Official Fake Famicom Thread
 

Hello Famicom friends at GFF,

I've recently found .... something << Famicom-related >> in my attic:

http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8805/daiteno2zj5.jpg

( click here for a higher resolution )

Todays question:

Well - it obviously looks like copyright infringement at its best ... it probably is!

What do you think?
Should I post the content of the "a-bit-in-red-paint-tinctured-box" (which differs a bit from the outside appearance)?

Do you have one too?! :tpg:

Wow, they made a Chinese clone of the...Dendy Famicom rip-off.

:gonk:

Is it even Chinese? Cause the text on it is definitely Japanese. Nothing about it would make me think that it's Chinese, aside from the obvious ghetto-ness of it.

Anyway, what the hell is it? Does it have its own awesome games, or is it compatible with the NES? These pirate imitation consoles sure are intriguing.

I wonder what plugs it uses, too...

You should rename the thread title to "[Amusing] Official Famicom Clone Thread". Anyway, nice find. I wish I could find stuff like that in my attic. :(

Infernal demands you bust that out of its cage and hook it up for action packed action! Does it even have a cartridge slot? The box looks like it's just a slab of blue. Ten thousand years ago when all the cool kids were playing Swords and Serpents, one kid in class got a 'Spiker'.. at least, I think it was called that. Google searching 'Nintendo Spiker' only results in volleyball games. It looked nothing like a NES or Famicom, but it could take official American/PAL cartridges and it had Super Mario Bros. built in. Nothing else!

Except the Katakana for "Family Computer", all symbols are actually Chinese, since there are no Hiragana (or previously mentioned Katakana) in the descriptive texts. If it was Japanese, that'd be just a random sequence of nouns, which would make no sense at all.

Meh, it would be nice to know whether that thing had any use at all... e.g. whether it played official releases or just cheap home-made pirate games.
I've seen such pirated consoles numerous times in domestic catalogs; and I think there was something that suspiciously resembled the infamous N64 controller. You just plugged that thing into your TV and it had around 100 built-in games. Lame. Thank god I never bought that crap.

I did. :(

That's a pair of very short controller cables :(

I did a lookup of those characters and apparently it's the former name of a Chinese company now known as Shenzhen Jeja Electronics Industrial Co. Ltd.

http://www.jeja.cn/

They've come a long way...

I recently saw this posted somewhere else:


http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j4...werstation.jpg


The name and looks might be decieving, but inside that fancy and oh-so-colorful box is in fact a famiclone. Note that this was spotted in Mexico though, so the $299 price tag isn't even worth a tenth of that in US dollars.

The "Powerstation" next to it also looks intruiging, but alas, I have no information on what it could possibly be.

Apparently, 八通 (hachitsû) means "eight pieces" (where "通" is a counter for cables, copies etc.), 電子廠 (denshi shou) means "electronics factory".　大天才 (daitensai) means "great genius" and is the clone's name. But, as Bigblah mentioned, it's more likely that 八通電子廠 is the company's name, meaning that the game itself was released in Japan (this explains the usage of Japanese characters) by a Chinese company.

*PHEW*

I had one of those. It was red. The upper A and B are turbo buttons.

It worked like a charm and it could even emulate european NES games.

A Famiclone? I was under the impression that South America was all about the Master System and assorted clones. Still, all it takes is a few Mexican moms with only a vague idea what game system their kids are asking for to make this thing profitable.

Despite being hellishly bootleg, the "Family Computer" is probably every bit as functional as an actual NES. Possibly even moreso - bootleg Famicoms tend not to be region locked, and some of them come pre-loaded with bunches of equally bootlegged games. The beauty of the old Famicom is that, being a relatively simple bit of electronics, there's less to screw up.

As for the text, it's entirely possible that it was just really bad Japanese. These are Chinese bootleggers we're talking about, here. Japanese is hardly immune to being horribly mangled by some guy with a Chinese-Japanese dictionary and no working knowledge of the actual language.