with fulfillment center.
@@pojr to add to your comment, I.. in california, remember these units at our mall at a kiosk. given this was an NY bootlegger running the show, i'd say popular is an understatement. these were EVERYWHERE in 2004
3:08 : I had a Power Player and trust me. They've FORGOT to make sure that the batteries fit inside. I've managed to make them fit, but inserting it into the machine was a nightmare. And that nightmare was even worst when you realize that the whole thing is too big to fit inside the socket. (I had to use some tools to pop it out.)
Famiclones only contain early Famicom titles not just because they use less ROM space but especially because they don't use mappers that were introduced later. So they just rely on basic hardware. Even bootleg cartridges that run on original NES hardware never contain games like Castlevania 3 because of the mappers.
This is a very good point! It's much easier to use games that didn't need mappers. There's some exceptions, like Contra. Maybe it was worth putting in a great game like that, despite using a mapper.
It probably also has to do with many of them using the same Nintendo-on-a-Chip (NoaC) clone hardware as the core of the system. Anyone with the capability of actual cloning the system hardware themselves would have no trouble cloning a mapper.
I was a 13 year old kid when the shit hit the fan on these consoles. I remember a dude trying to sell one of these to my local mall. So my narc-ass self went and called Nintendo (something I did a lot as a kid, god help me) and I reported it to them. I remember some time later hearing about some dude who sold these things getting arrested and I always wondered if I was responsible. I am no longer a narc.
Eh, it is what it is, we were all taught as kids to "trust the system" and "if you see something bad, tell an adult" and some of us (me included) actually believed in it.
I had a Power Joy! Got it for Christmas in the late 90’s. I was in my mid-teens and didn’t ask for it or any other video game stuff that I can recall (I had a PlayStation at the time and still regularly played my SNES), but I think my grandma just got it as like a stocking stuffer kinda thing. I remember it being kinda fun as I hadn’t played my NES in years and this was a neat way to recapture the 8-bit days of my youth (even though like half the games didn’t work and the ones that did weren’t all that great).
I'm actually more familiar with the Power Joy than I am the Super Joy III, because I actually owned the former as a kid. The Power Joy is a little more ethical, because they don't try to pad out the game list, and are actually honest about that you're getting.
America is wild, 5 years in prison for selling a bootleg console that hd software that was not easy to get legally (at least the Famicom Stuff). I have seen news stories of people robbing gas stations with a gun get less time.
Its weird how after being infamous for decades now, the ROM still hasn't been dumped. Like, most famiclones and multicarts have been dumped but this one hasn't.
Not EVERYONE thought these consoles were bootleg and bad quality. In fact, my own parents, many years ago bought one of these pieces of crap and ruined Christmas for me and my brother one year by basing the entire round of family gifts around it as if this was some kind of main event big time surprise gift we were all supposed to love and be excited for. Me and my brother instantly knew this was a pile of crap, but our parents got this thing, expecting it to be as big for us back then as a Playstation 5 would be for people today. To the point that our parents even got mad that we didn't appreciate it the way were supposed to.
Very true. There might have been some people who weren't aware. Most people I knew were aware that the units were bootlegs, but it was still worth the purchase.
Yeah, I can't really imagine how that would feel... My family always stuck to the actual consoles when buying games, and most of the time at leaat *one* game would land. Usually most of the titles would, even if it was bt sheer luck of buying an actually good licensed title. I think the worst was my birthday one year, where I got to pick out one DS title and my parents picked out the others. I walked away with Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, the not great Star Trek: Tactical Command (because my Dad and I enjoyed playing the PC titles way back when), and my mom got Xiaolin Showdown (a cartoon that she vaguely remembered me watching), a *throughly* terrible game that I consider the worst I have ever owned. Never told her, of course, I wasn't that kid, but I am very glad she never asked about it, as I gave up after stage one past the tutorial of constantly falling into horrendous hit detection pits at the speed of a dessicated slug.
This is like when I asked my parents for a GameBoy and they got me...Dinosaur Attack by Radio Shack (similar to a lot of Tiger LCD games). They were sympathetic though because they didn't realize what I was asking for. Got the GameBoy on my next birthday. And it turned out...Dinosaur Attack wasn't actually half bad, for a 15-min time-waster.
My dad bought one of these in 2004 at a mall just because it looked cool. He knew it was a bootleg, and that we kiddos would enjoy it. And by golly we did enjoy it. This system was my introduction to the game Binary Land. So I have this system to thank
My mother gave me that famiclone as a Christmas present back in 2001, it only lasted 7 months, after that it just stopped working. At 12 years old I couldn't feel more disappointed and furious.
I had one of those as a kid. The second player controller and gun disinagrated. The other controller worked. Then stopped working after a couple years.
The key (legal) mistake of that console was that it was *ordered* from China. I.e. importer _requested_ someone to make it. Other bootlegs are _imported_, i.e. someone requested shipment of some already produced and branded units. The difference is that in the first case the US citizen left an order for the production of knowingly pirated consoles, while in the second case he is a legal importer with all (legal) reasons to believe that the games were licensed by the manufacturing company, and it is almost impossible to prove malice (because, thanks to the presumption of innocence, it is still necessary to prove that Shenzhen Dumb Brick United Manufacturing Co, whose entire legal history began and ended the month before last on Taobao, did NOT obtain the licenses - and, more importantly, that the importer knew about it).
They're not doing anything to stay out of trouble. They simply exist through obscurity. In the 2000s I remember there was a different kiosk every couple of months at the local mall who was selling a completely different, similar thing. I doubt any of them got in trouble, and this particular guy was probably just extremely unlucky. The reality is that these companies don't really "care" or have time to deal with this, because it's not an actual problem they can do much about if they were even inclined. Hell, when I was a kid (over 20 years ago) I used to sell burnt CDs filled with every NES, Genesis, and SNES game on it for like $5, I would even organize them, put recommended lists, and put the emulators with custom configs and a little splash screen with artwork I drew. People would ask me "Isn't this illegal? Aren't you worried about getting in trouble?" And I'd say "I dunno, probably, but no, I'm not," and I wasn't.
Either that, or these new Famiclones are not getting caught by Nintendo and the FBI because kiosk sellers are being really careful not to let them get popular enough to get into the news (as Nintendo seems to only go after fan games and pirate products that get popular enough that sites like IGN and GameSpot decide to report on it, which makes them a clear target).
Good point. Even with the Super Joy III, while Yonatan Cohen was arrested, I don't know exactly what his role was in the sales of it. He may not have been the man behind the Super Joy III. Who knows who was actually in charge.
Yeah, I have to agree. The guy that got busted must have done something with the Super Joy III that got him in the spotlight and in the crosshairs of the law, as most of these do tend to fly under the radar.
I think the reason clones are thriving today is beacause there are simply too many clones, back then the early 2000 is was all new so easier to target (espacially if you sell them directly from the US), now those companies are located in China and most of them are short lived so by the time any legal action could be taken, the company is gone / recreated under another name. Also trying to protect the IP of retro games is a losing battle IMO it's too late for that, internet connections / storage are so good you can basically get every games of a system in minutes, maybe why Nintendo are focusing hard on protecting the Switch right now and offering older games as a service (Switch Online).
Were those the first bootleg consoles sold in the US? I live in Panama , I got an NES late 80s but bootleg consoles were already sold everywhere outside US, but they were well made, very sturdy and good quality materials, and were actually hardware clones and not a system on a chip, later when the system on a chip ( like the one system in this video) appeared the quality went down, although I had an original NES most of my games were famicon pirates that I played with an adapter 😅
That could be true. In fact, sites that offer ROMs that are copyrighted are basically like a hydra, even if Nintendo and their lawyers manage to shut some down by threatening legal action, more will end up popping up over the internet. Same with fan games, as while they can get the creators of them to stop development, if the game was released, fans will end up releasing it on torrent and other websites. Nintendo is basically fighting a futile battle that only causes more sites to replace those taken down and fans to retaliate by uploading downloads of fan games that got C&D'd.
