BL-826A
| BL-826A | |
|---|---|
| Type | Handheld |
| Hardware | Unknown VT-series |
| Manufacturer | Xinbaolong |
| Developer | Wellminds |
| Brand | BL |
A handheld Famiclone-ish console seemingly by Wellminds, released under the BL brand. Has 168 built in games + SD card support(!)
Box
Console
Quite a nice well-made machine (albeit from cheap plastic). Sadly no select button, and an annoying multi-level sound button instead of a volume wheel :(
It supports rechargeable lithium (Nokia BL-5C type) or AAA batteries, the former can be charged via a mini USB port. which also activates a ridiculously bright LED.
168 in 1 built in games
Menu in Chinese & English. Looks like there are no repeats, but unverified
- Catch (the) Cat (围住神经猫) - Seems to be the only game supporting this hardware's native(?) mode, more advanced graphics than FC & scratchy sampled sound. Based on a Chinese web game.
- Backkom - Hack of Wacky Races
- Cross Fire (kyugo)
- Plants vs Zomb(ies) (Nice Code)
- Angry Bird(s) (Nice Code)
- Super Contra 2 - hacked with big "START" text on title screen. Game over text broken.
- Gunnac - Hack credited to Wellminds, has Chinese title screen & translates some essential text to Chinese and removes the rest
- Double Dragon 2 - big START in place of menus
- Sume Tooru (Mitsume ga Tooru) - seemingly untouched
- Chip & Dale - big START on title screen, JP text all removed.
- Snowbros
- Bubble Bobble 2
- Super Mario Bro
- Russia - "Harry Potter" version of Nice Code's Tengen Tetris clone, otherwise known as Russia or Falling Blocks(Bricks?) etc
Games after that seem mostly untouched, a mixture of standard small FC games with a few common hacks and Nice Code stuff.
I suspect the reason a few of the bigger games had text hacked out/replaced with a big "START" is some other consoles Wellminds were involved with, which play FC games but on a too-low-res 1.8" screen which would probably render a lot of standard 8x8 text unreadable
SD card support(!!)
Games must be placed in WMGAME folder. Tested & supports
- .nes format ROMs
- mapper 0/4 only, most but not all games work, some are glitchy or crash
- Size capped at 512k so no Kirby or Nanjing games etc. Assumed no battery save support but not tested.
- .bin format VTxxx/OneBus ROMs(!!!!!)
- Supports only certain sizes of .bin, seemingly 64k, 256k, 512k work, definitely nothing over 512k
- VT02 seems to work fine
- VT03 runs with wrong graphics
- VT168 works but wrong colours and some glitches
- VT09? format used by recent Jungletac consoles (ex. the dump of Defender 120 in 1) works FINE :O the 512k limit prevents the entire Jungletac ROM from being loaded, but if you cut it to the first 512k the menu still works and a tiny handful of games load.
Some menu options cause built-in games from the console itself to load (with wrong graphics), presumably because they occupy the location in the console's actual ROM that the Jungletac menu is expecting to find the selected game..
Controls
For in-built FC games, the following controls apply:
- ○ = B
- X = A
- □ = Turbo-B
- △ = Turbo-A
In Catch the Cat and any game running from the SD card, □ and △ do nothing, which seems to imply the turbo functionality is not implemented in hardware and native games may be able to read all four face buttons as distinct inputs.
Control test
Hold X+O+Up and reset. Note that the turbo function is enabled here
