"retro freak" CYBER Gadget Corporation’s new machine lets you play 11 different classic game consoles

[SparTonberry]

Epic Fail for Tengen MS Pacman. Bad dump or Crapulation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fRCovcWgp4

Seriously folks this is Nesticle bad.

As a side note, I tried to access the ROMs stored on the Micro SD memory card. FCEU error missing header. In fact none of the dumped ROMs play at all for any system in PC emulator. I checked the file size of Super Mario Bros and it is 512 bytes too big. Instead of 40kb + 16 bytes, it is 40kb + 528 bytes. Further examination with offsets in a hex editor will determine if it's encrypted or just formatted weird. I hope it's the latter.

I would say maybe they didn't bother testing non-Japanese mappers (such as Tengen), but it looks like Ms. Pac-Man is an NROM (no mapper) game.
How does the Retro Freak even dump FC/NES ROMs, since AFAIK it's not possible to auto-detect mappers? Does it have a list?

[ccovell]

It can run a checksum on the first bank that shows up when dumping an unknown game, then compare it to a database to find out the mapper (for dumping the rest of the cart).

[stardust4ever]

I would say maybe they didn't bother testing non-Japanese mappers (such as Tengen), but it looks like Ms. Pac-Man is an NROM (no mapper) game.
How does the Retro Freak even dump FC/NES ROMs, since AFAIK it's not possible to auto-detect mappers? Does it have a list?

Bunnyboy on Nintendoage claimed that the Retro Freak uses the GoodNES database to dump the games. GoodNES database alledgedly has the mirroring set wrong, hence the game runs with severe artifacts.

They used the info from the GoodNES rom set which has the mirroring wrong.

Sadly it appears there's no way to fix this...

[stardust4ever]

Here's a weird little update for you regarding two Sachen games in my possession. As it turns out, Soap Panic was for a while in the No Intro database as a bad dump missing the second 32kb of CHR banks. This was the Famicom version of Bubble Bath Babes. AV Pachinko, on the other hand, does not have a clean dump publicly released yet.

Both of these Sachen carts said "no cart inserted" when I attempted to plug them in. But if I plug Soap Panic into a cartridge adapter piggybacked on top of another cartridge adapter (Famicom -> NES -> Famicom) the game dumps and runs quite well. And it dumps the full entire CHR bank. I know this because I play tested the game, and all 12 pinups have intact graphics, meaning the CRC database used by the Retro Freak is fairly current, within the past few years. Otherwise I'd of ended up with an incomplete CNROM dump of the game, and all girls past the forth pinup would have been corrupted. And as expected, AV Pachinko throws an error when inserted with the adapters, as expected because it isn't in the database.

This gives me a clue that perhaps certain games that are completely undetected by the Retro Freak (Soap Panic (FC) by Hacker, Psycho Pinball (MD) by Codemasters, and a few others) may not be internally wired the same way as licensed releases. The piggybacked adapters alter the wiring somehow and the game runs. Neat.