annoyingly I bought this so I could record a few bits from the unit to help with the emulation (it's already dumped) and maybe see if there's any way to run custom code on it as I think there's internal ROM (although it's a pads, not sub-board' case, so will be tricky)
I'll have to see if I can find a suitable backplate for the battery compartment in remains of another unit, although the shells for most other units are long gone at this point.
of course given that this is missing in the first place it makes me think it's just a broken unit, and won't work even if I add something conductive there.
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We're approaching mid November now, which means only 2 more MAME releases left in 2020. It hasn't really felt like almost a year, but I guess the whole pandemic has moved me from 'high functioning' (even if I hate that term) to 'barely functioning'
My patterns haven't changed much as I'm not that much of a social person (it usually just exhausts me) but not being able to 'reset' with friends once a month has just lead to a cloud of depressed feelings, no motivation to get out of bed, and even simple tasks being overwhelming
In fact just about the only thing I've managed to do this year is scrape together to contribute a few things to MAME before feeling like I've hit my limits. This is also why I hate the term 'high functioning' because it you look at that alone, it appears that everything is normal
Overall a poor form factor for the games included tho. While some have double sized fonts to make them easier to read, others don't, and the display is clearly half the resolution of the NES/VT so pixels are simply being dropped making a lot of things very difficult to make out.
Also it's oddly quiet, most games have sfx only, no music.
The 153/152-in-1 units are also full of unused games, including 'Deal or No Deal'
There's also a 'PacMan' but it isn't playable, it just loops saying 'Ready...' and 'P T' so I guess it is incomplete.
There's a version of 'Bravery Birds' hidden in there too, the 160 has this game, but the smoothly rotating Angry Bird style bird was replaced with a badly animated bear head.
The 160-in-1 of these low-resolution handhelds actually contains a list of 180 games, all present in ROM, just 20 haven't been selected for the menu. Most are in the other units, some are reskins of included, some I guess weren't chosen for legal reasons. pastebin.com/P7wSSXt8
If I hack the menu index I can launch the unlisted games. This OTM Pick Fruit doesn't seem to be in the other currently dumped units.
3 Rabbits is in the higher resolution version, with Bugs Bunny rip-offs, but here if you force it back into the menu it has more fox-like characters, suggesting maybe it was undergoing a reskin before being dropped entirely.
I was sent some code to allow the 6502 based units to boot. The code as it stands is unlikely to be included tho, it breaks almost every MAME and C++ coding standard you could imagine to the point I'm not sure anything can be salvaged from it.
The inspirations for some of these games is kinda obvious.