Oregon Trail Handheld ROM Dump?

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

I apologize if this is the wrong spot to be asking this, but this was as close as I figured I could get.

A good while ago now, I recall reading about how someone had figured out that the Target exclusive Oregon Trail handheld was actually running some sort of NES emulator (or was an NES SOAC, I honestly can't recall 100%), and stipulated that as such, the game running on it had to be some sort of NES ROM.  Does anyone know if this was ever actually dumped, and if so, confirmed to be an NES ROM?  I'm not sure why this popped back into my mind this morning, but I tried to do some Googling to find some sort of answer but just get flooded with a ton of sites' "add every word imaginable" SEO versus any actual answers.  If it turned out that the system really did have a ROM of Oregon Trail on it, that would be something I'd love to play on actual NES hardware versus solely via a dedicated handheld.

Any info would be appreciated!  Thanks in advance!

Edited January 25, 2023 by darkchylde28

[RH | 4,903]

I have two of these, both sealed in box. I should probably open them and take out the batteries so they don't leak, but I digress.

I bought them from Target and shortly after, I wanted to see if anyone would hack one of these and, sure enough, they did.  That was ages ago and I cannot recall what SOAC it was, but it was not the NES.  It was some PC architecture, but not the Macintosh.  I wish it was the NES but someone might have misspoke because it's probably an emulated 6802 CPU which is what practically every device ran on from the early to mid 80s.

I can't recall if I found a blog post or a video.  I'll see if I can find it.  Again, it was shortly after this device came out and if it's YouTube, YouTube loves to push down their older videos in their searches, but maybe I can find it.  Let me check.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

@RH I managed to come across this Hack-a-Day article about it, and most of the comments section seems to believe that the ASIC on the board is a NOAC one that matches one used in other products they produced.

Apparently Ben Heck chimed in that he didn't think it was an NOAC because the 1M ROM he dumped was 80% full, but didn't/couldn't identify what was actually running it, and didn't seem to explore all of what was dumped.  I know there have been some larger-than-normal ROMs available for the NES, and elsewhere someone mentioned that the other cabinets running that exact same board/hardware (and running NES versions of the games) had jumpers inside which let you switch between two different games (demonstrated here).  I have to wonder if there could be more than one ROM flashed on there, and Ben Heck just didn't dig down deep enough to determine one way or the other before giving up on mapping it (spoiler: he hacks the save data in a video, then turns the insides into a much smaller portable game).

Fingers crossed it really does turn out to be some sort of NES implementation inside.  Even if the ROM wouldn't play on OG hardware due to some custom mapper or such, it would be neat to see and might give someone a better jumping off point to porting Oregon Trail to the NES since it never seems to have been done/completed before.

[RH | 4,903]

I stand corrected, everything seems to reference this is some famiclone/noac chip.  So that's cool.  I'll look and see if I can find a ROM dump.  I find it odd that they took NOAC and hacked the game to run on it, rather than using a ROM for a dead system that had joystick/controller inputs (if that's even a thing.)

[DefaultGen | 5,405]

This is one of my favorite unexplored frontiers of gaming, random NOAC products from the 2000s. Not that it's completely unknown, but there's a whole bunch of random plug and play consoles that run unique NES games or NES implementations of some other game (e.g. Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced has new NES ports of Time Pilot, Scramble, and Frogger IIRC). It's maybe the least appreciated area of NES gaming and collecting, maybe more than homebrew and weird unlicensed stuff.

That Oregon Trail handheld is rad too. I didn't know it was NES (or might be), that makes it even cooler.

Edited January 25, 2023 by DefaultGen

[RH | 4,903]

Yeah, the whole thing is odd to me.  The hacker community enjoyed this device, which was 100% expected, but I'm surprised no one has seemed to complete spec out the chips and then take the step further, as you're suggesting, to hack this into an NES ROM.  It's probably as simple as finding the actual, specific game data and writing it to a NES file, because it's likely offset and/or has additional data around it the system might use.  I'm just guessing.

If any of the homebrew community are interested in this, this could be a fun extraction/project for the NES/Famicom.  Someone who's intimate with the bitecode of the NES may be able to tell if it uses a mapper or something, that might be built into some NOACs.

