New system at GameStop: VG Pocket

I justed wanted to say that I received the vgPocket for christmas. I saw it at GameStop and just thought it was really cool looking. My girlfriend bought it for me and overall, I think it is a nice system. I have the 50 game one and am a fan of older games. The games are rather simple for the most part, but there is one shooter called air war that is very entertaining. I did notice that the directional pad is sometimes not real responsive, but is not incredibly horrible. If anyone knows how to fix this, please let us know. There are a couple other games that I thought were worth having this system. A game called Jewels which is a version of the old game columns, a pool game, and possibly one or two other logic games have potential if you are into that type of games. I will post a full list of games soon. The other feature that I think is very nice, is the brighness and clearness of the 2.0" color screen. The screen is and A+ in my eyes. For the price of this system, whick since I did not buy it, I think is somewhere around $30-$40, this screen is unbeleivably clear and bright. If anyone finds anyway to add games to this system, I would love to know how to mod this system. The hardware is great, it just needs some games replaced. Maybe a small RPG and a console Mariolike game would be great. It seems like this may be another system that has great potential but no support, and unfortunately not much work on the games. I bought a sharp wizard pda a few years back and the same thing. Great system, great potential, no support. Overall, I enjoy it though. Great Gift.
 
Here is a list of the games included on the vgPocket VG-2000 (50 Games). I will write reviews in another post on some of the games that I have played and feel are worth a review. If someone has the 75 game model, I would like to know how many games are different between the 50 game model and the 75 game model and if there are any good games on the 75 game model.

Action:

Get it Right
Lawn Gems
Leap
Road Works
Smash Ball

Racing:

Bandit Racer
Motor Rally
Road Ace
Road Race

Shooting:

Air War
Earth's Star Fighter
Quick Shot
Sky Fighter
Space Shooter
Sub Hunter

Sports:

Bulls-eye
Free Throws
Surfs Up
Target Shoot

Wits:

Bird Craze
Bird Droppings
Bounce
Butterfly Catch
Chuck Holes
Dragon's Tail
Drop and Stock
Egg Catcher
Fire Fight
Flying Fish
Fungi
Globs
Go Ball
Go Bang
Grow and Mow
Jewels
Matching Diamonds
Fun Moves
Paddle Ball
Paint
Patch'n Go
Pipelines
Pool Pro
Rainbows
Richochet
River Racing
Sea Destroyer
Sky Mission
Smart Monkey
Spin Ball
Wake The Baby
 
--Adventure--
Balloon Catcher
Get it Right
Jump
Leap
Night Monster
Penguin Island - Not bad 5 mini games
Quick Match
Road Works - Great Puzzle Game
Sea Voyage
Smash Ball
Worm Catcher
--Racing--
Autobahn
Bandit Racer
Bridge Driver
Freeway
Motor Rally
Off-Roader
Race and Ram
Road Ace
Road Race
Road Rally
Street Bike Racing
Trucker
World Racing
--Shooting--
Air War - A bit like 1941
Earth's Star Fighter - Shooter with both air and ground targets
Mutant Hunt - Shooter with both air and ground targets
Quick Shot - Space Invaders Clone
Sky Fighter - Galaxian / Galaga clone
Starcraft Attack - Galaxian / Galaga clone
--Sports--
Boat Racer
Bulls-eye - Weird target shooting / dart like game
Free Throws
Knockem Down
Rackets
Surfs Up
Target Shoot
--Wits--
Bird Craze
Bird Droppings
Bounce
Butterfly Catch
Cats and Dogs
Chuck Holes
Dragon's Tail
Drop and Stock
Egg Catcher
Fire Fight
Flying Fish
Fungi - A bit like Pac Man
Fun Moves - Neat line 3 up puzzle game like Bejeweled
Globs
Go Ball
Go Bang - Go puzzle gang
Grow and Mow
Jewels - very fun puzzle game kinda like Tetris
Marble Max
Matching Diamonds
Paddle Ball
Paint
Patch n Go
Pipelines
Pool Pro - Decent pool sim for a handheld
Pop the Lop - whack a mole based game
Puzzle Box - neat maze / puzzle game
Rocochet - Breakout clone
Risk It - A Donkey Kong style game
River Racing
Sea Destroyer
Sea World
Sky Mission
Smart Monkey
Spin Ball - Neat maze puzzle game
Table Ball - Ping Pong style game
Tile Tizzle - Neat tile matching game
Wake the Baby
 
