The Sup 400-in-1 Gamebox is a Chinese Famiclone sold through Temu, E-bay, and I think Ali Express. Five and Below also has a more recent version that removes a lot of the offending copyright strike games (Ie Super Mario, etc) from the console. It runs on one of those lithium ion batteries old flip phones used, and is charged via a Micro USB Port on the top. It comes with a Micro USB Cable (But no charger), and a 3.5" Phono out to A/V cable for playing through an actual television. This is a review based on 2 years of experience.

Powering it on, it popped up the menu identifying itself as 400-in-1 and obviously was a Chinese non-regulated product of some kind, similar to all these goofey famiclone consoles you'll find in other odd parts of the world that are not highly regulated or easily recognized by the general populace. To be honest, this was kind of a massive surprise considering it's 2022 when I got it, and by now, the questionable legality of such products is rather surprising, as right off the bat, I can see that they had major Nintendo Properties on it including Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, and Dr. Mario (albeit rebranded "Mr. Mary" when I launched it).

The screen is fairly decent, about on par with a NEC Ultralite Versa series laptop computer from 1993-1996. While the viewing angle is equally as weird, and it has a strange orangey tint to it - but more on that later. The backlight is nice and bright, but the screen is roughly the size of a original Grey brick gameboy unit from 1989, so it's a bit squinty for old people like me.

The buttons feel surprisingly good for such a product. They have a decent response, and a nice, tactile feel to them, though they are a little noisy. The D-pad's a little tiny though - but this has some advantages for a big ham-fisted old man like me.

The unit itself is pretty lightweight and feels cheap. I found out later they paid $10 for it. Kind of surprising. It's made out of the same kind of cheap plastic common to cheaper chinese products from the 1980's. This very hard, stiff, heavily textured plastic. The "Sup" is silkscreened over the top, however, it seems that's just ONE brand they sell this under as unbranded units were seen online as well.

The biggest torture test was playing all 313 games that are on it (more on that later) - things start to repeat - so it should be called the 313-in-1 - not the 400-in-1, but it has 400 slots for data. I spent all of xmas 2022 putting this thing through it's paces on every single game on the unit. It stood up to them all, however, I found that the battery started losing capacity by that point already.

The battery buldged out 3 years in, granted this probably was due to lack of exercise and therefore I kinda' blame myself for this one. Luckily, replacements with a higher mAH (1050 vs. 300) are available on E-bay for around $5.00 with free shipping.

As of December 2023, the battery is fully expired and started to buldge. This lead to some serious problems regarding power, especially when run through a Television. As of this point, it won't take a charge. Thankfully, BL-5C batteries are dirt cheap - like $5.00 a battery, considering the life you get out of them. However, I think some of this was because I did not exercise the battery properly and the device sat in a drawer for a really long time before I pulled it out again prior to starting this review/update.

Prior to this, the machine did start to have problems being captured over TV input due to poor power quality from the battery, however, I had issues with this while connecting too. Plus the cable it uses for to-TV video is kinda' cheap and crappy. It's also really short so you can't sit miles away from the television set and play the unit comfortably from the couch. The only real gaming session I had that was not into Open Broadcaster Studio was with a 27" Mitsubishi from 1989 where I had to sit about 15" from the screen awkwardly to play the games.

That said, the size can be pretty cramped if you do long gaming sessions with it, like my all x-mas long 2022 capture-fest responsible for this website. I find my hands start to sweat and get cramped up if I spend a lot of time playing hard, especially if I use manual button presses. Thankfully, the company responsible built this with "Turbo Buttons" to the right of the standard B/A buttons (although they are labeld X and B).

USB charging will save a lot on batteries for this device, that much is for sure. The original Game Boy ran on 4 AA batteries, this runs on one rechargable Lithium Ion battery that's pretty cheap. I checked and batteries on Amazon range from about $3.49 for the cheapest battery closest to the unit's original one, all the way to almost $15.00 for some pretty lofty claims and a much different battery. These use apparently the cheapest BL-5C form factor batteries to be had. I'm ordering new ones and and will update when I have them. However, it's also just tempting to buy one of the new Five And Below units that they have had out since mid 2023 since I think those are the same device cut-down to 200 games.

Graphics do have a strange orangey tint to them, I have reason to think this is the Video Circuitry, which I will get to later on.

Audio is much better through the TV (obviously) but it is apparent this is likely an emulator unit, or more likely, a NES on a Chip running code saved to flash ROM inside the unit given I've seen similiar wonkiness with various FAmiclones I've seen demonstrated on YouTube videos. One of the most immediatley obvious are the instruments on Super Mario Bros. - which sounds more like the "Dendy" version of this people had in Russia and other parts of Europe back in the late 80's. I'm thinking the emulator, or more likely, the NOAC (NES-on-a-Chip - meaning all of the functions of an original Famicom or NES built into a single piece of silicon), was based on one of these Dendy consoles and not a regular thing. It's an interesting thing - actually, I THINK Lady Decade did a video on this issue (or maybe some other YouTuber who popped up in the middle of her videos).