Oh god does this take me back to the early into late 2000s when I begged my parents to buy me one of those Super Joy III/Power Player bootleg consoles when we stumbled upon it at a kiosk at our local mall. I remember even buying one from a flea market during a family vacation trip in Orlando, Florida. Learning about the history of this thing and how it ultimately led to an arrest was just wild to discover when I got older. It was even crazier to find out that the Super Joy III literally took the same menu SFXs from Action 52 as well.
It’s one thing about piracy but these games are 40 years old, and game companies need to understand that they should stop sitting on them and crying foul. Today, even on Facebook, I was seeing ads for a device that plays 44,000 classic games.
I know a LOT of people who used to own these kind of bootleg consoles, and they always wondered how they can make 10000 original games in one affordable system only to find out that theres a bunch of repeats. At least Action 52 kept some originality in its 52 games! (Also, big fan of your content, I love these kind of topics you delve into, Subscribed!)
I went to California many years ago and bought one at the "Great Mall" for my godson. I never saw something like that in Puerto Rico on those days. Now we have similar units everywhere.
That doesn't surprise me, southern California has anything you are looking for in the world lol. The amount of people in Los Angeles alone is mind boggling.
Great video! I remember seeing these for sale at a kiosk in the mall of Georgia. It was a new nice mall at the time. Was surprised to see bootlegs getting sold there. Also remember the guy selling them looked a lot like Yanaton or his cousin. Wild times
Basically, Nintendo just got overwhelmed with going after so many devices and paying lawyers to send cease and desist letters that it ended up costing more than it could ever make them back. They still go after major players like high profile ROM sites like emuparadise and recently vimms lair
Can you put the full story, "Vimm's Lair has been asked to remove many games from The Vault on behalf of Nintendo, Sega, Lego, and the ESA." Because Sega is also taking offence againts rom lately.
@@gogereaver349 You do know that's also same With Nintendo they have Nes/Snes mini. They also have classic's in Switch system and when 3DS had store they were filled with classic's. So yeah by your logic Nintendo has that right to take roms down from other sites. You do have to remember that only the ones developed by those companies are removed so if Mega Man's or/and Residen Evil trilogy got removed it would be A Capcom who request it.
@@gogereaver349 That's what I was saying they only can remove those they own rights to. If other roms like Megaman or Castlevania got removed it would be Capcom or/and Konami that requested it. Yes roms are under the copyright law that's hasn't gone anywhere especially if the studio or it's owner exist. Like Palcom was owned by Capcom until "merging" happened and Ultra same thing with Konami.
NO WAY The Super Joy Power Player! I had one of those! It was scuffed, but it was introduction to some NES games like Contra. Loved it. Super happy to see a video on it! I had a pS1, an N64, but I spent SO many hours with this goober. I always found it weird how the genesis type controller had that weird screw-in joystick lol. Mine also came with a light gun as well. Had hours of fun.
In The Netherlands they even sold on television (Tel Sell channel). It was called Arcade Action and looked like a N64. Unfortunately I haven't been able to found the particular commercial online, it was so bad.
What’s funny is that is exact model bootleg console was my very first game console when I was 4 or 5. I think my Grandma got it for me. My first time ever paying Mario or Contra was on this thing. (My mom didn’t like me playing contra though because it had guns in it). It’s also weird how you showing the distorted bad audio is what triggers my nostalgia rather than the correct audio. Also speaking of the joystick on the main controller, I ended up, breaking it off as a kid because I could never figure out what it was for lol. Thanks for unlocking a core memory with this video.
Bought this in a Tennessee mall around 99/2000 … started making a burning rubber smell and started smoking after a couple months into use , had to throw it away of course
Something insane is you can actually buy a portable Famiclone at Walmart which has the typical bootleg jank you'd expect, like one game is literally named "Assart" on the unit, and another has Pikachu all over it for some reason.
I had one of these back in the day. I got it for Christmas of 2002. I liked it because I didn’t have a NES at the time, and grew up with the Genesis instead. I wonder if all of the super joys had the same issue mine did. The dig dug and golf roms had a few letters mixed around so whenever you got a water hazard in golf it would say “waner hazard” and when you got a bunker it would say butker. xD I will say the sound is better than what you find in some of todays bootleg consoles. In some of them, the music plays too fast and it’s up a pitch.
From what I can tell, the hardware manufacturers (at least the decent ones) usually sell them to smaller companies who put the roms on them, perhaps even shell companies. Not that you can really sue people in China either way, but when one of the small ones gets attention or banned on Amazon, Ebay, etc., they just shut it down and make another. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
I had one of these, my parents got it from a kiosk at the mall. Had to get rid of it because one day when I plugged it in, smoke started coming out of the AC adapter
I had either this one or a copy of it as a kid over twenty years ago. For the year i had it before it broke i had a great time with it. Always wondered if the main controller could actually take real cartridges so I finally got an answer.
Despite knowing what it was, I really wanted one. Unfortunately they were not readily available where I lived in the 1990s. I found one seller in a Mall when I was on vacation, but I could not justify the asking price. I eventually bought one online in a private transaction and (after moving cross-country) they started turning up at thrift shops with some frequency. I now have multiple different models. They are still sold new at retail around the Christmas holiday season. My latest acquisition cost about $25 and it has a decent selection of games; not all of which are pirated.
There are so many of these that Nintendo couldn't ever go after all of them, they are like weed farms they take a few down and a few dozen more pop up.
@@pojr Indeed, and they can also be like the hydra of Greek mythology. If Nintendo manages to get one pulled from market, more will be created to takes it place, like how when one of the hydra's heads is cut off, more will grow in its place.
My aunt bought a similar 1000-in-1 console for me because she knew I liked video games. It had a few decent games, but it was glitchy and obviously bootleg. I enjoyed it and took it to college with me before misplacing it.
I've had one of these things for the last 10 years that my brother-in-law got me as a gift. I never gave it much thought other than it was just another bootleg. Cool to actually see there was a story behind it and someone else going through the device. The genesis controller had a stick you could thread into the d-pad and that was supposed to be your joystick but it was awful, much like the rest of it.
Around where I live, I would see these guys at the local malls selling these things from kiosks. They always appeared to be Eastern European guys with thick foreign accents telling passers by about 76,000 games. I was even briefly tempted to take a closer look as I thought it looked like it could be a usable cheap N64 style controller. To this day I didn't know the analog stick was not functional. I watched one person argue with them they were selling bootlegged games and were breaking copyright, and the guy defended it stating they are all legally copyrighted, going so far as to show the copyright notice on the game screen! "Look! It is copyright! It is ok!" It was pretty comical - the guy was adamant that the fact the game showed a copyright on screen meant it was completely legal. Out of a matter of curiosity, I called Nintendo's 800 number to ask them about it , and even then, the early 2000s, their rep took the call very seriously, asking for the exact mall and location. I gave them the info, and a week later, those guys were no longer at that mall. I assumed Nintendo's legal department called the mall offices making threats, but I could never confirm if that ever happened.
I remember playing this as a kid, it was actually the introduction to some of the old games. Did not know that they were stolen but it is fun while the controller lasted
I remember a kiosk at my local mall selling these at one point. They even had a TV set up with it, and I played it briefly using that terrible knock off N64 controller. While was there, a woman who bought one earlier that decided she wanted to return it (it hadn't been opened as far as I know), and the guy at the kiosk was giving her a hard time about it, and she was saying that she specifically asked him about their return policy earlier and he had told her it could be returned. It was an interesting exchange since it was clearly (to me) a shady kiosk.