vg2000 seems to have 4 games not found on the vg3000

--Action--
Lawn Gems
--Shooting--
Space Shooter
Sub Hunter
--Wits--
Rainbows

vg3000 has 29 games not found on the vg2000
In my opinion Penguin Island, Puzzle Box and Tile Tizzle are the only 3 that are not on the vg2000 that are worth playing.

--Action--
Balloon Catcher
Jump
Night Monster
Penguin Island - Not bad 5 mini games
Quick Match
Sea Voyage
Worm Catcher
--Racing--
Autobahn
Bridge Driver
Freeway
Off-Roader
Race and Ram
Road Rally
Street Bike Racing
Trucker
World Racing
--Shooting--
Mutant Hunt - Shooter with both air and ground targets
Starcraft Attack - Galaxian / Galaga clone
--Sports--
Boat Racer
Knockem Down
Rackets
--Wits--
Cats and Dogs
Marble Max
Pop the Lop - whack a mole based game
Puzzle Box - neat maze / puzzle game
Risk It - A Donkey Kong style game
Sea World
Table Ball - Ping Pong style game
Tile Tizzle - Neat tile matching game
 
Penguin Island sounds like a cool game, I wish the vg2000 had that game. I am interested in knowing anything about possibly hacking this system. I would love to have an RPG on this nice color screen to take along with me.
 
How many people are still actively reading the replies on this post? If you are, post some ideas or things you would be interested in regarding this system.
 
Chuck Holes Review (VG-2000):

This game is located under the wits category and is very entertaining. If you like logic games, you will find this game fun to play. This game is like a combination of Gauntlet, and Dig-Dug. The main character resembles the popular Nintendo character Kurby. I have finished several levels and so far have found that the game looks great and plays well. The object of the game is to fill the holes in the road with stones in order to make yourself a smooth road, you must then push the ball into place to open the treasure chest and move onto the next level. There are more obstacles to this game as well, that make it very entertaining. It has some aspects of an RPG in some respects. On a couple of the levels that I have played, you must work your way toward a key to open the door that allows you access to the teasure chest and the next level. This game is one of the few that definately make this system worth purchasing. I give this game an A+ for overall look and feel. I give it a B+ for playability, only because the vg-2000 direction controls are sometimes difficult, although it seems as I play more, and the controls get broke in a little more, they seem to work better.
 
I have been monitoring the posts on this forum for a few days and would like to add my thoughts. I work at a wal-amrt and happened to see the vg pocket max and picked one up for under 40 bucks. I had a few thoughts about it that may be nice to roll around. If indeed it is a NOAC, then it may be possible to mod the unit with an SD card slot on the side once several pretests are done. If anyone can dump the roms in the unit, then we can find out about the pre loader directory and move on from there. Also no one mentioned that the left side of the screen cuts off about a tiles worth of graphics. 8 pix. no biggie but worth mentioning. hooking it up to a tv corrects this.On a side note, I also picked up another tv plug n play device about a week earlier and it has to be the same thing cause it plays many of the same games. If it can be used to run test on before the pocxket then that will help other from destroying the pocket. And I bet that the unit may have pin outs for a start and select that arent used. just mod again with a start and select on the bottom left and right of the screen for these.
 
[quote name='iheartmetal']well, most people seem to forget that copyright on a lot of nintendo stuff is expiring now, so this can totally be legit... too bad theres not more details, could be very interesting[/QUOTE]

While Nintendo itself is more than 95 years old, none of its video games is.
 
First of all everyone, HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!!

