After a bit of haranguing, I was finally able to get my hands on this pirate Famicom console. The system itself is the same as one of the pirate consoles shown before on another page.

This was picked up at a toy store in Greece and boldly exclaims its "NEW DIMENSIONS IN GAME PLAY" on the box. I like the slightly inappropriate clip art on the box; I wonder why they felt compelled to put The Flintstones on the box? In fact, the flip side contains 24 screenshots and none of them come from NES games at all! There're shots of Genesis, SNES.. even 3d0 games! How many Greek families were disappointed by the hype on the box? And how many more were disappointed by the fact that the "60 day limited guaranty" was useless because there is no manufacturer or address listed anywhere?

Oh, and how many more were disappointed to read on the side of the box that the console includes "600000000 in 1 game cartridge with 17 real games"? Yes, it actually says this on the box! The pirates finally come clean with their game counts. Games include Street Fighter V.6D., Batman Flash, and several of the usual 32k pirated games. Unfortunately I wasn't able to try these games out; the previous owner of the console fried it when he tried using it with an Atari 5200 power supply.

The system comes with this console (complete with 15-pin FC expansion port and a "Super Video Game Seal of Quality" that I'm sure made Nintendo shake at the knees), two controllers, an RF switch, a weird Euro AC adapter, and a Nintendo-clone light gun. The controllers are shaped almost exactly like SNES controllers with two turbo buttons and Atari-style connectors.

The big surprise about this unit is how light it is. The console and lightgun are extremely light; I felt like I could carry about twenty of them. This isn't the only pirate console that's like that, either. As it turns out, this is due to the fact that no pirate consoles have the heavy metal plates inside that are used in the US for RF shielding. Those plates make a very surprising difference in weight. There are both RF and composite outputs, and it's altogether not a badly made system at all.

Back to the odd page.