@@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 😅
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!
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.
'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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
@@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.
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.
@@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.
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.
Got one of these from a friend too. Was amazed at how they pulled off such a feat at the price of a burger or whatever. Gave me confidence to upgrade to a Anbernic RG35XX (beast)... these handheld devices simply rock. Loved the video!
I got the same console hours ago and you posted a video, what a coincedence :D :D I was planning to dissasemble it to see whats inside but now i dont have to. Thank you for the quality videos you make :)
i really enjoyed watching this, it's great seeing you have so much fun too, nice to see some unknown titles lol , i was hoping you could do a future video and modify one of those and turn it into a mini console with controller support , would be awesome to see what you come up with.
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.
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.
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.
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 think the issue with the audio is a common issue that plagues bootleg famiclones. The 2a03 clones tend to have the pulse width bytes swapped which results in the 25% and 75% widths being backward. While this functionally doesn't really sound too different, compared to how you may be used to hearing it, it will sound just different enough.
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.
I bought a pair of these back around Christmas for $7 total and I was honestly impressed for the cost. The duplicate games cut down on the 400 game value, but I simply cannot complain much considering the price. Probably about 150 decent games. Good ol' Ali Express. Glad to see you do this review, since so few of my friends believe me about this game device's existence.
I have the same exact thing, and it gaves me tons of amusement when waiting in the car for the kids to finish school (mine runs properly). Just playing 1942 for half an hour already makes you realize that it was a good buy. I love that little red thing.
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.
some sellers also sell them with an additional gamepad you can connect directly to the thing and play with a friend (works both on the screen of a console or on tv), it's only about a dollar more expensive
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
38:00 *doesn't mean its anything new just means the board was made that year* (also revision could just be the board reshaped for the plastic shell/ to use less components so its mostly likely the same old schema still)
7:13 I bought a red and yellow one last year and the music is proper speed and the game play is very good. I also noticed that mine came with a different set of games. And mine has music on the English menu. There are many sellers of these. I wonder if they are all different.
Adrian, there are two options: first, the handheld console only with AV and USB cable, and second with controller included, for 2 players gaming, for 2 bucks more. The controller plugs in the Micro USB connector.
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!
Thanks Adrian. We have one of these, I bought it for my daughter but she doesn't play these "old" games. I had Raid on Bungling Bay on my C64 - we played it a lot.
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.
Back in around 2000 or 2001 teen me discovered that the players are stored in an array, so I thought, what happens if I set that to 3, implement keyboard bindings and set the spawn point in the levels... IT FRIGGIN WORKED! And then I made a 4 player version, a 6 player and then an 8 player version...
Mine has a different character inside the battery compartment. It's a red Ink Stamp, not an etching in the mould, so I assume it's the QC operator 'signing' it after assembly? (It'a a Cat character who has caught a tasty Fish).
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.
Even with all the compromises, that you can get a standalone handheld gaming machine that plays Super Mario Bros 3 acceptably well for less than the cost of a meal at McDonalds is a bit of a miracle.
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.
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.
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 😊
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.
I just looked this console up on Ali Express shipped to the UK. £0.40! Yep 40 pence (plus shipping though) but even with shipping it's only £1.62 to ship. Crazy!
I have one of these that I picked up from a local flea market, as well as a couple of other similar models that I got from Five Below over the past few years. Each one has a slightly different lineup of games (with more than a handful of duplicates, given), and for a cheap knock-off product, I was actually quite surprised at the quality. The ones I have suffer from the duty cycle swap bug, of course, but otherwise it's a pretty decent famiclone handheld. It'd definitely keep kids busy on a road trip for a bit.
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 BL-5C battery if I recall was first used in the Nokia 3310/3330 when they were launched. Some of the newer Nokia phones still use a BL-5C but are a different size now.
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
Oh my godess, for that price I actually must get myself one - no matter the glitches in video and audio, it's still a nice pocket NES I can get entertainment worth much more - and the possibility that in future someone finds a way to mod this to be able to load your own ROM's from SD card, or something, is thrilling.
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.
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.
Those flash chips are a little complicated, the original NES used separate buses for the CPU and PPU roms but these clones developed something they called "onebus" for this which somehow interleaves the data into a single chip and manages the access timing etc. It may be as simple as literally interleaving the bytes but I never got round to looking into this stuff in detail. There's probably also some metadata in a weird format in there you'd have to fiddle with to get it to point to the right places.
I bought the "same" thing from the dollar store a few months ago, it has vastly different games on it, it does have a few official NES roms on it, excite bike, TMNT, paper boy and a few others, but no Mario, or contra. There's a few modern shortwave radios that use the BL5C batty 15:27 that chirping is actually apart of the normal sound effect for that weapon. Its a little bit off but even the normal NES has that sound.
