VG Pocket Caplet & Tablet handhelds...

[josekortez]

I bought one of the VG Pocket Caplet handheld units for $10 from Gamestop almost a year ago and never tried it out. I was too cheap to find 3 AAA batteries, but I just tried the VG Pocket and it is actually better than I thought. It is a 16-bit system and it even has TV out!

It's the one that has Burgertime, Bust-A-Move and Space Invaders with 47 other arcade and NES clones built in. Some of the clone games are actually pretty good. There is a Mario Kart clone that plays more like Outrun and a Columns clone. Surprisingly, there are even a vertical shmup and a horizontal shmup. I was shocked! :0

I could play the poker and billiards games for hours since they really don't end.

Anyway, the screen looks even brighter to me than the one on the Game Boy Micro since it's backlit, so this handheld will probably be my default one at the laundromat now. I think only a true retro fan could appreciate this system.

Here's the Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican_VG_Pocket

And this is the Wikipedia link to the Pocket Caplet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VG_Pocket_Caplet

Does anyone else own one of these, and what are your impressions?

[retro junkie]

I have one of these units. I really like it. And yes I agree with you, it does take someone that is into retro gaming to really appreciate the Caplet. There are a lot of fun little games on the unit. Personally, the games do not seem to have a polished feel about them and some may not feel complete. But I still find them fun in a homebrew sort-of way, because that is what they remind me of. My full review of the system is located on my site.

[TwinChargers]

I own both the Tablet and the Caplet and I must say they are both very nice little units. The only knock on it is that they are nearly all rip-offs of other classic games. That isn't necessarily bad, I'm guessing it would have been costly to license 25-50+ games. These two little handhelds unfortunately never got the respect they deserve though. Concidering they came out around the GameBoy Micro time period, they are a very cost efficient and well built system for its time.

On a side note, I'm kinda eyeing a Onestation that seems like its kinda in the same line of systems. Heres the site

http://www.onestation.com.ar/

Anyone able to shed some light on this product?

[retro junkie]

Wow that site you link to there is old in its information.
The Onestation basically is an outer shell that is no more than a LCD and controls. The game carts, themselves, have the NOAC inside. The game carts contain early original NES games and are usually multicarts containing up to a 100 games. There are a few carts that contain the clone games that can be found on the VG pocket series. There is a "MD converter" available that contains the Genesis/Mega Drive on a chip. This enables the Onestation to play the multi game carts that contains the Mega drive games. The Onestation has TV out but have found it to be problematic, depends on the cart being played at the time. They have good battery life.
The Onestation may be hard to find. Depends where you look, I guess. They only developed the MD converter for it. So the NES and Mega Drive games is all that it really plays.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

The OneStation is indeed from the same manufacturer as the Tablet, Caplet and original VG Pocket systems (and also some older Famiclone plug & play systems that were marketed in the US by dreamGear and VsMaxx and others). The company's called JungleTac. I don't really know what they're up to these days. It's hard to tell if any of the products on their webpage are new or not.

The OneStation is cool. The NES multicarts are great and include many more advanced games that require mappers and so are not usually found on pirate hardware and the selection of games is very good, too. Definitely a step up from the usual pirate stuff. As retro junkie said, there's also carts that carry JungleTac's own original games running on either NES hardware or some unknown 16-bit architecture (definitely not Genesis, might be some Sunplus chip or something) which I think are often pretty cool games, thought there's a lot of junk on them, too. The Genesis stuff isn't really worth dealing with, in my opinion. The game carts have a very very high defect rate (I think because the way they're constructed just exposes flash chips to too much), though they do have some nice games on them when they're working.

Finding the system isn't a problem (try DealExtreme), but finding game cartridges is getting harder and harder. I don't expect stocks to last more than a few months unless there's a new batch or something. In addition to the original OneStation, there's also the OneStation Extreme and the CoolBoy, which are similar sorts of systems. The Cool Boy seems to be an unlicensed knock off of the OneStation, which is pretty crazy if you think about it. From what I've heard, a Cool Boy system will play OneStation games as well as original Cool Boy games, but a OneStation can't play Cool Boy games.


...word is bondage...