Second, I would be interested in trying to dump the ROM on the system, but I am new to this. Does anyone have a website that I could read up on dumping a ROM image? Also, I would like to practice on a cheaper game system, not my vg, which I love and do not want to destroy for testing purposes. Any ideas, just let me know. I think blankmediapro is headed in the direction that I was thinking. The SD slot is a great idea if it would work.
 
Yeah, the methods are different for every system; nobody's going to have the information for doing so on this one. Besides, if the hardware's modified, there won't be much to do with the result.
 
I also found one for cartriges
http://nesdev.parodius.com/rom.txt

I figured if anyone can trace the tracks on a vg pocket based on the NOAC pinouts then that will allow them to know what the pins are for the rom chip based on the cartrige connections.Just find ground and the vcc+ and go from there. I would love to do this but just don't have the time to put in the effort. One could also take a cheap unit like a dream gear 50 in 1 and preform a cartrige connection for testing. I have one apart now and have been studying it to learn more about the pocket. They have the same guts. BTW, my pocket only have the master clock crystal and no others inside. someone elses had 2 crystals inside. Strange, the dreamgear and others like it have an extra chip inside unlike the pocket. I know the pocket has other chips but not like the size of this one.I bet the small chip in the pocket is an audio amp.
 
I picked up a mini one tonight to hack up sorta speak. thiis one has the same type of rom chip (new type of course) that nintendo uses for their carts. old (nes, snes) and newer (64, gba) Even today this type is used in the Nintendo DS. (MX)
 
How much does the dream gear cost? How much was the mini that you purchased and where did you pick it up at?
 
I just picked one of these up yesterday at Gamestop. THough there's no NES games on it, there's a number of classic knock off's. There's:

Smart Monkey - most might not recognize this, but it's actually a rip-off of Pooyan, which is just as weird as this version

Ricochet - Breakout

Paint - Pac-Man (kind of). There's actually an old game called Paint, which was a pac-man knock off. Maybe this is the same?

Jewels - Collumns

Fire Fight - another Breakout, except weirder

Chuck Holes - not a direct rip off of anything I know, but you look exactly like Kirby.

Bounce - *another* Breakout, except obnoxiously hard.

Bird Craze- like Duck Hunt, without the annoying dog.

Earth's Star Fighter - Xevious

Quick Shot - Space Invaders

Air War - 1942

Motor Rally - Outrun

Anyone else detect some connections I didn't?
 
To add to the inovercy comments about the Chuck Holes game. You do look like kirby in this game. I think this is a great game. This is one of the handful of games on the vg pocket that I really enjoy playing. Read my review of the game in a previous post.
 
One other note!

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make the directional control pad more responsive? I am going to take a look at it and see if I can come up with any ideas. I enjoy playing Chuck Holes, but when I move in the wrong direction because of the directional pad, it really gets me mad.
 
[quote name='caa718']How much does the dream gear cost? How much was the mini that you purchased and where did you pick it up at?[/QUOTE]
I got the dream gear on sale at walgreens for like 15 bucks and I got the mini at wal-mart for 20 bucks. the max cost around 40
ona side note to a previous post of mine, I got a site for the pinouts of an SD card
http://pinouts.ru/data/sdcard_pinout.shtml
 
[quote name='caa718']One other note!

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make the directional control pad more responsive? I am going to take a look at it and see if I can come up with any ideas. I enjoy playing Chuck Holes, but when I move in the wrong direction because of the directional pad, it really gets me mad.[/QUOTE]

Yea, I have the same thing with 'Paint'. It seems like it might be fun, but the controls are soo unresponsive in it that gameplay is simply impossible (getting caught in corners constantly or not making turns when I wanted to).
 
I was successful at fixing the vg pocket directional controls to be more responsive. A short list of directions for the mod is listed below. Please be adviced, these directions are only for informational purposes. If you use this list of directions, it is at your own risk. Electronic parts are touchy, and getting things back together exactly the same way, may be tricky at times.