Here in Argentina we had various Famiclones the back in the 90s. The Electrolab Family Game was very popular and they sold it as an "original" unit, it was very well built :)
2:09 Well after I got a little pissed about how misleading the ATGames Sega Genesis classic was by saying it had 80 games when really it had maybe about 40 games and the other 40 games were Sega Genesis games but they weren't like ones from the classic era and just a bunch of random stock games like chess and disc golf and other stock games that were never released on the Sega Genesis before and probably just made for this device specifically just to try to advertise they have 80 games when really they don't. I thought that was awful but it's a falsely advertised 76,000 games is a whole lot worse
I remember having one of these as a kid but mine was red. To quote Jontron, it was called the "Power Cracker" and came with a surprisingly functional light gun for Duck Hunt. I even got my first perfect score in Duck Hunt through that "Power Cracker" before I finally found a working NES to play the real deal with.
(0:00) OK… right off the bat that took me back! I saw them for sale (in around 2010 to 2011) at a ‘3Stars’ shop near where I lived, they had a stack of them near their shopfront and had one set up with a small 14" CRT TV, but other than that they sold cheap off-brand stuff. At the time, I was a teen and didn't know it was modelled after both Nintendo 64 and Mega Drive controllers, but did notice the fake control stick which was broken on the shop's demo unit. I never bought one, but did experience some of the bootleg games you showed through one of those Chinese ODM portable DVD players that had a built-in NES emulator with a ‘Super Game 300’ disc and controller modelled after a Mega Drive 6 button controller. (11:53) That setup with the two TVs looks a lot like the mall kiosks I saw here in Singapore in around 2018 to 2019 that sold set-top boxes preconfigured for pay TV piracy. Part of their MO involved hiding the fact that it's piracy and instead baiting unsuspecting customers with what appeared to be a good deal compared to actually paying for Singtel TV or StarHub TV. Linux Tech Tips did a video on the boxes themselves, but they basically ran uncertified Android TV OS (or Android for tablets) with a custom UX of poor quality, Kodi (legitimate) but configured with third-party plugin repositories that provided plugins for pay TV piracy, and/or had a low-quality pay TV piracy app preloaded. I do remember one of my uncles having one of those piracy boxes, and that ran Android for tablets with an extremely outdated version of Nova Launcher along with a fake baseband (so it always shows ‘No SIM card’ and ‘No service’ in the notification centre). The services themselves are still being sold on Lazada to the point where many people buying them led to them being algorithmically recommended to me on my Lazada homepage when I'm signed in.
Recently, there were these cheap handheld that were being sold at Walmart and Five Below that were Famiclones with obviously pirated games. When the word got spread, the handhelds were re-released with several of those games taken off, but there were still a lot of obvious games on it
I actually remember seeing this thing on sale once at this big gathering of vendors. Most of them were selling things like antiques and retro stuff and it was mostly outdoors but for some reason the people selling this had power and had a little tv and console hooked up
My cousin had one of these! Bahaha It was kind to odd though cause he had modern consoles but I think it was just a random gift he got. We use to play Contra on it. Now that I think of it bootleg games always played a part of my early years growing up My uncle in Mexico use to repair, rent out and assemble arcade cabinets that used some sort of emulator system called SONICTEAM(I vaguely recall this cause it would flash the info on screen real quick each time you’d turn the console on) And it would have a thousand games….literally! It was packed with countless arcade ports under the Sun including a HEAVY amount of Japanese imports so I got to experience some cool stuff when I’d visit in the 2000s. Overall it ran pretty well! And this was in the mid 2000s so whatever was running the system had the power to do so. Pretty much all the arcades in town had it or some other emulator in some form (Heck don’t get me started on the cabinets that had a first gen Xbox emulator built in)
I remember having something like this in the mid 2000s as a kid - At some point the cheap power supply had died, and I realized it had the same size barrel jack as my mom's keyboard synth's power supply. Only problem was I didn't realize it was a totally different voltage and I let the magic smoke out. Crazy I somehow didn't start an electrical fire.
This was a small portion of my childhood lmao. At the time, this, ps1 , gba, and the N64 were the ones I had eventually being phased out by the PS2 . I don't know what happened to this.
Have you ever heard of the mini game anniversary edition? It's basically a famiclone that looks like a NES classic It says it has 620 games and I keep seeing this thing at all the malls I go to
I fell into a coma right before he did that. When I came back to reality my mind was pretty screwed up and I was hallucinating for days. After I started to feel like I was back to normal I saw the story about Soulja Boy and his emulator console and it made me think I was still out of my mind.
@@davidchavez5418I’m reporting you to Nintendo and the FBI. Not because you’re selling copyrighted games, but because you don’t choose to sell better emulators. Those are trash
Something did happen to him though, he got a cease and desist from Nintendo and his souljawatch website was taken by Nintendo and for awhile actually redirected to the 3DS section of their website. It got bought after the domain expired and now it’s a “best watches under $1,000” website. It isn’t owned by him anymore though.
I Remember Having These in 2004 at a Flea Market, Good Times Playing Super Mario Bros, Contra, Pac-Man, and a Few Famicom Games That Didn't Release in America, But Later On I Realized That There is a Different Versions of Power Joy III Games, Like Aladdin III was Replaced by Games Knights Which is Game Called Ikki for The Famicom and Front Line for Famicom was Replaced by Duck Hunt Clone or Hack, Man So Many Variations of the Power Joy III Also Some Music on These Uses The Duty Cycle Swap, It's Strange Because Listening to The Music on These Games Sounds Good or Different From a Real NES.
This was sold in the main mall area of the Harlequin, Watford, UK in 2003. It was a small table and TV set-up where people could walk up and try it out. In fact, the guy there coerced people to try it out to buy because he had a tonne of them. He was set up right outside what was then the GAME store. As a 12 year old I knew this was bootleg, but decided to go over and “play test” it because it had Super Mario Bros, a game I hadn’t played for a good few years at that point. The guy eagerly watched me as I had a good go on the crappy N64-style blue controller, and then said thank you and walked off 🤣
One of the aspects of the sound issues is the duty cycles of the square waves, they get interpreted differently (meaning a not intended square duty cycle is being used resulting in a different sounding timbre) on certain console revisions i.e. common in Brazil or rip-off consoles like this. In many emulators you can re-enact those sound quirks, or reverse them to normal instead.
I was just thinking about this right now. Even to 5-6 year old me it stood out as cheap and flimsy, but it also was my first exposure to Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, and Contra.
I actually remember having a bootleg Famiclone that has ten games by default and countless additional games like Adventure Island, a Super Mario Bros. ROM Hack called Pandamar, Dig Dug, "Bomb Man", etc. That, and there were no repeats, as well as a hidden version of Duck Hunt in th base console.
I think they're trying to pull a we're only preserving these games and letting the future generation play them type deal to try and get around the legal issues
I grew up with one of these units. I played Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Jr., Karataka, Ikki, and Muscle the most on the unit. I almost considered buying another bootleg console to play some Famicom cartridges I bought years ago, but I'm going to leave them be.
