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Hmm, another Namco stick out there.


NightSprinter

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I'm curious as to whether or not anybody tried to "hack in" to the SMS chip the way they did for the Commodore stick and Atari Flashback 2.

 

Um, I don't think that sentence is related to any topic discussed in this thread. Has the SMS, or any SMS-related product, even been mentioned?

 

er.. Yeah..

Quite a bit of page 2 mentions the SMS, complete with some pics...

:twisted: :roll: :)

 

desiv

 

Hmm, I guess so. Well, in my defense, the last mention of it had been 20+ posts and 6+ months prior to my post. When I wrote my post, I glanced through only the most recent page of the thread to look for SMS references, figuring that, surely, he would have been referring to something discussed within the last few months. I thought it a reasonable assumption for a post that didn't quote any previous post.

 

If anyone is curious why I have not updated my comprehensive plug-n-play listing since August 2009, it's because I've seen so few releases that it's not worth updating. Since then, there have only been:

 

- Cars interactive coloring book, from Techno Source

- Triple Header Sports motion control game (which means it wouldn't go in my listing, anyway), from Jakks Pacific

 

And that's all. Hardly worth an update. I will continue to wait for more substantive material to appear before I update the listing.

 

onmode-ky

 

P.S. The Capcom TV Game is also one of my favorites.

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Another fun one was the Konami DTV with Rush 'N' Attack, Frogger, Time Pilot, Scramble, Gyruss, Yie-Ar Kung Fu.

 

But there were some DISMAL failures like the Activision DTV and the alltime worst design known to man... the PlayPal Play Sonic DTV, OMG how awful!

post-24636-12635709696_thumb.jpg

post-24636-1263571046_thumb.jpg

Edited by the-topdog
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Onmode-ky, I think there are others. I know there was a Star Wars Clone Wars flight yoke game that used accelerometer controls. I was tempted to snag it because it looks a bit like the Atari arcade game. Anyone play that one?

Actually, the Clone Wars game has been out since the summer. It's not in my listing because it's a motion control game, but I do have it, dated August, in my private, supplementary listing. Back around when it came out, I test drove one and wrote up a mini-review earlier in this thread. Here's what I thought of it:

 

I tried out the Clone Wars motion game, and it's pretty good. The underlying TV Games technology has really evolved over the past few years; this one features some impressive graphic scaling effects (makes hyperspace jumps and flyby shots look realistic--not that I've ever seen a hyperspace jump first-hand) and seems to have pretty good resolution and color depth, as well as handling a fair number of sprites onscreen simultaneously (and yes, still sprites, no 3D like X-Wing or TIE Fighter). The sound is okay, but the synthesized music, which I think consists of only 2 primary tracks, of which 1 is almost just the bassline of the other, is nothing to write home about, certainly no iMUSE. The motion control aspect is impressively sensitive, very SixAxis in feel (though still $25 cheaper MSRP than a DualShock 3). However, I continually got screwed up by the fact that you turn it like a car steering wheel to go left and right, whereas I'm used to pushing flightsticks left and right. Also, holding it in the air rather than with a grounded reference point was a little disorienting at times.

 

As far as resembling Atari's vector arcade Star Wars game, this TV Game actually has a number of different gameplay styles (I think four?); I can remember cursor-based on-rails starfighter combat (like the Atari arcade), obstacle evasion trench runs, on-rails light gun-type ground vehicle combat, and a weird one where different buttons fired weapons for the upper and lower regions of the screen. There is a total of 21 missions, and your score in each gets ranked, with the count of highly ranked missions contributing to your overall military rank. If you should play this, I'll note that the key to high scores is to use lock-on with proton torpedoes (where available), as there is a score multiplier that increments with consecutive kills. It helps that you have infinite torpedoes.

 

the-topdog, I was disappointed with Majesco's Konami TV Arcade unit. While better than the simultaneously released Frogger-only unit (same price, more games, after all; I still think it must have been some licensing requirement that resulted in a single-game unit alongside a multi-game unit that included that game), it contained the NES ports of 3 of the games, along with newly coded NES ports of the other 3 games. The system was, obviously, a NOAC. I had been expecting the arcade games, not the significantly different NES versions, so that, combined with the cheap (and ugly!) build of the hardware, led me to return what I had thought would be a definite keeper. It's also false advertising that the back of the box shows screen shots from the arcade versions.

 

By the way, "DTV" was only from the Commodore 64 plug-n-play unit.

