Stuff Ankos Imported

[Ankos | 433]

I'm not entirely sure what the etiquette is on posting finds here. Since I'm about to make a really lengthy post on stuff that is admittedly pretty niche I figured I'd post it to my own thread instead of clogging up the main one.

Anyways, recently I picked up two large packages of games that I shipped out of Mainland China and Brazil.

For the non-Gameboy stuff I picked up-

1. Gameking III: This one is pretty interesting. Throughout the 90s and 2000s in Mainland China and Taiwan companies were trying to make cartridge based dot matrix handhelds to compete with the Gameboy. The very last major one was the Gameking line of systems by Timetop (aka Gao Ming). Timetop had been making LCD toys for a while before this with ID codes starting with GM, which they would also use for their cartridge based systems later. Interestingly there is an LCD machine with this type of ID that credits a company called Gowin on it, but I'm not sure if that is the same Gowin that made Gameboy games. Anyways, the original Gameking was a very cheap machine, going the furthest on the discount route of all the dot matrix stuff from Chinese speaking regions. This makes it all the more surprising that Timetop made beefed up models of it instead of keeping it cheap. The Gameking II added a backlight (something the other dot matrix stuff didn't have), and the Gameking III added color, even colorizing its monochrome games. It is kinda admirable how they tried to keep their own thing going for so long instead of just making Famiclone handhelds like everyone else.
2. LTPS Handy Game: Timetop immediately discontinued the Gameking III shortly after releasing it in favor of making a Famiclone handheld. In Greece they even called this the Gameking III, burying the existence of the previous machine. It is still a discount machine, but kinda interesting. It has video output, so you don't have to use the tiny screen, and it has its own cartridges. It also adds enhancements, allowing for the original games to have 16 bit graphics.
3. XB-F801: XB multis were a neat series of multis that contain hacks of existing Famicom titles, and occasionally original titles. The same publisher also released some Mega Drive Taiwan originals. This one has "Super Pocket Monster", an alternate version of the Taiwan original "Pocket Monster" that disables the debug features. This version is considerably rarer than the version with the debug stuff, which frequently appears on Famiclones to this day.
4. DJ08002 (Dream of the Red Chamber): Of the four great classics of China, this is the one least often adapted into video games. This one was made by Dragon Co. It appears to be a board game of sorts, but I don't know how to play it because I don't know how to read Chinese.
5. Waixing 2 in 1: I like to think of Waixing as the start of the second generation of unlicensed games in China and Taiwan because when they came into the picture a lot more of these games were done by joint ventures between Taiwanese and Chinese companies, when previously it was mostly Taiwan originals. Early on they made some titles that they never re-released, and this seems to be one of them. One title is Doctor Mary II (which the title alone should give you a pretty good idea of what it is), but what is more interesting is the second title, Eight Magical Treasures. It is a compilation of eight original minigames by Waixing. Why they didn't release this as a standalone I have no idea.

