Nintendo Game & Watch

Strider · Post by **Strider** » Sat Oct 31, 2020 5:02 pm

Oh yeah, I owned a lot of those Tiger Electronics LCD games over the years, as well as some from other companies. Many of the games and units from those "other" compaines never really seemed to have the quality of the Game & Watch, at least in my opinion. "Cheap" is the key word.

What amazes me, looking back, is how far we have come. Granted, I am not nearly as excited about most new tech as I was back then, where "generational" advancements were so much more prominent than they feel today. I just slapped a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ into a Retroflag MegaPi case, setup RetroPie, and it can play/run everything I ever owned in the 80's and well into the 90's. That to me is more amazing than the next new launch from any of the big players today. Seeing what you can get out of hardware like the Raspberry Pi or old school hardware.

:)

Cyber · Post by **Cyber** » Tue Nov 10, 2020 7:05 am

I'm from ex-USSR country. And while our country were behind the iron curtain, we had many country scale official clones of foreign products. There were nobody to sue us for this. Iron curtain did its job. )

Clones of Nintendo Game & Watch were extremely popular! Nearly every kid had one. Or at least had friends who have one.

Here is the most popular unit, it uses USSR famous cartoon characters instead of original ones:

And here is another famous redesign example, in which cook was changed from original angry design to more of a friendly one:

Oh, and I remeber I loved the racing game like mad:

Cyber · Post by **Cyber** » Thu Nov 12, 2020 4:59 am

Just remebered another thing. We had a legend that if you score 1 million points in game, it will show you a cartoon. Obviously it's impossible. But some kids didn't understand that and truly believed it. And they smashed game buttons like mad for hours and hours. Oh, what a times it was...

Strider · Post by **Strider** » Thu Nov 12, 2020 5:19 pm

On 11/10/2020 at 1:05 AM, Cyber said:

*snip*

Now that's cool!

I love seeing different versions of popular devices, consoles, and computers from around the world. No matter if they are legal clones or not, especially "retro" tech, it's neat to see.

Thanks for sharing! Never even knew these existed. ?

Fnord42 · Post by **Fnord42** » Fri Jan 01, 2021 7:40 pm

Very nice, I didn't know this existed until @Perifractic showed one in his christmas unboxing video!

Then, just one day later, I stumbled across this very interesting talk at the rC3 conference: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-80443-hacking_the_nintendo_watch

Mine is ordered and should arrive next week. ?

orsoon · Post by **orsoon** » Wed Jan 27, 2021 7:30 am

Played nintendo in past. Now just watch streams and play minecraft. Usually use smartphone during playing games online and click some tools for getting access to forbidden gaming servers in my region. It helped a lot. Especially unblock twitch.

sucotronic · Post by **sucotronic** » Wed Jan 27, 2021 10:33 am

The great thing with this little device would be to develop a mod (hardware + firmware9 to be able to use directly the usb-c connector and something like http://arcade.makecode.com/ to make easy for people to develop their own games.

Fnord42 · Post by **Fnord42** » Wed Jan 27, 2021 10:45 am

With Nintendo being Nintendo it would probably be better to use any of the numerous devices out there that are actually made for tinkering, like for example the Odroid Go.

Doing anything with Nintendo hardware that has a chance of not making them money is just asking for legal trouble.

That being said, it is fun to run the retro-go port on this thing, provided that you can solder and don't mind swapping the flash chip for a bigger one.

sucotronic · Post by **sucotronic** » Wed Jan 27, 2021 11:17 am

30 minutes ago, Fnord42 said:

With Nintendo being Nintendo it would probably be better to use any of the numerous devices out there that are actually made for tinkering, like for example the Odroid Go.

Yeah, I know. Better to go with one like this https://shop.tinkergen.com/gamego.html (much more simpler than the Odroid Go :P).

Anyway, I like the Game&Watch look, so would be a nice/great hack project, not something that can be sold as a product.

Fnord42 · Post by **Fnord42** » Wed Jan 27, 2021 11:57 am

True. You'll probably want to start here: https://github.com/ghidraninja/