I love the arcade, and Jeroen Tel did a worthy version for Commodore 64 Turbo Outrun.

That’s also Tim Follin. 😂

Most of these are difficult to mess with, because, like you discovered, there’s some kind of internal database of ROMs. Worse, this doesn’t appear to have a JAMMA harness so the board can only be replaced with a similar one.

I would see if someone from TeamPandory can identify your board for getting a custom firmware on there. I’ve seen a lot of this type of board in which the bottom-of-the-barrel-quality micro SD card suddenly dies, then you lose the encryption key and the board is just garbage.

At the very least, backup the micro SD card to an image. I use GNOME Disk Manager that’s built into Linux Mint. Programs like balenaEtcher can do it on Windows but like Windows, they have telemetry (spy on you).

Edit: As others noted, the “S812” is relevant, the board seems to be based on Allwinner H3 like other “Pandora’s Box” (the name is more appropriate than it should be). You could do something like this or rewire the controls into “zero-delay encoders” to turn them into USB controllers to connect to any Pi or PC.

You can, but you have to add the correct oscillator and associated passive components, or buy the Japan-only Super Game Boy 2 that fixed the issue.

One fun possibility is that if you get it running at the correct clock speed, you can also add the link port back in.

The Analogue Pocket “Game Boy” is… an FPGA SNES? Is it just using borrowed assets?

I loved the concept of Super Game Boy but the wrong clock speed in it always annoyed me. Every game just sounded wrong. 😅

Lynx was as much “the Epyx console” as it was “the Atari portable”. Epyx had so many high-quality games on Commodore 64; I have not played all of the Lynx ports but I can tell you that Electrocop was a sequel to Impossible Mission, in spirit. All of “The Games” (unlicensed Olympics) series were pretty great on C64.

Early on, one of Epyx’s founders got sick of just reusing the Apshai engine over and over and left to found Free Fall, who created Archon - one of Electronic Arts’ first games.

Well, I thought it was funny!

Challenge mode (Dangerous to go alone mode): Complete the game without getting any swords. It is possible… 😳

My friend’s dad worked at a local electronics store, so he was the only person I knew that had the “weird” consoles - Sega Master System and TurboGrafx-16. Alex Kidd and Wonder Boy were the favorites, of course… I liked how you got to buy your choice of weapons in Fantasy Zone.

Years later, I found my own SMS at Goodwill! I need to get a multicart because I only have Fantasy Zone, Ghostbusters, and R-Type.

Game Genie had a thicker circuit board than a game cart, to get a good connection in the frontloaders. The toploader’s cart slot is pretty tight, to get a good connection. Combine these, and it feels like the cart slot is going to pull off of the circuit board before the Game Genie lets loose. Everdrive/Powerpak would work fine.

Galoob offered an adapter for the toploaders but they are extremely rare.

Honestly, even a Trinitron TV with composite looks as good as RGB at the resolution of NES.

Remember Craigslist? I got a toploader for $40 with games because it had been stepped on and crushed! Some Bondo, paint, AV mod…

Toploader not recommended if you like to use Game Genie.

RGB mod: It’s expensive IIRC because you need to replace the PPU (video chip) entirely with one from an arcade board or a modern FPGA reproduction. Edit: Sweet Jesus, you’re looking at about $250 for RGB kit installation…

At the time, if you bought a new US toploader then complained to Nintendo about the video quality, they would replace it with a revision with no jailbars. There’s also a very rare US toploader with the composite AV port and no jailbars!

https://consolemods.org/wiki/NES:NES_Model_Differences

Very sciencey, not a toy. Hilariously, Nintendo fought hard to get their competing “Entertainment System” recognized as a toy and not a computer, for import tax purposes.

I wanted to love FF9 but even the most basic battles (grinding) take way too long! Enter battle: swirl, loading… camera flies uselessly around the battlefield… sometimes we’re at one minute already and haven’t even started doing damage yet. Not a disc or laser problem because this happens on emulators, too. Solution is to use an emulator with fast-forward.

After completing the game, when you’re sent back to the title screen, you can also press B to select which world to start on. The World 1-1 in the HUD changes, then you have to do the continue trick - hold A and press Start.

I can finish the game on one life without warps, but I’ve never once been able to get the 1ups from a Koopa shell.

Edit: Another fun one is to play a bit of Tennis, eject the cart and insert SMB without powering off the system, then reset and do the continue trick. Tennis changes the memory value that SMB uses to tell which world you are continuing on, so you can play “weird worlds” like 63-1 that are generated from non-level data. Reset doesn’t clear all RAM. 😅

That face looks more like Vigo the Carpathian.

Lakka will make a dedicated RetroArch machine, if that’s your thing.

Edit: Updated link for Lakka x86.