Tools:

1.) Small screwdriver
2.) Electical Tape

Directions:

1.) Flip the system face down and take out the five screws on the back side of the case.
2.) Flip the back cover over, be aware that there are two wires connecting the front and back cover. Do not pull apart too far or wires will break off and need repaired.
3.) Take out the four screws holding the main board to the front cover, and flip the main board over and apart from the front cover. Be sure to keep the unit face down or the buttons will fall from the front cover of the unit. Note, the same applies here, there are wires connecting the main board to the front cover, do not pull apart too far or wires will break.
4.) remove the rubber directional pad from the front cover, (it may also have stuck to the main board), and place it on a flat surface, magnets facing down.
5.) cut eight small peices of electrical tape, approximately 1/8" square. Just enought that they will cover the rubber circled peice on the directional pad. Place one of these peices of electrical tape on each of the cirecle parts of the rubber directional pad, then double up with a second layer by adding the second peice of electrical tape to the first. When you are done, you will have two layers of the electrical tape on each of the small round parts of the rubber directional pad, with the magnets facing down.
6.) Place the rubber directional pad back onto the chrome plastic directional pad with the magnets facing up, so that they will have contact with the main board when reattached.
7.) Be sure that all of the buttons and rubber peices with magnets are in place.
8.) Reattach the main board to the front cover in reverse order of step three (note, be sure that the screen is in place to fit in the slot, and be sure that both the lcd screen and the plastic screen on the font cover are clean before reattaching the main board.
9.) Reattach the front cover to the back cover in reverse order of steps one and two.
10.) Turn system on and test.

I found that this short mod helped noticably with the response of the directional keypad. I hope it helps with your system as well.
 
If anyone has any questions or comments regarding the posting on the directional keypad mod, please post them.
 
Just in case that an SD card could be added to a VG Pocket Max, I found the perfect location just under the D pad from the left side. This area is rather vacant of parts except for the clock crystal. However the reader guts could fit just under this. My theory on adding a memory slot consist of the following:

A small board that is wired to the pinouts of the rom chip and a small switch to choose between the rom chip or the board which has a chip of around 2 to 8 MB of memory. This chip hits all the pinouts of the cart connections and the SD would feed it's data to this chip of volatile memory for execution serialy. The SD would have to have a front end loader prog written that would display a directiory of the roms contained within. Only the rom that will be played at any given time is loaded onto the 8 MB chip and fed directly to the NOAC as if it WERE an actual cartrige. When reset is hit the front end laoder will relaod form the SD card. Now there is also a small I/O controller that goes between the SD and the 2 to 8 MB chip that handles the data feed commands. This is the theory. This may be over complicated but if anyone else has an idea on geting data from a serial SD card to a full cartrige connection, please feel free to come up with some ideas.

Side note: An SD card can acualy operate in more than one bit at a time. there is one pin that is a comand/data in and 3 that are outs but usualy only one is used from what I understand. This may be wrong. any thoughts???
 
looks like blankmediapro is on to something positive with the mod. JSK414, definately purchase one of these systems. It looks like we have a small group of people interested in modding this system. Other than the SD card mod, if anyone else has any ideas on modding this system, post your ideas. I have posted a small mod to give the directional keypad better response. I also gave a review of one of the games in a previous post. Any additional comments, suggestions, mods, etc. please post them and keep this forum thread going strong.
 
One thing that I heard people complain about when it comes to this system is that the screen scratches easily. I noticed that the screen does scratch easily and unfortunately I scratched it from the inside when modding the directional keypad. When I had the system apart though, it appears that the screen may come out rather easily and may be able to be replaced by a new peice of plexiglass, etc. this might be an idea for another mod. I also noticed that the screen is hard to clean, so this may be a fix for this problem.
 
One quick fix. If anyone can buff out the current scratches with maybe a dremel buffer and do it litely enough as not to burn a rut in the screen cover plastic (as long as it is evenly done across the screen). You could purchase a palm pilot screen protector film and trim to fit. This would do it wonders. Be sure not to get any bubbles under it though.

Also I was wondering if anyone has made any headway on dumping the rom chip from any of the VG Pocket models? I figure that the mini would be the easiest to do this on. I have never ripped a rom before and would like to know more about it from thoes with first-hand experience.