 

onmode-ky

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the-topdog, I was disappointed with Majesco's Konami TV Arcade unit. While better than the simultaneously released Frogger-only unit (same price, more games, after all; I still think it must have been some licensing requirement that resulted in a single-game unit alongside a multi-game unit that included that game), it contained the NES ports of 3 of the games, along with newly coded NES ports of the other 3 games. The system was, obviously, a NOAC. I had been expecting the arcade games, not the significantly different NES versions, so that, combined with the cheap (and ugly!) build of the hardware, led me to return what I had thought would be a definite keeper. It's also false advertising that the back of the box shows screen shots from the arcade versions.

 

My sentiments exactly!

 

By the way, "DTV" was only from the Commodore 64 plug-n-play unit.

 

Indeed, that is a good one, the Commodore 64 on a chip similar to what Curt's Flashback 2 did with an Atari 2600 chipset.

 

Signed,

 

Rick

Edited by TrekkiELO
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By the way, "DTV" was only from the Commodore 64 plug-n-play unit.

 

I did not mean to offend anyone. I meant TV Arcade and PlayPal Game.

 

I don't think you offended anyone. Certainly, I wasn't offended; if I sounded offended, I didn't mean to. It seems a perfectly harmless mistake to me, nothing for anyone to get upset about. Mind you, if you called me a "DTV," I might have to attach some knucklesandwiches to this thread. After a 5-hour sulk. In the closet.

 

Going back to the topic of new plug-n-play systems, I did see another one recently . . . but it was yet another interactive coloring book from Techno Source, this time for Toy Story. Not enough for me to update the AtariAge copy of my listing. However, if nothing new and significant appears by the time 6 months have passed since the last update, then I will go ahead and make an update. It sure is one quiet market these days.

 

onmode-ky

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By the way, "DTV" was only from the Commodore 64 plug-n-play unit.

 

I did not mean to offend anyone. I meant TV Arcade and PlayPal Game.

 

I don't think you offended anyone. Certainly, I wasn't offended; if I sounded offended, I didn't mean to. It seems a perfectly harmless mistake to me, nothing for anyone to get upset about. Mind you, if you called me a "DTV," I might have to attach some knucklesandwiches to this thread. After a 5-hour sulk. In the closet.

 

Going back to the topic of new plug-n-play systems, I did see another one recently . . . but it was yet another interactive coloring book from Techno Source, this time for Toy Story. Not enough for me to update the AtariAge copy of my listing. However, if nothing new and significant appears by the time 6 months have passed since the last update, then I will go ahead and make an update. It sure is one quiet market these days.

 

onmode-ky

Atari Flashback 2+ pre-orders are open.

Look in the forum under dedicated systems/flashback 2.

Everybody seems pretty excited...

Edited by brojamfootball
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  • 6 months later...

I was at the local Wal-Mart the other day and saw the '09 Namco sticks in-stock. I thought these things were out of production because I haven't seen any plug 'n plays other than Spongebob ones these last few months..

 

I was really tempted to get this, primarily because of Super Pac-Man, but passed because I didn't feel like shelling out money for batteries. After all these years, why are they still not including a standard A/C adapter port? Sure, the price may go up more, but I can't picture it being more than $5 higher to the customer than what it is now, currently at $20. :|

 

Also, I noticed the packaging on this one had a slanted facing, whereas the one I saw pictured in this thread last year was flat. Still says it was manufactured in '09 though..

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I was at the local Wal-Mart the other day and saw the '09 Namco sticks in-stock. I thought these things were out of production because I haven't seen any plug 'n plays other than Spongebob ones these last few months..

 

That model, "Retro Arcade," is actually from late 2008 (as noted by the original post in this topic), though it only became commonly available in 2009. I've been seeing the same small group of TV Games models in Target and Wal-Mart stores all year (saw a "new" one yesterday, though, a rerelease of 2006's Pixar Classics model), and this one was one of them.

 

I discovered recently that the "joystick up, press-and-hold 'A' button, joystick down" sequence upon booting brings up the debug mode on both the wireless Ms. Pac-Man TV Game and this one, in addition to the wired Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, and Capcom TV Game models I tested earlier (I have confirmed it does not work for either the original Pac-Man model or the "Arcade Gold" 8-game model, nor for the Dragon Ball Z model). What's particularly interesting about the debug mode for this model is that the sound test portion includes sound effects and music for 2 Namco titles which are not actually on the device--or at least not available from the main menu. The first is Ms. Pac-Man, a game which has at least appeared in other TV Game models, and the second is Jr. Pac-Man, a game which has not appeared in any plug-n-play form. I seriously wonder whether either or both of these games may be hidden on this system, accessed via some easter egg or code. However, it seems a little unlikely, given that the packaging's copyright info probably has to include all the onboard games, hidden or not. Maybe it was intended to be included but was left out before production started. Still, it's a little strange to see that they went and kept the music and sound effects built into the production units, even if only accessible from the debug mode.

