| Sup 400-in-1 Tech Stuffs Digging into the world of the Modern Portable Famiclone |
 What. Did you forget WHO wrote this website? C'mon, there's going to be technical data here, even on a cheap, questionably legal "Famiclone" here. So here it is, the case-technical study - in photos - of the Sup(reme) 400-in-1 "Game Box" Game Boy copy "Famiclone" handheld.
Famiclone Basics What I see a lot on the internet, is that that there is some confusion as to whether this is an Emulation box, or if this is a "NOAC" or "NES-on-a-Chip" which has been a popular platform for these sorts of inexpensive "Famiclones" (Famicom Clones) going all the way back to things like the Jak's Pacific Arcade, Atari 2600, and other all-in-one stylized joysticks and paddle controllers from around 2003. I can confim, that this uses some kind of blob-top SoC (System-on-a-Chip) for the main CPU, basically an ASIC (Application-Specific-Integrated-Circuit). Basically, what it does, is replicates a real NES or Famicom system in hardware, and then executes the games as they would on a regular NES or Famicom. The most common of these chips in inexpensive Famiclones such as this is the V.R. Technologies VTxx series - which are listed here at NESDev wiki. Some of these have some enhanced capabilities over a regular NES, but they are mostly used for playing already pre-existing NES titles on various types of hardware. A lot of the time, these chips are hidden under a epoxy blob called a "Blobtop". These then read off of a Flash ROM storage of some kind, usually containing the menu code, game code, and whatnot, basicallylike an actual Famicom multicart would have going all the way back to the late 1980's. These Flash ROMS have ridiculously high amounts of storage sometimes, such as 128MB, and less than all of it is being used. It's been rumored a lot of these chips are damaged, "used" chips in a lot of these. A Technical Look at the Sup GameBox 400-in-1  Here's the motherboard of my Sup' 400-in-1 Gamebox with the major components annotated and listed on the board.
First off, dead center of the board, is the "glop top" that most likely is a V.R. Tech VTxx CPU. I'm willing to bet this could be a used VT02 given some of the bizzare behavior from this Famiclone console in some games such as Arkista's Ring, Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong Jr (Sound), and so on. Honestly, I have to wonder if this was somewhat taken from the "Dendy" by design because I saw a video recently on the audio differences between a real NES and the Dendy consoles from Russia. We really don't need to bother with this. The biggest piece-d' resistance though is that big honkin chip on the upper left corner of the board - this is the flash ROM chip used to store all 312ish games on. It seems a common interest to people on these is the idea of loading your own games onto it, something I'd be tempted to do TBH (think the entire U.S. NES library fits on this device). |
