Those VCD things

[cubelmariomadness]

Has anyone seen those vcd game consoles where you can pop in a disk with Famicom roms on it, and play them off the cd?
I'm not looking to buy one, but does anyone have any information on how those work?

[ericj]

This thing?:

http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/famiclones/game_vcd.htm

[cubelmariomadness]

Yeah, those things.

[MS-DOS4]

There's also this cool DVD player that does the same thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5Gdcbj9ZC0

As for info, what do you want to know exactly?

[cubelmariomadness]

Just how they work and what controllers they accept. In the future I might want to get one.

[133MHz]

I had one. The emulation was really slow with plenty of frameskipping, totally unplayable unless you only went for the Mahjong type games. Apparently the NES emulation was done in the Video ASIC. It used standard Famiclone controllers.

It came with a 300 game CD that used a special file format (some kind of binary at the start of every NES ROM). Even though it recognized ISO9660 CDs with .NES files on them as playable games, I never got them to work.

I gave it to my uncle who uses it as a CD/MP3 player replacement for his modular stereo to this day. I kept one of the controllers and the game CD though.

[MS-DOS4]

So it does not load onto a NOAC? Odd choice to emulate...

[ericj]

Here's a similar piece of shit you can put in your car, and wish you hadn't:

http://www.chinavasion.com/product_info.php/pName/headrest-dvd-player-and-nes-emulator-7-inch-lcd-pair-grey/

[cubelmariomadness]

That looks pretty horrible for the person resting on the headrest!

By the way 133Mhz, is this the one you had?
http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/famiclones/miyota_wapstation.htm

[133MHz]

By the way 133Mhz, is this the one you had? link

No, but I've found pictures of it among my old stuff (probably for a review I never did )

Front:


Back (notice the two DE-9 controller ports):


Box:


One of the controllers and the game CD:


Brains:

Pretty much like a modern DVD player: An ASIC that does pretty much everything, a ROM for storing the firwmare, some DRAM and a couple of driver chips to run the optical mechanism.

[ericj]

Looks pretty sturdy and kind of like a car cd player, but obviously bigger.

[NintendoKing]

Those remind me so much of a Philips CD-i; to bad they can't play cd-i games because finding a working unit is a annoying task.

[cubelmariomadness]

So are they all like this, or are most of them good quality?

[L___E___T]

I still recommend a soft-modded Wii with a Super Famicom controller over any of this.  Best emulation experienec I've found (closely followed by PSP).

[cubelmariomadness]

Eh. I've bricked 2 wii's I've owned. I really don't feel like shelling out a bunch of dough so I can brick it again.