[RH | 4,903]

Anyone know if most "NOACs" are actually 6802OACs, but with extra settings/features to work with the NES?  I know the NES had two 6502s and the RICOH one was for sound and had some slight modifications.  I know we call these "Nintendo on a Chip"s but in reality, are they just a chip with a suite of 6802 options that can be set and used to run various types of bite codes for various 6802 implementations?

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

Just now, RH said:

Yeah, the whole thing is odd to me.  The hacker community enjoyed this device, which was 100% expected, but I'm surprised no one has seemed to complete spec out the chips and then take the step further, as you're suggesting, to hack this into an NES ROM.  It's probably as simple as finding the actual, specific game data and writing it to a NES file, because it's likely offset and/or has additional data around it the system might use.  I'm just guessing.

One of the commenters on the Hack-a-Day article (zenmechanic) did do this, but with the Joust ROM which sports basically the same hardware that Oregon Trail does.  He said that it was an NES ROM that had been modded for that specific hardware, but basically stripping out some of their code and adding NES headers got it to boot and play in an NES emulator, so I'm excited at the thought that Oregon Trail might turn out the same way.  Unfortunately, that's the only mention I've been able to turn up of something like that in regard to Oregon Trail, and that commenter never commented again that he'd gone any further with the particular system.

3 minutes ago, RH said:

If any of the homebrew community are interested in this, this could be a fun extraction/project for the NES/Famicom.  Someone who's intimate with the bitecode of the NES may be able to tell if it uses a mapper or something, that might be built into some NOACs.

Absolutely.  I could have sworn that it was on here that I read about this thing maybe-could-be-probably being an NES ROM run by some sort of NOAC hardware, but doing a search of the entire site this morning for "Oregon Trail" just turned up some random mentions here and there, as well as a few mentions in the old Covid topic about this specific unit.  It would be fantastic if one of our homebrewers were able to go down the rabbit hole on this and tell us one way or the other whether there's actual NES code on the thing, even if they couldn't just hand it out to everyone.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

@Ankos Do you remember who's involved in operation plug n plays or whatever that was? Just Frank Cifaldi? Those are the guys you guys should be talking with about this.

[Ankos | 439]

Project Plug and Play? There are multiple people involved with that if I am remembering right. I want to say NewRisingSun is one of them. The most recent update I remember to it was posted on Lost in Bygone Gaming (which I don't think I'm allowed to link because ROMs are hosted there)

[Tanooki | 4,933]

I had to pop away for an hour, saw this post shortly after it went up.  Glad to see hack a day listed, I used to have that book marked as I wanted to find out if it ever would get a full on hack to dump the data (which you want) or a way to load more or other games to it.

I was hoping someone would crack this, and tear down the even more capable Carmen and see how that went.  Carmen ended up being a larger debate, it's not quite the same.  It has a save mechanism, and people oculdn't figure out if it was some Apple or DOS variant or a custom tweaked from that NES conversion due to the detail and color usage/style.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

I did some more poking around today based on the "Project Plug and Play" suggestion provided above and came across this thread where user "forgotusername" talks about the various types of innards in the "Basic Fun" mini arcades and then seems to casually advise that he believes the Oregon Trail one has been dumped.  He included this one as part of what he's calling "NES/VT" hardware, so it seems possible that this may have been dumped somewhere, but just not surfaced too publicly just yet.

Is anyone a member of that forum already, and if so, would anyone be able/willing to ask around about this?  If nobody is, I'll go ahead and sign up to ask some questions, but I figured we might get further (and further quicker) if someone who was already a member of that community reached out.

[Ankos | 439]

@darkchylde28

I am a user on that site, though I think I know the answer you are looking for without having to ask forgotusername. The oregon trail handheld appears to be in mame. I checked internet archive and it looks like it is in mame under the name otrail. Based on this page it is a VT369 machine. Judging by that page emulation is still a work in progress

Edited January 26, 2023 by Ankos

[RH | 4,903]

2 minutes ago, Ankos said:

@darkchylde28

I am a user on that site, though I think I know the answer you are looking for without having to ask forgotusername. The oregon trail handheld appears to be in mame. I checked internet archive and it looks like it is in mame under the name otrail. Based on this page it is a VT369 machine. Judging by that page emulation is still a work in progress

I could understand why because proper implementation and testing of this ROM + hardware nuances will probably take work.  Having the ROM, though, in the right hands of a NES homebrew/hacker might be able to expedite getting a playable PC version (in any form) and that will likely be an NES ROM that could be loaded to a flash cart.