 

I was really tempted to get this, primarily because of Super Pac-Man, but passed because I didn't feel like shelling out money for batteries. After all these years, why are they still not including a standard A/C adapter port? Sure, the price may go up more, but I can't picture it being more than $5 higher to the customer than what it is now, currently at $20. :|

 

They probably believe (maybe rightly so) that the customers lost due to the ~$5 higher price more than offset the gains made in the greater per-unit revenues. Anyway, I just use rechargeable batteries. The same set of 4 has been powering almost all of my AA-battery devices since 2003.

 

Also, I noticed the packaging on this one had a slanted facing, whereas the one I saw pictured in this thread last year was flat. Still says it was manufactured in '09 though..

 

No, the front faces of the normal TV Games boxes have all been slanted since the new packaging came out in 2009. The picture in this topic is just from an angle that obscures the slant. Since the new packaging's debut, there have been two TV Games boxes with front faces perpendicular to the top and bottom faces, but they have both been fully cardboard boxes (the Triple Header Sports motion game and the new Toy Story Mania 3D light gun-style shooting game), not the clear plastic window boxes used for the normal, smaller TV Games systems.

 

onmode-ky

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I was at the local Wal-Mart the other day and saw the '09 Namco sticks in-stock. I thought these things were out of production because I haven't seen any plug 'n plays other than Spongebob ones these last few months..

 

That model, "Retro Arcade," is actually from late 2008 (as noted by the original post in this topic), though it only became commonly available in 2009. I've been seeing the same small group of TV Games models in Target and Wal-Mart stores all year (saw a "new" one yesterday, though, a rerelease of 2006's Pixar Classics model), and this one was one of them.

 

Hm, interesting.. The box says © 2009.

 

Earlier today I was feeling like spending money I didn't have, so I made the trip back to the Wal-Mart and snagged one of these units. All in all, it doesn't seem so bad.. Emulation is good, anyway. The stick itself is a little finicky, but it's usable.

 

I will have to look into rechargable batteries like you say. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was at the local Wal-Mart the other day and saw the '09 Namco sticks in-stock. I thought these things were out of production because I haven't seen any plug 'n plays other than Spongebob ones these last few months..

 

That model, "Retro Arcade," is actually from late 2008 (as noted by the original post in this topic), though it only became commonly available in 2009. I've been seeing the same small group of TV Games models in Target and Wal-Mart stores all year (saw a "new" one yesterday, though, a rerelease of 2006's Pixar Classics model), and this one was one of them.

 

Hm, interesting.. The box says © 2009.

 

When the 2009 packaging came out, all the boxes had 2009 as the copyright date even if they were not brand new releases. Notably, this was even true for the models that were rereleases of ones from years ago. The Pixar rerelease I mentioned above, too, has a 2010 copyright date even though it's really from 2006.

 

Earlier today I was feeling like spending money I didn't have, so I made the trip back to the Wal-Mart and snagged one of these units. All in all, it doesn't seem so bad.. Emulation is good, anyway. The stick itself is a little finicky, but it's usable.

 

I will have to look into rechargable batteries like you say. :)

 

Unless Jakks Pacific changed more than just the color and markings of the base when they switched the Retro Arcade into the 2009 boxes (the 2008 ones have a yellow base with screen-printed top graphic), it's actually the Namco-series TV Game with the sturdiest joystick and buttons. It isn't 8-way, so Xevious and Bosconian aren't so good, but it's as solid as these come. As for the fidelity, yeah, HotGen did pretty well porting these games to the Sunplus hardware. It's nice that Xevious' easter eggs are all there, for example.

 

onmode-ky

 

P.S. I've updated the first post in the Comprehensive Plug-and-Play Listing topic: new data in the CPU data section, plus the latest pnpgames.*.txt file. The file's changes are mostly the addition of developer names, though, along with some product name changes (corrections) and labeling of the dotted lines to show what content is under them. Only one new product, the Toy Story Mania I mentioned a few posts up, and there's even a product removal, since that Pixar Classics model is a rerelease. All the updates are already reflected in my website.

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Prompted by this topic, went to Wal-Mart & grabbed the last Retro Arcade stick there. They had a ton of the Atari 10-in-1.