Had a backup plan for the SD thought. If a multiplexer chip that could transfer serial data to parallel but was intuitive about it like a router this could be a simpler solution than the fore mentioned thought above but this requires a more precise chip to do so. I usualy purchased my electronic supplies from digikey. I think they have a website with the exact same name. www.digikey.com
 
Well after doing some more research, it looks as if to do a dump on the ROM chip, it will have to be removed from the board and connected to a general purpose EPROM reader in order to dump the ROM image. If this is not correct, then let me know. It seems that every ROM dump works differently and in order to successfully do this, you must have some electronics experience, which unfortunately I do not. Does anyone have any ideas? I also read somewhere that a rep from the company that makes the system (www.jungletac.com) said that the games were updatable through a port on the system. The only port I see is the port used to connect the system to a T.V. I also read that this port is all you need and it is possible if the company released what was needed to do this. I contacted every person on the contact list and am waiting for an email back.
 
Hey, maybe you already knew this, but if you Hold down square and Circle on the VG-2000(50 games) and turn it on, it has a debug screen to test the controller.
From that screen, if you press square + down, it goes white. Press square repeatedly to go through different colors. To exit, just reset.
 
Wow good find, Coolty. It works on the Max version as well. Interestingly enough, the debug screen shows two NES controllers (with Start/Select buttons!). I can hold down square/circle or square/double triangle to enter debug mode.
 
I was convinced that there may be tracks on the internal board for start and select. This debug screen supports this even more. Would be cool if someone could find these. I need to go now. Got to get ready for work.
 
Well, that definately backs up the NOAC theory. If we can work with this and get some ideas together, we might be able to run some nintendo roms on this system. All I keep thinking about is all of those old Nintendo and Gameboy RPG's, and how great they would look on a system like the VG. Thanks Coolty for finding this trick.
 
Oh, no problem. Just glad I can help out a little, with some luck we will all be playing zelda in no time ;)
 
Dig this... the price of the VG Pocket Max has been shaved down to $25 at Wal-Mart, and just $15 for the trimmed-down model with thirty games. You get a pretty decent toy for that price. The screen wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped (there's a certain graininess to the display which makes text fuzzy and hard to read), and as others have mentioned, the joypad is pretty crummy. Still, you're getting a color display and seventy games for less than thirty dollars. You can't beat that with a stick!

It's worth pointing out that several of the games on the VG Pocket Max are hacks of previously released NES and Famicom games. The archery and skeet shoot games are straight out of Track 'n Field (with almost nothing changed), while Sky Mission is a repackaged version of Astro Robo Sasa. Even Penguin Island, while unique in gameplay, takes most of its graphics from Yume Penguin Monogatari.

JR
 
Has anyone heard about PIC programing? This may be the solution we have been loking for. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. A Programable integrated circuit. With a pic we just need the address lines of the NES slot and the input of an sd card and voila! instant portable NES. If anyone knows anything about PIC's or knows anyone who does, please find out waht you can.
 
I picked up one of the VG Pocket 50 units today, and it's kinda neat. There's no doubt this is NES hardware, with thinly-disguised ripoffs of NES games. There's a near-perfect copy of Bump-N-Jump on this thing!

However, we could do better. The software on the VG Pocket system seems to be low quality. If we can get ROMs on to this thing, that would truly rock. I've got one of those import games-in-a-joystick things, and I'd love it if I could get the rom from that (with MUCH better ripoffs) into the VG Pocket.

A few thoughts- How the heck will we use some NES games without select or start? The "Reset" doesn't register as either select or start on the controller debug, and even if we find a way to access those functions, the buttons just aren't on the outside of the system. The only thing I could think of is rewiring the turbo buttons to work as select and start, if that's possible.

The screen alone makes this worth it, but the NOAC is just BEGGING to be exploited and turned into something that allows us to play Zelda, Metroid, and DECENT 8-bit games, instead of these quick-n-dirty generic ripoffs.

I swear, 1/4 of the games on this thing are BREAKOUT clones!