The power pack being broken I:m sure wasn't because of the seller, from what I've heard these things were made so cheap that they not only broke but they caught fire extremely often
Really enjoying your videos Pojr. I remember seeing these things at discount dollar shops here in Australia back in the early 2000's and thinking to myself ''what the hell is that? It's playing 8-bit games on a Nintendo 64 controller?'' The reason why it's not really policed anymore like it was back in the early 2000's I think is because the video market today is over saturated with cheap, knock off retro game clone consoles these days like how many unlicensed Mega Drive/Genesis consoles are on sale at the moment and most of them from China?👍
Our local mall had a kiosk selling these sus AF consoles when I was in high school. I almost bought one but I knew at some level they were illegal. Asked my attorney uncle about it and his response was that knowingly buying bootleg or pirated media is a crime just as much as producing it. Said for this type of thing it's rare that prosecutors go after the customers when a seller is shut down, but it has happened, usually in cases where the product in question was so blatantly obviously not genuine that no rational adult would argue otherwise (ie prima facie that you purchased it knowingly). Said while possible albeit highly unlikely a customer would prosecuted, a civil suit was definitely possible and had a much lower burden of proof to clear. He ended by saying "if you really want one - pay cash. Don't use a card or anything they can trace the purchase back to you with"
76 stolen games led to an arrest? Nowadays, every cheap china handheld or game stick contains a SD with a few thousand games on it, I don't even want to imagine what happens to those who own such a thing...😅
Okay, you covered this theme towards the end. Obvioursly, the law goes after the manifacturers and sellers in the first place, rather than after the customers who just buy and own such a device. But I still don't know how the companies manage it to avoid consequences. Maybe a case of corruption?
12:02 think copy rights are different in countries like Chin& , so they can get away with selling bootlegs. Retro companies like My Arcade, Atgames , Arcade 1up etc do it the legal way , because their a American companies
@@joezar33 the majority of the games on emulation devices aren't bootlegs, they're original ROMs. But please don't get me wrong, I'm not against emulation at all because many games would simply "die out" without it and it's an affordable way to enjoy them, but it still begs the question how the companies get away with it.
I had one of these. Mine was just the N64 Controller which came with the light gun nozzel built into the front of the game pad. Happy times pkaying all those retro games.
My parents got me one that looked like a penguin from a flea market when I was a kid, I think they might have gotten me the Super Joy 3 too but I forgot. I remember being super confused about the cartridge slot on it and why the NES games I have didn't fit in there. It was until many years later I learned that it was meant for Famicom games to be put in it, not NES games lol
There was a device similar to this called TV Boy that was sold for years in the '90s(at around the same time the SNES and Mega Drive were big) in massive nationwide stores such as Argos here in England. It wasn't a Famiclone like these, but a bootleg Atari 2600 with unlicenced Atari and Activision games. Later ones even had a unique feature in that they had an antenna and you could actually tune your TV to it via RF without actually needing to plug it into the TV, so if you were running on batteries and playing single player, it was completely wireless.
7:11-7:17 why does that sound better than the original i'm not joking that actually sounds fire bro! that bootleg 1-1 overworld theme is kinda golden! this is fire! 🔥 💯
The reason these Famiclones used relatively simple games was due to the mappers in more complex games. They could pull off Contra because it had only discrete logic chips for its memory mapping.
I remember having one of these (in like 2009) with some "Power Player" branding, but I don't know if it was this one specifically. I remember Circus Charlie being labelled as Toy Story and also "Circus Chablie" which I thought was the game's actual name. I also remember a "Teletubbies" (Mario Bros. with Mario and Luigi modified to be Teletubbies) and "Pokemon" (Popeye, of all things, with Popeye as Pikachu and Olive as a Pikachu with a bow, I think?) The lightgun games surprisingly worked pretty well. Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman, I played them quite a bit.
The Famiclone audio is due to two of the duty cycle modes being reversed.
What is a duty cycle mode?
@ZachAttackIsBack The NES has two square wave channels which have four different duty cycles. The 25% and 50% got swapped in many Famiclones.
They make these things cause nobody
Could afford a console that's high priced.
@@nehemiahpouncey3607 I was just explaining why the sound is off.
@@soundspark thanks.
Here in Brazil, consoles like this are often bought for the child because the father often doesn't have the money to buy a popular one. It was like that in the 90s and it remains that way to this day.
That's why TecToy (which has always been a Sega representative) still sells Master System and Atari Flashback here.
People here in the USA usually don't realize how expensive electronics are in other countries
This is a good point. Bootleg consoles like these can sometimes have a positive impact. For me, I got access to make Japanese-exclusives that happen to be great games.
Same here in Venezuela, I had one of those
I always liked how the Master System is still going strong in places.
#deadbeat dads
“Why did they model the controller after an N64 controller?”
Simple to make money. They never intended to sell this as a famiclone per se , they intended to trick people into thinking they were buying an N64 ( at the time a modern console ).
Ah yes, the "video game box" your grandmother gets you for christmas when you say you want an Xbox.
Good point. For some reason, I didn't think of that lol.
They sell a few and move on to another selling site .
I always wondered why it was model after a Nintendo 64 and a Sega Genesis controller also these things break easily but I remember me and my twin brother had a couple of these my mom used to buy these from the flea market and I always thought it was bizarre that has Star Wars picture on it because it clearly has no Star Wars games on it
Hispanic families at the time
The light gun that came with this was also used as a third party light gun for the PS1. (sometimes even came in a bundle with Die Hard Trilogy)
I would love to see you do a video on bootlegs!
@@mavericksetsuna7396 Lol, there was one I had in mind funnily enough! :D
@@Larry I will look forward to it!
hello you, it's been eight months guru larry, and i hope you're doing well
@@Omabatfartsbruh yeah he told me he's doing fine dont worry
3:00 the reason the batteries dont fit is pretty simple and is the case for lots of late-90s technology: it needs R6P batteries, these batteries are carbon zinc based and are just a tad but smaller than alkaline batteries.
if you're having trouble telling if a battery is an R6P (somehow... they say the kind on the battery itself most of the time), try seeing if you can squish the battery a little with your hands or compare it to an alkaline to see if its noticably lighter than an alkaline or not
bling alert
@@GroupNebula563 hi
@@romfighter hyelo
@@GroupNebula563 :)
Interesting, didn't know this. Thanks!
9:02 - So, fun fact, both Tekken (2) and Toy Story have already gotten bootleg NES ports before this system was released. Ouch...
Same with King of Fighters which Yie Ar Kung Fu was listed as.
Are we sure Nintendo didn't have
Nonthing to do with the arrest?
They move quickly don't they?
Update: they did with help from
The feds.
These things be sitting in the
Electronic aisle at Walmart.😂
@@nehemiahpouncey3607 The NES's patents expired sometime in the mid-2000s, meaning that nowadays famiclones only have to worry about legal issues if the games themselves are pirated.
The arrests occurred BEFORE the patent expiration.
Nintendo and the FBI thought they
Could possibly stop this from
Happening.
LOL I used to have one of these. I believe most companies are getting away with it now because the patent for the NES expired in 2005. I could be wrong though.
Patent on the hardware and software copyright are two very different legal issues.
Nintendo simply does not care enough to fight so many bootleg devices. It would be different if they would be on one market place, but amazon is not an online store, nor a market place, their are a web hoster with fulfillment center.
Fuqq Nintendo they not making money from ancient games made 35+ years ago no more@@sarowie
I'm not too familiar with legal stuff, but you may have a point. The Super Joy III was also very popular, so maybe that made them a bigger target.
@@pojr to add to your comment, I.. in california, remember these units at our mall at a kiosk. given this was an NY bootlegger running the show, i'd say popular is an understatement. these were EVERYWHERE in 2004
3:08 : I had a Power Player and trust me. They've FORGOT to make sure that the batteries fit inside. I've managed to make them fit, but inserting it into the machine was a nightmare. And that nightmare was even worst when you realize that the whole thing is too big to fit inside the socket. (I had to use some tools to pop it out.)
you’re not using the right kinda batteries, they gotta be zinc
@@GroupNebula563 yo thems bats gotta be green
You could have rigged up an external battery connector?