 

Im a sucker for Bosconian & Xevious, & I even like Galaxian somewhat, never played Super PacMan anywhere & looking forward to it.

 

& oh God, Mappy AGAIN? I gave it a try on their DS Museum, couldnt get into it.

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Xevious & Bosconian are severly hampered by the stick. Something's wrong w/ Xevious too- I didnt see any of those roving grey octagonal ground tanks, & some of the ground targets are misplaced. I have other better versions, I wont be playing that one much.

 

Prob not worth $20, but I'll enjoy Super Pac-Man & PacMan plus. I'll check out Pac & Pal too. IIRC I heard it wasnt so great, but we'll see.

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Super Pac-Man is primarily the reason I got it. I figured it would probably cost the same to snap up the Namco Museum PlayStation release that has it on it, and this stick was more convenient to obtain. Plus, it's a joystick! Haha..

 

Seriously though, I really wish the buttons and stick were flipped around. I'm not used to using it with my right hand, likewise I'm not used to using arcade buttons with my left hand. Meh.

 

I tried Pac 'n Pal for the first time on this stick, too, as someone else stated above. Still getting used to it. It's interesting, for sure.. Most of my time is still spent with Super Pac-Man, though. :)

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Pole Position is VERY playable on this thx to the twisty stick! I always had trouble w/ it on NAMCO 50th Anniv, damn car slid all over the place for me.

 

Also tried Pac & Pal, something different, may grow on me. & why is it "New" Rally-X? All it does is start slower...

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WARNING- DO NOT buy this expecting an even halfway decent vers. of Xevious- it is SEVERELY fucked up. Sound is wrong, no roving ground tanks, no flying rotating shields, misplaced ground targets in addition to it being near-impossible due to the 4 way stick.

 

Where the floating shields are supposed to 1st appear, the game starts throwing everything at you- all types of ships, crystals, even those exploding black balls! Needless to say it gets unnecessarily difficult. Im starting to doubt there's even an Andor Genesis. I got to where it's SUPPOSED to be, but died & the game bumped me past that part.

 

I hope this saves someone a trip to Wal-Mart. Avoid this Xevious version AT ALL COSTS. I would like an explanation as to why they shit on this one.

Edited by RJ
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I hope this saves someone a trip to Wal-Mart. Avoid this Xevious version AT ALL COSTS. I would like an explanation as to why they shit on this one.

 

Well.. It might be a *little* bit better if they included a better stick (i.e., more than four directions).. :ponder:

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Can someone else replicate RJ's issues on their Retro Arcade (Namco 5) model? I don't have mine handy at the moment. However, on my Ms. Pac-Man (Namco 2) TV Game, I do not have any such problems with Xevious; it plays like it's supposed to, with the proper progression of Areas (the flying enemy mix changes sometimes because Xevious adapts that based on how you're playing). The sound is fine, and the floating plates and Andor Genesis appear where they're supposed to. I find it hard to believe that Jakks/Hotgen would have gone back and altered the software to make Xevious play less accurately. I have never noticed any significant difference between how my Ms. Pac-Man TV Game's Xevious played versus how the Xevious in Namco Museum Essentials on my PS3 plays, other than the control method.

 

I'm hoping RJ just got a one-off screw-up (unlikely though it seems, since memory corruption would normally lead to absolute garbage, not gameplay tweaks) and can resolve the problem just by getting an exchange at the store. Someone else please report on their Retro Arcade model's Xevious.

 

onmode-ky

 

P.S. RJ, can you enter the system's debug mode and see if the memory check reports any problems? At system boot (when the very first screen appears), do "joystick up, press-and-hold 'A' button, joystick down." I believe the first thing it should do is a bunch of checksum stuff.

 

WARNING- DO NOT buy this expecting an even halfway decent vers. of Xevious- it is SEVERELY fucked up. Sound is wrong, no roving ground tanks, no flying rotating shields, misplaced ground targets in addition to it being near-impossible due to the 4 way stick.

 

Where the floating shields are supposed to 1st appear, the game starts throwing everything at you- all types of ships, crystals, even those exploding black balls! Needless to say it gets unnecessarily difficult. Im starting to doubt there's even an Andor Genesis. I got to where it's SUPPOSED to be, but died & the game bumped me past that part.

 

I hope this saves someone a trip to Wal-Mart. Avoid this Xevious version AT ALL COSTS. I would like an explanation as to why they shit on this one.

Edited by onmode-ky
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