17:30 It’s the “Otto hotel”! This references a YT and Twitch.TV legend Jerma985, when he played a NES bootleg multi in one cart on hardware and came across this game. His dog’s name is Otto, and he joked with his chat about how the hotel sign looked like it said Otto’s Hotel. Jerma is a gem and it brought me joy seeing Otto’s Hotel again lol. These multi in one carts are all the same, but I’ve seen them enough they almost are nostalgic for me.
I got one of these a couple of years back £10 with a controller. It was fun for a while to play the old NES games. .How much better would it be witha micro sd slot. Would have only added a few £1's more.
The multichip FLASH and RAM is interesting... never knew about those. Looks like this part is obsolete as far as ST Micro is concerned but that isn't stopping this manufacturer!
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
"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
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
I never seen someone trying to change the roms of this things. Could be a cool project.
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.
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.
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).
Can you send??
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
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?
Hacking that into a TV would make a great video, man! Thanks for sharing this with us.
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.
raid on bungling bay was one of my favorite C64 games when I was a kid.
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!
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
Contra here in Sweden is named Probotector and you play as Robots.. Thanks for another greatt video! Greatings from Sweden.. 😊🇸🇪
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!
I was watching patiently just for the tear down 😂
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.
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.
Got one of these from a friend too. Was amazed at how they pulled off such a feat at the price of a burger or whatever. Gave me confidence to upgrade to a Anbernic RG35XX (beast)... these handheld devices simply rock. Loved the video!
I got the same console hours ago and you posted a video, what a coincedence :D :D I was planning to dissasemble it to see whats inside but now i dont have to. Thank you for the quality videos you make :)
Thanks!
You're welcome! Thank you for the super thanks!
Mine arrived today - less than 2 weeks! Pretty darn impressed! Even more so given the price.
i really enjoyed watching this, it's great seeing you have so much fun too, nice to see some unknown titles lol , i was hoping you could do a future video and modify one of those and turn it into a mini console with controller support , would be awesome to see what you come up with.
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.
I bought one of these in 2019 when you showed one before. Still works well and battery holds its charge for ages!
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.
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.
I ordered one of these yesterday after watching your video. £2.87 including shipping!
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 think the issue with the audio is a common issue that plagues bootleg famiclones. The 2a03 clones tend to have the pulse width bytes swapped which results in the 25% and 75% widths being backward. While this functionally doesn't really sound too different, compared to how you may be used to hearing it, it will sound just different enough.
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.
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
My wife got me this last Christmas as a joke. I love mine. :D
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
I bought a pair of these back around Christmas for $7 total and I was honestly impressed for the cost. The duplicate games cut down on the 400 game value, but I simply cannot complain much considering the price. Probably about 150 decent games. Good ol' Ali Express. Glad to see you do this review, since so few of my friends believe me about this game device's existence.
I have the same exact thing, and it gaves me tons of amusement when waiting in the car for the kids to finish school (mine runs properly).
Just playing 1942 for half an hour already makes you realize that it was a good buy.
I love that little red thing.
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.
some sellers also sell them with an additional gamepad you can connect directly to the thing and play with a friend (works both on the screen of a console or on tv), it's only about a dollar more expensive
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.
15:13 in Germany, Contra was heavily censored, you played as a robot against other robots and it was called Probotector.
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
It's amazing what you can do without those pesky labour laws, environmental regulations, human rights, copyright, etc.!
38:00 *doesn't mean its anything new just means the board was made that year*
(also revision could just be the board reshaped for the plastic shell/ to use less components so its mostly likely the same old schema still)
7:13 I bought a red and yellow one last year and the music is proper speed and the game play is very good. I also noticed that mine came with a different set of games. And mine has music on the English menu. There are many sellers of these. I wonder if they are all different.
I use those cheap game consoles as composite video testers when checking monitors, mini lcd displays etc. video tester on the cheap!
Adrian, there are two options: first, the handheld console only with AV and USB cable, and second with controller included, for 2 players gaming, for 2 bucks more. The controller plugs in the Micro USB connector.
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!
I got one of these years ago and always pondered if I could somehow take it apart and program it or at least get access to the storage
Thanks Adrian. We have one of these, I bought it for my daughter but she doesn't play these "old" games. I had Raid on Bungling Bay on my C64 - we played it a lot.
35:11 the interesting part starts :-)
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.
Is this the one that Vinny played, that would lose video output and corrupt itself as the battery died?
Nibbles was from well before the Nokia days. It was released on the supplement disk for DOS 5.0 as a demonstration of QBASIC abilities.
