Of course, can't go without mentioning the Jontron video on it.

>>984 Only ones I've ever played were those boring edutainment ones, and one about Disney princesses or something my cousin had.

>>985 I have both one of the Bamco ones he displayed in the video and another which is for some 20 Atari games that use the dial.

Well, the setup wasn't as hard as I remembered it to be. Only took me 30 minutes of fiddling and not reading the manual. The user interface is about as obtuse as I remember it to be. Isn't there something like a Qt frontend for it? Unfortunately it looks like no one has dumped the 2003 spongebob console, but ones from 2005 exist so I settled for playing that. The graphics and sound chip are very remeniscent of something you could find in a SNES or GBA, though they're of lower quality. The 2003 spongebob one could only produce a single channel sound with a square wave, but the graphical fidelity remains about the same. The games are fine, but nothing to write home about.

Feel free to post about MAME or emulation in general here, if you'd like to.

This is mostly just obvious fluff, but one interesting side effect of having emulated versions of games is that it forces you to figure out the specification of the hardware it runs on. Systems that would go undocumented otherwise will now at least have their CPU or ISA documented. The spongebob console uses a SPG240-series System on a Chip, which got used in various b-market and bootleg consoles. I didn't even know SoCs existed as a concept back in the day. I just thought they crammed all of the hardware in there somehow. Apparently they go back as far as the 1970s with LED wristwatches. The chip has 10KB of RAM and a 25.75 MHz processor. For comparison, >the SNES has 256 KB of RAM (divided between audio and video), and runs at 3.58 MHz tops. >The GBA has a 16.7 MHz ARM CPU and about 300 KB of RAM in total. The SPG240 wins out in terms of pure CPU frequency, which is surprising. I can't find whether they have a separate RAM chip as well though. One more interesting thing about these is that they roll their own proprietary ISA for the chip. It's neither an ARM/RISC-based CPU or an x86 one. The Taiwanese company that used to make these (Sunplus) doesn't release datasheets for it to the public, which sucks. They seem to make car dashboard displays nowadays.

Also, the fact that the instruction set is undocumented makes it all the more impressive that the game can even be emulated in the first place.

I love this one. I want to get it again at some point just to play Galaga.

>>1025 That's playable on MAME too, but sounds can't be emulated yet. I actually found a detailed article on it: https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2020/06/10/emulating-the-emulators/ The console uses the GPL16250 SoC from Generalplus, which is a subsidiary of Sunplus. They still seem to be around making embedded device stuff.