The video, however, carries over the orangey display issue to the TV, which has me thinking, the problem with the Orange tint, is not the LCD, but rather the console's video output - maybe the output is being a bit, uh, processed, or not processed enough to give true colors to everything. Or it may be one of those things that does not balance the color spectrum correctly because of how the NOAC/Emulator inside this thing works. Honestly, it is not that bothersome though, since I remember playing VS Super Mario Bros. at the arcades and seeing the same issue with those, though that could just be a thin layer of nicotine and pizza aroma coating the screen in that case.

Another issue I've found comes when recording, but the power drain on the unit when running in TV mode is pretty horrendous, leading to certain games not wanting to work properly at all. Actaully, I uploaded a pretty nutty glitch to YouTube involving the power when I pulled the power plug with the dead battery....and created a bunch of amazing and insane glitches somewhat unintentionally while recording.

First are the Classic games. These include Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Dr. Mario, Double Dragon, Excitebike, Adventure Island I & II, Donkey Kong/Jr/III. Surprisingly the only MMC3 game here it seems is Mario 3.

However, if things seem a little different than normal, that should not surprise you. Super Mario Bros. is the PAL european version, which runs too fast on what I assume is a NTSC emulator/NOAC inside the unit (I see this same problem with the Pocketgames 150-in-1). Also, it shows that the audio channels must have that reverse signal issue the "Dendy" consoles had because everything is pure square wave and not the envelope filtered sound that we usually get on the American NES.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is a proper NTSC-J format version, BUT, it's the JAPANESE release. So this might screw with some players used to the USA release. This one has also been hacked so it does not have the title screen on it. The first thing players will notice is you start with 3 lives instead of 5, and Mario will change to regular mario when hit even if he has the leaf or fire flower, or Tanooki suit. ALso, every level has a special little fade in that was removed on the USA version.

Which brings me to the fact some of the American games are asian releases and hacks. Mario Bros. identifies itself as "Mr. Mary" - where the whole "Mario Bros." Title screen has been wiped for the default NES on-screen font saying a tiny "Mr. Mary" in the middle. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is Chinese or Japanese (not sure the difference yet), so none of the cut scenes make any sense, and Kid Nikki 2 has been hacked into "Mario 14" - using Super Mario Bros. 3 assets. Some of these hacks look like they may be ROM hacks made from the internet in the early days of ROM Hacking.

But even more interesting is CONTRA!. Contra seems to split off into it's own "Cheat Screen" right away, so you get a total of about 12 different variations of Contra which allows you to skip levels and cheat, but it also kind of makes the experience inauthentic.

Drilling down further, we get some Famicom exclusives and some "C-list" NES releases. This was honestly the inspiration to start collecting for the Famicom (now my wife is REALLY going to hate this thing). For example, two examples of the Famicom list that really stick out to me, is Bird Week and Antarctic Adventure, both of which were not available in America, and both are actually pretty fun. Bird Week was so absurdly named though I literally though it belonged in a later category of games here.

C-list releases included things like Rush'n'Attack and Gradius, the former I really started to dig due to cool music and decent gameplay of. Gradius is one I have some experience with.

There are some stinkers here too - such as the three above. Back to the Future (why in the heck would anyone want this game?), King's Knight (which is the game that notoriously almost sank Square before Nirobu Sakaguci saved the whole thing with Final Fantasy), and CastleQuest - aka Castle Excellent, which is really not that bad but just not up to par with some of the other more iconic releases on this unit. That said, they might be better in the time waster category.

Of course, in the more proper time-waster category are the Arcade classics, of which there are plenty, Gradius, Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, Spy Hunter, 1942....just to name a few Arcade ports on this unit. And they all run great and play well, except 1942 picks up some weird graphical artifacts for some crazy reason.

And then of course, we get a nice smattering of Nice Code games which make up roughly 1/3rd of the catalog on this unit. For those that don't know, Nice Code is a current CHina developer of new Famicom/FAmiclone games for consoles such as this. Above is Lawn Mower, Escapeway, and "Mirroe". These games can get pretty freakin' weird in a very funny and cheesy way. Mixed in are some interesting ports of Arcade classics and even one Intellivision game (Night Stalker). Seems China liked the Intellivision system for some reason.

The 400-in-1 has it's own smattering of "Broken" games in it. Which include Aso and Exerion, as well as Sea Maid, which all have graphical corruption issues in gameplay, as well as Arkista's Ring. At least one does not work - Volgard II, which does not even work at all, to the point I had to download a screenshot from the internet for it's own page. I have found certain games stopped working after working for awhile, like Antarctic Adventure, which was one of my favorites, but stopped working after the battery buldged. It is as of yet to be seen if this is a problem caused by file corruption on the flash ROM, or if this is just a power-related problem, because I HAVE gotten Exerion to work at least once, and I THINK I may have gotten Volgard II to work as well.