Famiclones only contain early Famicom titles not just because they use less ROM space but especially because they don't use mappers that were introduced later. So they just rely on basic hardware. Even bootleg cartridges that run on original NES hardware never contain games like Castlevania 3 because of the mappers.
This is a very good point! It's much easier to use games that didn't need mappers. There's some exceptions, like Contra. Maybe it was worth putting in a great game like that, despite using a mapper.
It probably also has to do with many of them using the same Nintendo-on-a-Chip (NoaC) clone hardware as the core of the system.
Anyone with the capability of actual cloning the system hardware themselves would have no trouble cloning a mapper.
I was a 13 year old kid when the shit hit the fan on these consoles. I remember a dude trying to sell one of these to my local mall. So my narc-ass self went and called Nintendo (something I did a lot as a kid, god help me) and I reported it to them. I remember some time later hearing about some dude who sold these things getting arrested and I always wondered if I was responsible.
I am no longer a narc.
I will not be telling you any of my secrets
Lmao. "Mister Nintendo, there's something you need to know about"
Eh, it is what it is, we were all taught as kids to "trust the system" and "if you see something bad, tell an adult" and some of us (me included) actually believed in it.
"You did this."
How did they respond to your report? I wonder how they handled it.
I had a Power Joy! Got it for Christmas in the late 90’s. I was in my mid-teens and didn’t ask for it or any other video game stuff that I can recall (I had a PlayStation at the time and still regularly played my SNES), but I think my grandma just got it as like a stocking stuffer kinda thing. I remember it being kinda fun as I hadn’t played my NES in years and this was a neat way to recapture the 8-bit days of my youth (even though like half the games didn’t work and the ones that did weren’t all that great).
I'm actually more familiar with the Power Joy than I am the Super Joy III, because I actually owned the former as a kid. The Power Joy is a little more ethical, because they don't try to pad out the game list, and are actually honest about that you're getting.
These Bootleg Multicarts were Awesome as a Kid. You can fail to understand 75+ games while not knowing what game you were actually playing
I'll admit I have fond memories of units like these. It really felt like you had a lot of games in the palm of your hands.
America is wild, 5 years in prison for selling a bootleg console that hd software that was not easy to get legally (at least the Famicom Stuff). I have seen news stories of people robbing gas stations with a gun get less time.
Copyright laws are harsh so that the poor billion dollar corporations that own all those properties don't lose any money
@@limemaster4942ok commie
I've seen many, many child rapists get less time.
America was built under a common law system which protects property not people.
America was built under a common law system that protects property not people.
Its weird how after being infamous for decades now, the ROM still hasn't been dumped. Like, most famiclones and multicarts have been dumped but this one hasn't.
Not EVERYONE thought these consoles were bootleg and bad quality. In fact, my own parents, many years ago bought one of these pieces of crap and ruined Christmas for me and my brother one year by basing the entire round of family gifts around it as if this was some kind of main event big time surprise gift we were all supposed to love and be excited for. Me and my brother instantly knew this was a pile of crap, but our parents got this thing, expecting it to be as big for us back then as a Playstation 5 would be for people today. To the point that our parents even got mad that we didn't appreciate it the way were supposed to.
Very true. There might have been some people who weren't aware. Most people I knew were aware that the units were bootlegs, but it was still worth the purchase.
Did you express they were crap as bootlegs rather than being old?
you were a bad son
Yeah, I can't really imagine how that would feel...
My family always stuck to the actual consoles when buying games, and most of the time at leaat *one* game would land. Usually most of the titles would, even if it was bt sheer luck of buying an actually good licensed title.
I think the worst was my birthday one year, where I got to pick out one DS title and my parents picked out the others.
I walked away with Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, the not great Star Trek: Tactical Command (because my Dad and I enjoyed playing the PC titles way back when), and my mom got Xiaolin Showdown (a cartoon that she vaguely remembered me watching), a *throughly* terrible game that I consider the worst I have ever owned.
Never told her, of course, I wasn't that kid, but I am very glad she never asked about it, as I gave up after stage one past the tutorial of constantly falling into horrendous hit detection pits at the speed of a dessicated slug.
This is like when I asked my parents for a GameBoy and they got me...Dinosaur Attack by Radio Shack (similar to a lot of Tiger LCD games). They were sympathetic though because they didn't realize what I was asking for. Got the GameBoy on my next birthday. And it turned out...Dinosaur Attack wasn't actually half bad, for a 15-min time-waster.
My dad bought one of these in 2004 at a mall just because it looked cool. He knew it was a bootleg, and that we kiddos would enjoy it. And by golly we did enjoy it.
This system was my introduction to the game Binary Land. So I have this system to thank
My mother gave me that famiclone as a Christmas present back in 2001, it only lasted 7 months, after that it just stopped working. At 12 years old I couldn't feel more disappointed and furious.
I had one of those as a kid. The second player controller and gun disinagrated. The other controller worked. Then stopped working after a couple years.
The key (legal) mistake of that console was that it was *ordered* from China. I.e. importer _requested_ someone to make it. Other bootlegs are _imported_, i.e. someone requested shipment of some already produced and branded units.
The difference is that in the first case the US citizen left an order for the production of knowingly pirated consoles, while in the second case he is a legal importer with all (legal) reasons to believe that the games were licensed by the manufacturing company, and it is almost impossible to prove malice (because, thanks to the presumption of innocence, it is still necessary to prove that Shenzhen Dumb Brick United Manufacturing Co, whose entire legal history began and ended the month before last on Taobao, did NOT obtain the licenses - and, more importantly, that the importer knew about it).
They're not doing anything to stay out of trouble. They simply exist through obscurity. In the 2000s I remember there was a different kiosk every couple of months at the local mall who was selling a completely different, similar thing. I doubt any of them got in trouble, and this particular guy was probably just extremely unlucky. The reality is that these companies don't really "care" or have time to deal with this, because it's not an actual problem they can do much about if they were even inclined. Hell, when I was a kid (over 20 years ago) I used to sell burnt CDs filled with every NES, Genesis, and SNES game on it for like $5, I would even organize them, put recommended lists, and put the emulators with custom configs and a little splash screen with artwork I drew. People would ask me "Isn't this illegal? Aren't you worried about getting in trouble?" And I'd say "I dunno, probably, but no, I'm not," and I wasn't.
Either that, or these new Famiclones are not getting caught by Nintendo and the FBI because kiosk sellers are being really careful not to let them get popular enough to get into the news (as Nintendo seems to only go after fan games and pirate products that get popular enough that sites like IGN and GameSpot decide to report on it, which makes them a clear target).
Good point. Even with the Super Joy III, while Yonatan Cohen was arrested, I don't know exactly what his role was in the sales of it. He may not have been the man behind the Super Joy III. Who knows who was actually in charge.
I still have several burned discs with emulators and games on them (Nester DC, Dream SNES, Sega Megadrive, etc)... all made to play on my Dreamcast!
@@pojr yes it does seem like the click-baity title is also a journalistic faux pas
Yeah, I have to agree. The guy that got busted must have done something with the Super Joy III that got him in the spotlight and in the crosshairs of the law, as most of these do tend to fly under the radar.
funny story, an nes bootleg toy story game actually exists
I had one of these. The cart port was only for using cartridges that would sometimes come with these devices.
My "Power Joy" had that.
I remember aggressive salesmen trying to sell these things at a mall kiosk back in the day. Word quickly got around about how bad they were.
Funny mine still works.
I think the reason clones are thriving today is beacause there are simply too many clones, back then the early 2000 is was all new so easier to target (espacially if you sell them directly from the US), now those companies are located in China and most of them are short lived so by the time any legal action could be taken, the company is gone / recreated under another name.
