Camerica 5 in 1, Yellow Cart

[Afrokidvet@yahoo.com]

Hi my friends new here!

I need your knowledge and help on this...

I just buy this game from a flea market, I didn´t know this game even exist, first I think it was a bootleg cart. But reading your threads I found BIC produced the Unlicensed Codemaster games for famicom this way, so this are not bootleg, I am ok with this?.





Any idea how rare is this?

Regards and thanks to everybody.

- Dr Afrokid

[fcgamer]

Those carts are fairly hard to find in some parts of the world, though they turn up more often in Poland.  The game carts were manufactured by a Taiwanese game company, and are completely legit.  These are not bootlegs.  Even more interesting, most (if not all) of these carts came boxed, though most used the NES boxes for their releases.

[nerdynebraskan]

That's a pretty sweet multicart. Camerica was one of the best unlicensed game companies of the NES era, and that has five of their seven best games on it.

[NintendoKing]

I have a Camerica cartridge, that's fully accurate. Unfortunately I have a super common cart, while yours is rarer. Probably a $30 cartridge.

[jpx72]

That's the "Golden five" aka Złota Piątka. Very polular cart, mainly in Poland.

[smeghead]

Never heard of any games on that cart... 30$ wtf , would never pay that much for it. Besides it looks ugly 

[L___E___T]

I still don't understand why Codemasters had stand alone official releases in PAL but not the US.

I have spoken to ex Codies members as think I have an idea, but it's interesting still.

[jpx72]

This cartridge is highly sought after, I bought mine for 25€ and happy about it. It's a very nice hardware piece, check photos here:
http://forum.pegasus-gry.com/index.php/topic,1778.0.html

There's also Złota Czwórka:

[nerdynebraskan]

That "Quattro Arcade" is very different from the Quattro Arcade we got from Camerica in the states. Go! Dizzy Go! is the only game the two versions have in common. The other three were released here on Quattro Sports (Soccer) or Quattro Adventure (Boomerang Kid and Super Robin Hood).

@ LET

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Most of Camerica's releases were single-game carts. The three "Quattro" releases I named in the paragraph above were the only multis we got from them here. The Big Nose games, Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, Firehawk, Micro Machines, Ultimate Stuntman, and a few other lesser titles were all sold here as single games. What's interesting is that the standalone release of Fantastic Dizzy was actually very inferior to the one that got published in Europe; it was apparently an early, unfinished version of the game. That's a pretty big screw-up.

The Aladdin Deck Enhancer was where things got really funky. I bought one, mostly for the exclusive Dizzy the Adventurer (which wasn't released here on a full-size cart), but also for the better, finished version of Fantastic Dizzy.

[fcgamer]

Very informative post, nerdynebraskan!

If the OP wants to sell his copy, I'd like to buy it.

On another note, I have a love/hate relationship with these BIC Codemasters Famicom carts.  I have a couple different ones, Ultimate Stuntman (CIB), Mig 29 (CIB), Go Dizzy Go (generic fake, I think), Super Robin Hood (generic fake I think), and the Taiwanese version Quattro Adventure, which contains Boomerang Kid, Treasure Island Dizzy, Linus Spacehead, and one other game. 

For someone who has the lofty goal of owning every unlicensed original Famicom game, these BIC Codemasters carts really trip me up.  There were tons of different games released (basically the whole Codemasters catalogue + some others), and they all seem to have come boxed.  That makes it even worse, since I am trying to collect boxed when I can.  But finding the boxes is quite difficult, and finding the carts is no cakewalk either.

For the noncollector, definitely just buying the NES Camerica versions would be the smart thing to do.

[MWK]

Golden 5s and Quattro Arcades are really not that hard to find around here, they're just freaking out pricey.

Here we have an example of a nice Polish stash of BICs >> http://carts.emunes.pl/thumbnails.php?album=48 (yo Machbed!)


edit:: on the personal note - I hate Codemasters, "MicroMachines" was the only one, truly, solid title they created, so I'm totally out of the pursuit, IYKWIM.

[NintendoKing]

I like it myself, it would be a worthy item in my collection.

[nerdynebraskan]

The US Camerica carts are generally pretty easy to come by. They're second really only to Tengen in terms of how common their unlicensed games are here. Stunt Kids, Big Nose Freaks Out, and Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade are the only toughish ones, but they're all realistic finds for $20-30 loose. The latter two are actually about as tough to find in gold carts as they are to find in their Aladdin mini-carts.

@ fcgamer

Sounds like the Taiwanese Quattro Adventure is the same as the US version. The fourth game would be Super Robin Hood, if that were the case.

@ MWK

I'm sorry you don't care for Codemasters titles. I think they were a pretty solid developer, and they're one of the examples (along with Tengen) I like to  point toward when people repeat Nintendo's propaganda that unlicensed games were garbage. Micro Machines does get pretty widespread praise for being one of the best racing games of the NES/FC era, but I think they did well with a lot of other games. The Dizzy titles are very satisfying platformer/adventure hybrids. Ultimate Stuntman dabbled in all kinds of styles, and did a decent job all around. Big Nose Freaks Out is almost like an 8-bit Sonic game, and Firehawk is like an 8-bit Desert Strike.

[L___E___T]

@nerdynebraskan

What I really meant was that I find it odd that Codemasters had official releases over here, while they went the unlicensed route elsewhere.  I have asked that question directly and I think that as a developer and publisher, they got annoyed with the mandatory license for NES games, which was a new thing at the time and not popular with developers and publishers, at least not over here.  It wasn't about quality, it was basically forced commission on Nintendo's part with a bunch of unpopular regulations (pricing etc.).  The home computer scene was more popular than say Atari over here, so this was quite an unpopular policy, having never been enforced by Sinclair for the Spectrum for example.  Not sure what SEGA had going on, but I'll enquire.

I think as Codies were UK based, with great national popularity here (they we're never seen as sub par), then they released here first maybe and then looked at options for the US market - namely, going the unlicensed route.

[nerdynebraskan]

Ah, ok. I do know that Camerica made a few, unsuccessful third-party controllers with Nintendo's blessing before turning to unlicensed games. I know they produced a wireless version of the NES Advantage joystick called the Freedom Connection (I believe). I wouldn't be surprised that they might've turned unlicensed after having problems with Nintendo. Nintendo's treatment of third-party publishers in the NES era was frankly illegal by US standards; I believe that they got busted in anti-trust court for some of their practices in the early '90s.

Tengen had similar frictions with Nintendo before going unlicensed. Tengen was actually Atari's arcade division porting games to home consoles, under a different name because there was still a separate Atari building game consoles and home computers. Tengen got an official NES publishing license, while trying to get special privileges with Nintendo. When Nintendo didn't budge on their monopolistic treatment, Tengen reverse-engineered the licensed US cart technology and starting publishing unlicensed games.

Maybe Camerica and Tengen were in more of a position to rebel since they were Western developers/producers, and maybe a little harder for Nintendo to control than fellow Japanese companies like Konami and Capcom.