I've got one of the 30-game VG Pocket Lite systems set aside at work, and I'll grab that next week and tinker with it. We'll see what we can figure out between all three models.
 
I just noticed that a lot of the games on the package are NOT on the VG Pocket.

What gives?

Anyway... Anybody out there? Anybody make any progress yet?
 
[font=&quot]Hey, I am new to these forums; I have not even set anything up yet. I found this discussion with a goggle search, and I was glad to see that other people were interested in finding the answer to the same thing that I was seeking. I picked up a VG Pocket Max (75) at my local Wal-Mart on clearance for $15! I bought it, because I was convinced that it was a Famicom clone. I was right! The first thing that I did, was open it up. The first thing that I noticed was two "glop-tops" oh dread... If you are not familiar with this term, a "glop-top" is an Integrated Circuit that is directly bonded to the board. A glop of silicon is then added to the top of it, for protection. One of these ICs was labeled 16M I assume that this is a 16 mega-bit ROM that the pirated ROMs combined with the menu system are stored on. Due to the amount of traces and leads pointing to the second Glop, (including input functions), I am pretty sure that it is a NOAC! After removing the board from the front panel and being frustrated by all of the buttons and plungers falling off, combined with the short length of the connected speaker wire, I took only a brief look at the front of the board. A quick look over revealed no visible leads to a start or select. Unless turbo one and turbo two can be swapped for start and select via cutting the traces halfway, and soldering them to other inputs on the NOAC. This, along with swapping the main ROM with an EPROM of other ROM storage device might be a bit tricky, because of the fragile nature of glop-tops in general. With a steady hand and more knowledge on the inner workings of a NOAC, this one in particular, I am almost positive that the Portable NES dream can be realized.[/font]
 
I have given many documents and diagrams ilustrating NOAC's cartrige connections and such. If anyone wants to take the time and try and trace any of the circuit board connections, we may can identify some if not most of the NOAC lines. I still think that the PIC may be the best solution. I ran across a company on the web that had a surface mount that would fit no problem. For thoes whe don't want to read back to previous archives in this forum, I will post the fore mentioned sites here for info.

This is the NOAC chip track count and layout http://nesdev.parodius.com/nes-on-a-chip.txt

one for cartriges http://nesdev.parodius.com/rom.txt

My original thought was to use an SD card for rom loading into the unit. Here is a site for SD card pinouts. http://pinouts.ru/data/sdcard_pinout.shtml

I figure if this thing can be moded, noone really wants it perm. unless you could get all 500 to 800 roms of NES games into it or have a huge cartrige connector hangiin out the back. could do perminant flash mem and just change it out with an upload with a USB cable. There are so many ideas to try, and I bet several of them will be needed in order to test this out and progress along. As for me, I would be extatic with an SD as an end result.
 
So basically what we're trying to do here is:

1: figure out a way to use the [START] and [SELECT] buttons.

2: figure out a way to load ROMS from an SD card.

Shouldnt be too hard, but I have no experience in this kind of thing.
 
Okay, in the debug screen on my VG pocket, it says TESTRAM FAIL
i'm not sure if only mine does this, or if everyone's does? Can someone confirm this?
 
My does it too, so I assume everyone else's does. I'm going to tear mine open right now and follow the button leads to see if I can find the start/select leads.
 
There are rehashes of arkanoid, bump n jump, pacman, columns, pong, boulderdash, snake, pipedream, battleship, and a pool game that's kinda fun. Other than that there isn't much. Many of them are the same game with slight differences, and involve catching some object falling from the sky with a pong like paddle. They do look good for 16-bit games though.
 
Well, it looks like it is time for me to learn some electronic stuff. lol. I picked up one of the VG 50's this weekend in hopes of seeing what I can learn about it to contribute.
 
I got a VG Mini this weekend and the joystick is excellent and it has about ten games that the VG pocket(50) didn't. Downside is that the screen is tiny, the buttons are on the top shoulder of the unit, and there's no volume control. It is very LOUD. I wish they would have put the joystick style conrol on all of these things.
 
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