Also trying to protect the IP of retro games is a losing battle IMO it's too late for that, internet connections / storage are so good you can basically get every games of a system in minutes, maybe why Nintendo are focusing hard on protecting the Switch right now and offering older games as a service (Switch Online).
Were those the first bootleg consoles sold in the US? I live in Panama , I got an NES late 80s but bootleg consoles were already sold everywhere outside US, but they were well made, very sturdy and good quality materials, and were actually hardware clones and not a system on a chip, later when the system on a chip ( like the one system in this video) appeared the quality went down, although I had an original NES most of my games were famicon pirates that I played with an adapter 😅
That could be true. In fact, sites that offer ROMs that are copyrighted are basically like a hydra, even if Nintendo and their lawyers manage to shut some down by threatening legal action, more will end up popping up over the internet. Same with fan games, as while they can get the creators of them to stop development, if the game was released, fans will end up releasing it on torrent and other websites. Nintendo is basically fighting a futile battle that only causes more sites to replace those taken down and fans to retaliate by uploading downloads of fan games that got C&D'd.
the ones today are not clones. as all the hardware is there own and there using emulation.
I have one hooked up to my television right now actually. Lol. I got it out of storage a couple weeks ago to play "Bird Week," and 'Space Invaders.'
Yep, those were games that were on my unit too lol.
Oh god does this take me back to the early into late 2000s when I begged my parents to buy me one of those Super Joy III/Power Player bootleg consoles when we stumbled upon it at a kiosk at our local mall.
I remember even buying one from a flea market during a family vacation trip in Orlando, Florida.
Learning about the history of this thing and how it ultimately led to an arrest was just wild to discover when I got older. It was even crazier to find out that the Super Joy III literally took the same menu SFXs from Action 52 as well.
It’s one thing about piracy but these games are 40 years old, and game companies need to understand that they should stop sitting on them and crying foul.
Today, even on Facebook, I was seeing ads for a device that plays 44,000 classic games.
I know a LOT of people who used to own these kind of bootleg consoles, and they always wondered how they can make 10000 original games in one affordable system only to find out that theres a bunch of repeats. At least Action 52 kept some originality in its 52 games!
(Also, big fan of your content, I love these kind of topics you delve into, Subscribed!)
I went to California many years ago and bought one at the "Great Mall" for my godson. I never saw something like that in Puerto Rico on those days. Now we have similar units everywhere.
Yeah, rather than 1 unit being sold at malls, now we see a bunch of them, like at the Great NY State Fair lol.
That doesn't surprise me, southern California has anything you are looking for in the world lol. The amount of people in Los Angeles alone is mind boggling.
There is a kiosk is my local mall that has been selling bootleg NES minis for a few years now.
they have to be old stock.where would they even get the nes chips in 2024. if there true famiclones. unless another huge stash was found.
Great video! I remember seeing these for sale at a kiosk in the mall of Georgia. It was a new nice mall at the time. Was surprised to see bootlegs getting sold there. Also remember the guy selling them looked a lot like Yanaton or his cousin. Wild times
Basically, Nintendo just got overwhelmed with going after so many devices and paying lawyers to send cease and desist letters that it ended up costing more than it could ever make them back. They still go after major players like high profile ROM sites like emuparadise and recently vimms lair
Can you put the full story, "Vimm's Lair has been asked to remove many games from The Vault on behalf of Nintendo, Sega, Lego, and the ESA." Because Sega is also taking offence againts rom lately.
@@Mikael404 just tells you sega is getting ready to relese another retro system. only time they seem to get angry about roms.
@@gogereaver349 You do know that's also same With Nintendo they have Nes/Snes mini.
They also have classic's in Switch system and when 3DS had store they were filled with classic's.
So yeah by your logic Nintendo has that right to take roms down from other sites.
You do have to remember that only the ones developed by those companies are removed so if Mega Man's or/and Residen Evil trilogy got removed it would be A Capcom who request it.
@@Mikael404 there roms yes. but not every rom as they dont own the right to them. many right holders are no longer a thing.
@@gogereaver349 That's what I was saying they only can remove those they own rights to.
If other roms like Megaman or Castlevania got removed it would be Capcom or/and Konami that requested it.
Yes roms are under the copyright law that's hasn't gone anywhere especially if the studio or it's owner exist.
Like Palcom was owned by Capcom until "merging" happened and Ultra same thing with Konami.
NO WAY The Super Joy Power Player!
I had one of those! It was scuffed, but it was introduction to some NES games like Contra. Loved it. Super happy to see a video on it! I had a pS1, an N64, but I spent SO many hours with this goober. I always found it weird how the genesis type controller had that weird screw-in joystick lol. Mine also came with a light gun as well. Had hours of fun.
“What are you in for?”
“Bootleg video game consoles.”
This is a fucking screenplay, dawg!
In The Netherlands they even sold on television (Tel Sell channel). It was called Arcade Action and looked like a N64.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to found the particular commercial online, it was so bad.
6:31 But what you don't know is that it's actually from an unlicensed game called Bookyman, which is from Caltron 6 in 1.
What’s funny is that is exact model bootleg console was my very first game console when I was 4 or 5. I think my Grandma got it for me. My first time ever paying Mario or Contra was on this thing. (My mom didn’t like me playing contra though because it had guns in it). It’s also weird how you showing the distorted bad audio is what triggers my nostalgia rather than the correct audio. Also speaking of the joystick on the main controller, I ended up, breaking it off as a kid because I could never figure out what it was for lol. Thanks for unlocking a core memory with this video.
Bought this in a Tennessee mall around 99/2000 … started making a burning rubber smell and started smoking after a couple months into use , had to throw it away of course
Mine still works.
Something insane is you can actually buy a portable Famiclone at Walmart which has the typical bootleg jank you'd expect, like one game is literally named "Assart" on the unit, and another has Pikachu all over it for some reason.
I had one of these back in the day. I got it for Christmas of 2002. I liked it because I didn’t have a NES at the time, and grew up with the Genesis instead. I wonder if all of the super joys had the same issue mine did. The dig dug and golf roms had a few letters mixed around so whenever you got a water hazard in golf it would say “waner hazard” and when you got a bunker it would say butker. xD I will say the sound is better than what you find in some of todays bootleg consoles. In some of them, the music plays too fast and it’s up a pitch.
From what I can tell, the hardware manufacturers (at least the decent ones) usually sell them to smaller companies who put the roms on them, perhaps even shell companies. Not that you can really sue people in China either way, but when one of the small ones gets attention or banned on Amazon, Ebay, etc., they just shut it down and make another. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
I had one of these, my parents got it from a kiosk at the mall. Had to get rid of it because one day when I plugged it in, smoke started coming out of the AC adapter
Can someone tell me what the penguin game at 9:23 is? I remember playing it when I was younger but don't remember the name
It's Binary Land.
BTW, while the first TwinBee game didn't get released in the US initially, the 2nd game did as 'Stinger', and is a lot of fun.
I had either this one or a copy of it as a kid over twenty years ago. For the year i had it before it broke i had a great time with it. Always wondered if the main controller could actually take real cartridges so I finally got an answer.
Never thought I'd see Donkey Kong Jr as Green Man.
They didn't sell them in stores cause
The companies would sue them.
Nintendo would be like oh hell naw!!!
Yup. If you ever want to play as green Donkey Kong Jr, you can only do so with "Monkey"!
Despite knowing what it was, I really wanted one. Unfortunately they were not readily available where I lived in the 1990s. I found one seller in a Mall when I was on vacation, but I could not justify the asking price.
I eventually bought one online in a private transaction and (after moving cross-country) they started turning up at thrift shops with some frequency. I now have multiple different models.