Any chance you could reach out over there and see if you could get just the game ROM?  I don't exactly know how MAME ROMs work, but I assume they have to have a layer of a lot of meta data and embedded attributes to account for the many, many forms of arcade hardware.

[Ankos | 439]

4 minutes ago, RH said:

I could understand why because proper implementation and testing of this ROM + hardware nuances will probably take work.  Having the ROM, though, in the right hands of a NES homebrew/hacker might be able to expedite getting a playable PC version (in any form) and that will likely be an NES ROM that could be loaded to a flash cart.

Any chance you could reach out over there and see if you could get just the game ROM?  I don't exactly know how MAME ROMs work, but I assume they have to have a layer of a lot of meta data and embedded attributes to account for the many, many forms of arcade hardware.

MAME ROMs are publicly hosted on internet archive. If you'd like I can PM you what I found

Edited January 26, 2023 by Ankos

[RH | 4,903]

A

1 minute ago, Ankos said:

MAME ROMs are publicly hosted on internet archive. If you'd like I can PM you what I found

Thanks, but to be clear, I assume to build the MAME ROM, they needed to take the ROM dump from the device and then add build meta-data "around" the game to work in MAME.  What I'm saying is, can you see if anyone has the OG ROM dump from the hardware.  The data would be embedded in the MAME ROM.  But parsing it out might be a hassle.

I don't really know, though.  I'm not the guy to do that type of thing, but getting the raw data gets us all a step closer.

[Ankos | 439]

13 minutes ago, RH said:

A

Thanks, but to be clear, I assume to build the MAME ROM, they needed to take the ROM dump from the device and then add build meta-data "around" the game to work in MAME.  What I'm saying is, can you see if anyone has the OG ROM dump from the hardware.  The data would be embedded in the MAME ROM.  But parsing it out might be a hassle.

I don't really know, though.  I'm not the guy to do that type of thing, but getting the raw data gets us all a step closer.

I'm not super knowledgeable on MAME stuff myself so I am not sure how to help you. There are lot of people who are knowledgeable on this stuff though, so it should not be too hard to find someone who has the answers you are looking for. David Haywood not too long ago added support in MAME for a handheld I shipped out, so he'd probably be a good person to ask

[fcgamer | 4,723]

On 1/27/2023 at 12:47 AM, RH said:

I could understand why because proper implementation and testing of this ROM + hardware nuances will probably take work.  Having the ROM, though, in the right hands of a NES homebrew/hacker might be able to expedite getting a playable PC version (in any form) and that will likely be an NES ROM that could be loaded to a flash cart.

Any chance you could reach out over there and see if you could get just the game ROM?  I don't exactly know how MAME ROMs work, but I assume they have to have a layer of a lot of meta data and embedded attributes to account for the many, many forms of arcade hardware.

The problem seems to be it's using one of these:

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/VTxx#VT369

So it's not just stock .nes ROM that would be compatible with a flash cart.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

3 hours ago, fcgamer said:

The problem seems to be it's using one of these:

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/VTxx#VT369

So it's not just stock .nes ROM that would be compatible with a flash cart.

Per the comments of one of the users in the linked Hack-a-Day thread, neither were any of the NES versions used in the other cabinets using the same hardware.  However, once he dumped it and looked through the dump, he was able to recognize where the specific code for the hardware ended and the NES ROM code began and was able to strip out the NES ROMs, add the appropriate NES header, and get it working in an NES emulator.  Nobody is saying that you could just take the code as-dumped and plug it straight into an NES emulator or flash cart, but that there's still hope to dig the/an NES ROM out of the code that's been added to such a ROM to get it to work properly with that hardware.  Since nobody in this thread has volunteered to look at what was dumped and uploaded to Archive.org (assuming that's a raw dump and not something that's been further modified to run properly in MAME instead of on native hardware), I'm going to assume that none of us have the skill or expertise to do so.  Hence hoping to get the raw dump so as to be able to put it into appropriate hands who could/would actually dig down into it and be able to tell us if there's actually NES code down in there, or if it's something else.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

Well the technology would be highly based on the Famiclone technology, albeit different in some ways. I own some clone machines that play both the Famicom and VT carts.