Back in around 2000 or 2001 teen me discovered that the players are stored in an array, so I thought, what happens if I set that to 3, implement keyboard bindings and set the spawn point in the levels... IT FRIGGIN WORKED! And then I made a 4 player version, a 6 player and then an 8 player version...
You persuaded me. These are on sale in a store near me for £50!
I picked two up for my grandkids for £4.10 plus £1.40 for a extra controller
Mine has a different character inside the battery compartment. It's a red Ink Stamp, not an etching in the mould, so I assume it's the QC operator 'signing' it after assembly? (It'a a Cat character who has caught a tasty Fish).
I can see this being a lot of fun to mod for a kid. Replace the controls with some DS buttons, 3d print it a cooler case. That sort of thing.
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.
Excellent content as usual
Would a micro usb OTG cable work? With a relatively new controller, like a logitec f310, maybe even a hub?
Bought one last year, mine came with controller, luv to see you read the flash.
What was the clock crystal frequency? Maybe could be swapped?
Zoomed in 21.47727mhz which is actually the SNES crystal frequency. 39:09
Even with all the compromises, that you can get a standalone handheld gaming machine that plays Super Mario Bros 3 acceptably well for less than the cost of a meal at McDonalds is a bit of a miracle.
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.
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.
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 😊
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.
I just looked this console up on Ali Express shipped to the UK. £0.40! Yep 40 pence (plus shipping though) but even with shipping it's only £1.62 to ship. Crazy!
I have one of these that I picked up from a local flea market, as well as a couple of other similar models that I got from Five Below over the past few years. Each one has a slightly different lineup of games (with more than a handful of duplicates, given), and for a cheap knock-off product, I was actually quite surprised at the quality. The ones I have suffer from the duty cycle swap bug, of course, but otherwise it's a pretty decent famiclone handheld. It'd definitely keep kids busy on a road trip for a bit.
I think the sound might be affected by the famous Reversed Duty Cycles issue which NES clones had for many years.
As someone who played a lot of Ducktalee, I can tell you that super Mario 14 was a ducktales romhack. I’d recognize that jump physics anywhere.
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.
I’m super interested in how I could use this for parts / add a Pi to the case, wondering if I could hook up the same screen to the Pi? 🤔
The BL-5C battery if I recall was first used in the Nokia 3310/3330 when they were launched. Some of the newer Nokia phones still use a BL-5C but are a different size now.
Noup. Nokia 3310 was using BLC-2 battery.
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
Oh my godess, for that price I actually must get myself one - no matter the glitches in video and audio, it's still a nice pocket NES I can get entertainment worth much more - and the possibility that in future someone finds a way to mod this to be able to load your own ROM's from SD card, or something, is thrilling.
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.
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.
My favorite is Rural Goblin. I wonder if the successor would be Urban Goblin.
There's a version of these with a larger LCD. Most of the listings show the larger LCD but it's a crapshoot whether you get the larger one.
That language select and game select screen, including some of the sound effects, come from a game called "Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight".
I have one of these that I bought 2+ years ago. Same start screen but Mario played at the correct speed.
Those flash chips are a little complicated, the original NES used separate buses for the CPU and PPU roms but these clones developed something they called "onebus" for this which somehow interleaves the data into a single chip and manages the access timing etc. It may be as simple as literally interleaving the bytes but I never got round to looking into this stuff in detail. There's probably also some metadata in a weird format in there you'd have to fiddle with to get it to point to the right places.
In Europe Contra was called Probotector, it has Robots (not Zombies) instead of Humans. 15:17
Haha! I have one. I played Excite Bike and Mario Golf..
I bought the "same" thing from the dollar store a few months ago, it has vastly different games on it, it does have a few official NES roms on it, excite bike, TMNT, paper boy and a few others, but no Mario, or contra.
There's a few modern shortwave radios that use the BL5C batty
15:27 that chirping is actually apart of the normal sound effect for that weapon. Its a little bit off but even the normal NES has that sound.
Bubble Bobble 2 is in there twice at 18 and 331.
17:30 It’s the “Otto hotel”! This references a YT and Twitch.TV legend Jerma985, when he played a NES bootleg multi in one cart on hardware and came across this game. His dog’s name is Otto, and he joked with his chat about how the hotel sign looked like it said Otto’s Hotel. Jerma is a gem and it brought me joy seeing Otto’s Hotel again lol. These multi in one carts are all the same, but I’ve seen them enough they almost are nostalgic for me.
I got one of these a couple of years back £10 with a controller. It was fun for a while to play the old NES games. .How much better would it be witha micro sd slot. Would have only added a few £1's more.
The multichip FLASH and RAM is interesting... never knew about those. Looks like this part is obsolete as far as ST Micro is concerned but that isn't stopping this manufacturer!