They are still sold new at retail around the Christmas holiday season. My latest acquisition cost about $25 and it has a decent selection of games; not all of which are pirated.
There are so many of these that Nintendo couldn't ever go after all of them, they are like weed farms they take a few down and a few dozen more pop up.
Very true, it's similar to ROM sites. Nintendo went after a few to scare other ROM sites, but there's too many of them.
@@pojr Indeed, and they can also be like the hydra of Greek mythology. If Nintendo manages to get one pulled from market, more will be created to takes it place, like how when one of the hydra's heads is cut off, more will grow in its place.
My aunt bought a similar 1000-in-1 console for me because she knew I liked video games. It had a few decent games, but it was glitchy and obviously bootleg. I enjoyed it and took it to college with me before misplacing it.
I've had one of these things for the last 10 years that my brother-in-law got me as a gift. I never gave it much thought other than it was just another bootleg. Cool to actually see there was a story behind it and someone else going through the device. The genesis controller had a stick you could thread into the d-pad and that was supposed to be your joystick but it was awful, much like the rest of it.
I remember owning one of these. It almost caught my house on fire after frying itself. Probably the best thing that could happen too it, lol
Around where I live, I would see these guys at the local malls selling these things from kiosks. They always appeared to be Eastern European guys with thick foreign accents telling passers by about 76,000 games. I was even briefly tempted to take a closer look as I thought it looked like it could be a usable cheap N64 style controller. To this day I didn't know the analog stick was not functional. I watched one person argue with them they were selling bootlegged games and were breaking copyright, and the guy defended it stating they are all legally copyrighted, going so far as to show the copyright notice on the game screen! "Look! It is copyright! It is ok!" It was pretty comical - the guy was adamant that the fact the game showed a copyright on screen meant it was completely legal. Out of a matter of curiosity, I called Nintendo's 800 number to ask them about it , and even then, the early 2000s, their rep took the call very seriously, asking for the exact mall and location. I gave them the info, and a week later, those guys were no longer at that mall. I assumed Nintendo's legal department called the mall offices making threats, but I could never confirm if that ever happened.
I remember playing this as a kid, it was actually the introduction to some of the old games. Did not know that they were stolen but it is fun while the controller lasted
I remember a kiosk at my local mall selling these at one point. They even had a TV set up with it, and I played it briefly using that terrible knock off N64 controller.
While was there, a woman who bought one earlier that decided she wanted to return it (it hadn't been opened as far as I know), and the guy at the kiosk was giving her a hard time about it, and she was saying that she specifically asked him about their return policy earlier and he had told her it could be returned. It was an interesting exchange since it was clearly (to me) a shady kiosk.
Here in Argentina we had various Famiclones the back in the 90s. The Electrolab Family Game was very popular and they sold it as an "original" unit, it was very well built :)
2:09 Well after I got a little pissed about how misleading the ATGames Sega Genesis classic was by saying it had 80 games when really it had maybe about 40 games and the other 40 games were Sega Genesis games but they weren't like ones from the classic era and just a bunch of random stock games like chess and disc golf and other stock games that were never released on the Sega Genesis before and probably just made for this device specifically just to try to advertise they have 80 games when really they don't. I thought that was awful but it's a falsely advertised 76,000 games is a whole lot worse
I remember having one of these as a kid but mine was red. To quote Jontron, it was called the "Power Cracker" and came with a surprisingly functional light gun for Duck Hunt. I even got my first perfect score in Duck Hunt through that "Power Cracker" before I finally found a working NES to play the real deal with.
(0:00) OK… right off the bat that took me back! I saw them for sale (in around 2010 to 2011) at a ‘3Stars’ shop near where I lived, they had a stack of them near their shopfront and had one set up with a small 14" CRT TV, but other than that they sold cheap off-brand stuff. At the time, I was a teen and didn't know it was modelled after both Nintendo 64 and Mega Drive controllers, but did notice the fake control stick which was broken on the shop's demo unit. I never bought one, but did experience some of the bootleg games you showed through one of those Chinese ODM portable DVD players that had a built-in NES emulator with a ‘Super Game 300’ disc and controller modelled after a Mega Drive 6 button controller.
(11:53) That setup with the two TVs looks a lot like the mall kiosks I saw here in Singapore in around 2018 to 2019 that sold set-top boxes preconfigured for pay TV piracy. Part of their MO involved hiding the fact that it's piracy and instead baiting unsuspecting customers with what appeared to be a good deal compared to actually paying for Singtel TV or StarHub TV. Linux Tech Tips did a video on the boxes themselves, but they basically ran uncertified Android TV OS (or Android for tablets) with a custom UX of poor quality, Kodi (legitimate) but configured with third-party plugin repositories that provided plugins for pay TV piracy, and/or had a low-quality pay TV piracy app preloaded. I do remember one of my uncles having one of those piracy boxes, and that ran Android for tablets with an extremely outdated version of Nova Launcher along with a fake baseband (so it always shows ‘No SIM card’ and ‘No service’ in the notification centre). The services themselves are still being sold on Lazada to the point where many people buying them led to them being algorithmically recommended to me on my Lazada homepage when I'm signed in.
I saw these at the mall where I lived in 2004 and I called Nintendo about it. They actually told me they’d look into it. This was a great watch.
Recently, there were these cheap handheld that were being sold at Walmart and Five Below that were Famiclones with obviously pirated games. When the word got spread, the handhelds were re-released with several of those games taken off, but there were still a lot of obvious games on it
I actually remember seeing this thing on sale once at this big gathering of vendors. Most of them were selling things like antiques and retro stuff and it was mostly outdoors but for some reason the people selling this had power and had a little tv and console hooked up
My cousin had one of these! Bahaha
It was kind to odd though cause he had modern consoles but I think it was just a random gift he got.
We use to play Contra on it.
Now that I think of it bootleg games always played a part of my early years growing up
My uncle in Mexico use to repair, rent out and assemble arcade cabinets that used some sort of emulator system called SONICTEAM(I vaguely recall this cause it would flash the info on screen real quick each time you’d turn the console on)
And it would have a thousand games….literally!
It was packed with countless arcade ports under the Sun including a HEAVY amount of Japanese imports so I got to experience some cool stuff when I’d visit in the 2000s.
Overall it ran pretty well! And this was in the mid 2000s so whatever was running the system had the power to do so.
Pretty much all the arcades in town had it or some other emulator in some form
(Heck don’t get me started on the cabinets that had a first gen Xbox emulator built in)
I remember having something like this in the mid 2000s as a kid - At some point the cheap power supply had died, and I realized it had the same size barrel jack as my mom's keyboard synth's power supply. Only problem was I didn't realize it was a totally different voltage and I let the magic smoke out. Crazy I somehow didn't start an electrical fire.
This was a small portion of my childhood lmao. At the time, this, ps1 , gba, and the N64 were the ones I had eventually being phased out by the PS2 . I don't know what happened to this.
NES clones are cheap and decent to me. I remember some versions sold at mall kiosk even had a light gun with Duck Hunt.
Have you ever heard of the mini game anniversary edition? It's basically a famiclone that looks like a NES classic
It says it has 620 games and I keep seeing this thing at all the malls I go to
Some of the companys only put games that the copyrights have ended and are now freeware to whoever wants them
0:54 my god that smile is magical
Soulja boy sold bootleg consoles and nothing happened to him
I sell sf 2000 and retro 400 in 1 and r36s handhelds my city don't care if I sell on weekends lol
I fell into a coma right before he did that. When I came back to reality my mind was pretty screwed up and I was hallucinating for days. After I started to feel like I was back to normal I saw the story about Soulja Boy and his emulator console and it made me think I was still out of my mind.
