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So much fun to be had with.. Speed Tedium, Super Callop, Long Massacre and Hag Ambush.

Any one else got some weird, funny or unpleasant multicart things to share?
(yep, its mostly Contra and Antarctic Adventure in this one)

"Speed Tedium" could describe a lot of racing games.

"Dormant": How would a Sleeping Beauty game even work?
"Canon Loyalty": Is this about avoiding temptation to buy a competing camera, about out of character fanfic, or a misspelling for "Cannon Loyalty", some sort of Rampart clone? (I'm guilty.)
"Speed Buger": Let me guess, one of those gross-out games from WarioWare.
"Long Offside": I wonder what sport that is.
"Apostate": Since when did Watchtower get into video game development? Is the publishing arm of Jehovah's Witnesses trying to belatedly compete with Wisdom Tree?

I wonder what other multicarts have "creative" renames, and whether we could have a game jam to develop original games based solely on the titles, like one mockbuster film studio is known for.

One story I can share about pirate multicarts is that when they were widely available a few years back in downtown Rio de Janeiro, I would often go there to pick up a few. A lot of them were the typical randomly named/numbered NROM games, but from time to time something more interesting would pop up. You often had to go by the cover, because hardly anyone had a console hooked up for testing. Most sellers didn't even know those were Nintendo games, and instead called them "Polystation games".

One day, after having sold me several cartridges, one specific seller decided to ask me if I had ever played any of those games until the end. I honestly don't remember my answer (but the truth is no, I didn't play those carts much), but then he outright confessed he didn't know whether the games he was selling were complete. It could also be that he knew they weren't complete, and found it strange I never complained, so he faked ignorance... who knows.

Anyway, to this day I sometimes find myself wondering about the pirate cartridges I own. I think this is a legitimate concern, as some of the them contain 3 or 4 good, large, MMC3 games, that would require over 1 or 2MB of memory, and it does sound unlikely that these would cost the same as the cheap NROM collections. But at this point I really don't have the patience to play all those games with any significant level of commitment, so I guess I'll just keep wondering.

Say you have a cart capable of holding four SMB3-size games. That's 1 MiB of PRG ROM and 512 KiB of CHR ROM, 8 KiB of work RAM, and a mapper IC. It's not too much more hardware than went into a Super NES game.

On another note, multicarts are a notorious source of Tengen Tetris copies, if you want to get that version without going crazy hunting down cartridges.

Also is it me or in Argentina we got completely different multicarts? I never saw one with Contra for instance, but on the other hand Battle City and Lunar Ball would always be there (in fact you can usually find Super Battle City here where the title screen is green and level layouts go up to 99, not related to Tank 90). Also Duck Hunt, Ice Climbers... you get the idea. (and Tengen Tetris at the top, nearly always called "Tetris 2" for some reason)

I wonder what it'd take to get homebrews into these multicarts. One did use my Nibbles clone, the one that runs with uneven speed on an NES because it used $2002 spinning to detect vblank.

Well, the multicarts I was talking about seem to include exclusively mapperless games with PRG-ROM and CHR-ROM. I guess that's so they only have to implement the multicart's own mapper.

Basically: use NROM.

Sometime in the early 2000's, as a gift my mom bought me one of those "PowerJoy 2" clones (looks like an N64 controller with a light gun built in, and has a cart slot). They were everywhere for a while, I even saw it being demoed on QVC (a TV shopping channel). There wasn't anything too interesting on the included multicart, but the games built into the console were pretty amusing. There was "Pandamar", which was SMB with a Panda instead of Mario, every other tile changed to squares and weird stuff, and the music in the game was hacked so it just plays some random-sounding beeps. And Duck Hunt was in there (named UFO-something), where the ducks were changed to UFOs, and the music was changed. They changed the dog into a kid, and instead of the animation of the dog wagging his tail, it looks like the the kid stops and scratches his ass. Also, Tengen Tetris was in there, with all the pieces changed into really bizarre shapes, making it pretty much unplayable.

I didn't see it in person, just on some website selling it, but there was Gameboy Advance multicart that had Munchie Attack on it. I don't recall if it had other homebrews on it.

tepples wrote:"Speed Tedium" could describe a lot of racing games.

Indeed
A Callop is apparently "a deep-bodied edible gold and green freshwater fish found in Australia".
[..god I wish I had the skills and patience to make a photoshop mockup of that title screen.. ]

This really bad multicart named "1000000-in-1" fascinates me.
For having such an abundance of quality games, its strange how the rom file size is just 1Mbyte..
32x16k prg and 64x8k chr to fit one millon games. Truly amazing.
What's not mentioned on the box (if there ever was one) are the chunks of scattered source code for some multi cart system. Actually, there are several "xx-in-1" references in there.

To be honest, it is quite the entrepreneurship to make a multicart engine like this.

1) Fetch a word from table 1 (SUPER, FANCY, CRAZY, etc)
2) Fetch a word from table 2 (MARIO, TANK, TETRIS, etc)
3) Fetch a number or a letter and put onto screen
(4) Hack the original game just a little so it counts as a new one)

Now, lets play Crazy Kong Fu 3

mikaelmoizt wrote:(4) Hack the original game just a little so it counts as a new one)

Recently I found a multicart that doesn't even bother with this (at least most multicarts mess with the initial level value). Also its name generator was bugged up because it'd generate repeated names all the time (sometimes within the same page!).

mikaelmoizt wrote:1) Fetch a word from table 1 (SUPER, FANCY, CRAZY, etc)
2) Fetch a word from table 2 (MARIO, TANK, TETRIS, etc)

I had fun with this tendency of pirates on one of my pages too: http://www.chrismcovell.com/OneStation/index.html

PINBALL FISH
Asian pirates sure have a funny way of naming their games. It's usually some obscure adjective followed by an animal of some type, like "Hectic Penguin", or "Consumptive Panda". This one is just as strange while still being halfway descriptive.

ccovell wrote:I had fun with this tendency of pirates on one of my pages too: http://www.chrismcovell.com/OneStation/index.html

From this page's description of Dream Bubble:
"But!! Some of the pieces are weirdly shaped, like the spiteful 'U' shape seen in the 1st ingame pic, or the 3-segment 'L' shape. Basically, they've taken Tetris and made 3 lines the maximum that you can clear at a time. "
It sounds like Tetris with Rampart pieces: each piece has 5 or fewer blocks, fits in a 3x3 square, and does not contain the O tetromino. So maybe I can bring back LJ65, as most of the copyright ruling from three years ago seems to cover the piece set.

tepples wrote: So maybe I can bring back LJ65, as most of the copyright ruling from three years ago seems to cover the piece set.

You should make a piece set editor inside the game, let users make their own and save it to flash memory.

tepples wrote:So maybe I can bring back LJ65, as most of the copyright ruling from three years ago seems to cover the piece set.

Note that I believe it also covers the concept of filling a row to clear it... (although I bet that in practice it's quite vague what's really covered by it)

Pac-Attack and 1010! also have line clearing. (Yoshi's Cookie does as well, but it doesn't count because it's by Bullet-Proof Software, which is closely associated with the Tetris IP.)