@@davidchavez5418I’m reporting you to Nintendo and the FBI. Not because you’re selling copyrighted games, but because you don’t choose to sell better emulators. Those are trash
Did he not also claim to own Atari? 😅
Something did happen to him though, he got a cease and desist from Nintendo and his souljawatch website was taken by Nintendo and for awhile actually redirected to the 3DS section of their website. It got bought after the domain expired and now it’s a “best watches under $1,000” website. It isn’t owned by him anymore though.
I Remember Having These in 2004 at a Flea Market, Good Times Playing Super Mario Bros, Contra, Pac-Man, and a Few Famicom Games That Didn't Release in America, But Later On I Realized That There is a Different Versions of Power Joy III Games, Like Aladdin III was Replaced by Games Knights Which is Game Called Ikki for The Famicom and Front Line for Famicom was Replaced by Duck Hunt Clone or Hack, Man So Many Variations of the Power Joy III Also Some Music on These Uses The Duty Cycle Swap, It's Strange Because Listening to The Music on These Games Sounds Good or Different From a Real NES.
Pojr console when?
This was sold in the main mall area of the Harlequin, Watford, UK in 2003. It was a small table and TV set-up where people could walk up and try it out. In fact, the guy there coerced people to try it out to buy because he had a tonne of them. He was set up right outside what was then the GAME store.
As a 12 year old I knew this was bootleg, but decided to go over and “play test” it because it had Super Mario Bros, a game I hadn’t played for a good few years at that point. The guy eagerly watched me as I had a good go on the crappy N64-style blue controller, and then said thank you and walked off 🤣
One of the aspects of the sound issues is the duty cycles of the square waves, they get interpreted differently (meaning a not intended square duty cycle is being used resulting in a different sounding timbre) on certain console revisions i.e. common in Brazil or rip-off consoles like this.
In many emulators you can re-enact those sound quirks, or reverse them to normal instead.
I was just thinking about this right now. Even to 5-6 year old me it stood out as cheap and flimsy, but it also was my first exposure to Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, and Contra.
I actually remember having a bootleg Famiclone that has ten games by default and countless additional games like Adventure Island, a Super Mario Bros. ROM Hack called Pandamar, Dig Dug, "Bomb Man", etc. That, and there were no repeats, as well as a hidden version of Duck Hunt in th base console.
I used to love buying these type of consoles back in the early 2000’s .. good times
I had a similar bootleg console when I was a kid. It was great and the highlight of my day playing it. Great times.
Im more impressed with how you are able to name every game and lvl. Super cool vid!
I think they're trying to pull a we're only preserving these games and letting the future generation play them type deal to try and get around the legal issues
I grew up with one of these units. I played Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Jr., Karataka, Ikki, and Muscle the most on the unit. I almost considered buying another bootleg console to play some Famicom cartridges I bought years ago, but I'm going to leave them be.
The power pack being broken I:m sure wasn't because of the seller, from what I've heard these things were made so cheap that they not only broke but they caught fire extremely often
Really enjoying your videos Pojr.
I remember seeing these things at discount dollar shops here in Australia back in the early 2000's and thinking to myself ''what the hell is that? It's playing 8-bit games on a Nintendo 64 controller?'' The reason why it's not really policed anymore like it was back in the early 2000's I think is because the video market today is over saturated with cheap, knock off retro game clone consoles these days like how many unlicensed Mega Drive/Genesis consoles are on sale at the moment and most of them from China?👍
What is 10:14 a screenshot of?
Our local mall had a kiosk selling these sus AF consoles when I was in high school. I almost bought one but I knew at some level they were illegal.
Asked my attorney uncle about it and his response was that knowingly buying bootleg or pirated media is a crime just as much as producing it. Said for this type of thing it's rare that prosecutors go after the customers when a seller is shut down, but it has happened, usually in cases where the product in question was so blatantly obviously not genuine that no rational adult would argue otherwise (ie prima facie that you purchased it knowingly). Said while possible albeit highly unlikely a customer would prosecuted, a civil suit was definitely possible and had a much lower burden of proof to clear.
He ended by saying "if you really want one - pay cash. Don't use a card or anything they can trace the purchase back to you with"
76 stolen games led to an arrest? Nowadays, every cheap china handheld or game stick contains a SD with a few thousand games on it, I don't even want to imagine what happens to those who own such a thing...😅
Okay, you covered this theme towards the end. Obvioursly, the law goes after the manifacturers and sellers in the first place, rather than after the customers who just buy and own such a device. But I still don't know how the companies manage it to avoid consequences. Maybe a case of corruption?
12:02 think copy rights are different in countries like Chin& , so they can get away with selling bootlegs. Retro companies like My Arcade, Atgames , Arcade 1up etc do it the legal way , because their a American companies
@@joezar33 the majority of the games on emulation devices aren't bootlegs, they're original ROMs. But please don't get me wrong, I'm not against emulation at all because many games would simply "die out" without it and it's an affordable way to enjoy them, but it still begs the question how the companies get away with it.
America was built under a common law system that protects property not people. Hence, the harsh penalty.
Almost all people from developing countries played Famiclones. I remember Micro Genius Famiclone. That’s the only console sold at my place.
I had one of these. Mine was just the N64 Controller which came with the light gun nozzel built into the front of the game pad. Happy times pkaying all those retro games.
This channel boutta BLOW U P. Glad I was here before 10k :)
Wise move to use a different power cable and neither of those things it came with. Those look like absolute hazards.
My parents got me one that looked like a penguin from a flea market when I was a kid, I think they might have gotten me the Super Joy 3 too but I forgot. I remember being super confused about the cartridge slot on it and why the NES games I have didn't fit in there. It was until many years later I learned that it was meant for Famicom games to be put in it, not NES games lol
I'm more shocked the FBI got involved.
Here in Brazil we had the "Polystation".
I have one too, in Indonesia. Crazy to think that they have wider distribution than the original NES.
There was a device similar to this called TV Boy that was sold for years in the '90s(at around the same time the SNES and Mega Drive were big) in massive nationwide stores such as Argos here in England. It wasn't a Famiclone like these, but a bootleg Atari 2600 with unlicenced Atari and Activision games.
Later ones even had a unique feature in that they had an antenna and you could actually tune your TV to it via RF without actually needing to plug it into the TV, so if you were running on batteries and playing single player, it was completely wireless.
Just lookin at this, I can hear JonTron saying “let’s boot it up and see something life changing.”
Congratulations you reached 20k subs!
You may not be aware, but for those who are not from the CIS countries, the story of such a pirated NES console as Dendy will be an amazing discovery.
7:11-7:17 why does that sound better than the original
i'm not joking
that actually sounds fire bro! that bootleg 1-1 overworld theme is kinda golden! this is fire! 🔥 💯
The reason these Famiclones used relatively simple games was due to the mappers in more complex games. They could pull off Contra because it had only discrete logic chips for its memory mapping.
Why did this guy only get 5 years where a guy who made a flash cart has to pay millions or more back to Nintendo that did not have ROMs pre installed?
I remember having one of these (in like 2009) with some "Power Player" branding, but I don't know if it was this one specifically. I remember Circus Charlie being labelled as Toy Story and also "Circus Chablie" which I thought was the game's actual name. I also remember a "Teletubbies" (Mario Bros. with Mario and Luigi modified to be Teletubbies) and "Pokemon" (Popeye, of all things, with Popeye as Pikachu and Olive as a Pikachu with a bow, I think?)
The lightgun games surprisingly worked pretty well. Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman, I played them quite a bit.
Remember Gamestation console? PS1 Famiclone xD. I grew up a lot with Famiclones in India. Nostalgia ❤
It's always funny when bootleg consoles pretend It's a console from a newer generation, but it's really an NES lol.