For the Gameboy stuff-

1. Waixing Game: I don't know much about this one. It is an RPG developed by Ruanxin, and knowing what they developed is most likely a port of a PC game. Ruanxin was pretty talented, so it plays well, but I don't know how to read the text.
2. Two Books: I heard from a friend in China these came bundled with magazines. They're little booklets that include a variety of stuff, most interesting to me are the new game announcements. The second one includes announcement for four games by Sintax, all with release dates in 2002, which is super early for them. It also includes some previews for those.
3. Monsters Go Go II: This one I unfortunately could not get to work. It is a hack of Kirby's Dream Land 2 that adds color and replaces Kirby with Pikachu.
4. Lord of the Rings: This is one of the Sintax games feature in that book I mentioned earlier. It is an RPG-platformer hybrid, sort of like Zelda 2, and plays quite well, but unfortunately is prone to the visuals skipping due to lag. This is one of the few Sintax games I would be able to give an honest recommendation for. It isn't the greatest game ever, but it can be really fun if you go in with an open mind, and even has an English version.
5. Soul Falchion (Kongfeng): Soul Falchion is a fighting game hack by Vast Fame. In Mainland China it got published by Kongfeng, featuring an alternate title screen, but this is strangely not that version. Kongfeng was admittedly a pretty bad publisher, sometimes putting early builds of games on cartridges, which is exactly what they did here. It is still perfectly playable, but all of the music and some of the pallets were carryovers from previous Vast Fame stuff, instead of the new ones Soul Falchion is supposed to have.
6. Two Tian Cai Xiao Zi carts: After Kongfeng milked Vast Fame games extensively they moved on to publishing Wuxia themed RPGs. These were by Tian Cai Xiao Zi, who just used Vast Fame's RPG engine, but did it really badly. Kongfeng being the official publisher for both companies may have hooked them up legally with this.
7. Sword and Fairy: Another Ruanxin RPG, this time published by Hitek. It is a port of the famous Sword and Fairy RPG, and a very good one.
8. Sachen 4B-006: Sachen had a little known publisher in Mainland China called OMR. They use really cheap generic shells, which break easily (which is why mine came cracked). This one uses the colorized version of the multi, which means I can use it on newer hardware, because monochrome Sachen carts don't work on anything newer than a Gameboy Pocket (I think, I don't have every Gameboy model under the sun to test if that fully).
9. Binary Monster: Gowin did later reprints of their monochrome titles with alternate art. These are pretty rare. Something odd about them is the boxes show them being in color, but when booted up they all seem to be in monochrome. I don't know if any colorized carts ever actually made it to market.
10. Final Fantasy X: This one was published by SKOB. It is a Final Fantasy beat em up, and plays great.
11. Gameboy Decoder Card: This is a weird accessory one seller had lying around for a while. They didn't know what it did, and neither do I, but I bought it in hopes of solving that mystery one day. It appears to be operational.
12. 20x copies of Fatal Fury 2001 Mark of the Wolves: This is a fighting game by BBD that was made to be like the NGPC fighting games, but on the Gameboy. It has no versus mode, so that kinda sucks. BBD put their GBC stuff in GBA shells for the English releases, using the name Oneself Play. A seller in Mainland China seems to have a ton of these because he has been selling batches of 20 for less than 10 USD.
13. 10x Story of Lasama: From here on out these all came from Brazil. These are copies of the unlicensed game by Gowin from the 1993 print run. The seller was selling these as one big lot (I forgot I left one copy in my Super Gameboy, which is why it is not in the picture). This is an original unlicensed game that Gowin published in their original 1993 print run. I've seen five games in that print run, but there may have been more. They all use this smooth grey shell, and have their ID codes in the bottom right corner of their sticker. These were sold in Taiwan and internationally, usually popping up in Europe and South America. They're fully original games and were made during the Gameboy's lifespan, so I think that it can be argued they should count towards the unlicensed full set if you are into that sort of thing. This one plays a lot like Super Mario Land 1, though not to an infringing degree. It is pretty fun, but has no continues and you die in one hit, so mistakes are real costly.
14. Prince Yeh Rude: Again, a 1993 copy. This is a game where you push blocks to combine them, sort of like a stacking Sokobon game. It has a story kinda similar to Snake Roy by Sachen and includes some minigames.
15. Prince Rainbow: 1993 copy of the shmup. It plays great and like the previous two games I think I could give it a recommendation. Something I didn't mention about these 1993 carts is that Nintendo added lockout measures to later models of Gameboy, so you need a Gameboy Pocket or earlier to play these. I don't have one, and unfortunately could not get these to work with my Super Gameboy, though I have heard some people have had better luck with that, so I am not sure why it does not work for me.
16. Pokemon Ruby (Vast Fame): This is an English cart released by NGCA for this game. It seems considerably rarer than most of the other NGCA games. It is an original turn based RPG by Vast Fame with Pokemon graphics that plays pretty different from official Pokemon games. Unfortunately NGCA is a bad publisher and used an early build for this one which gave all the Pokemon moves from Vast Fame's Digimon games, music from past titles, pallets from past titles, and everything being beaten from the start. At least trainers will re-battle you.

[Ankos | 433]

I went ahead and tried backing up the ROM for the Sachen cart, but all I could get was the menu, no games. It looks like a menu for one of the 8 in 1s is hidden in it. I'm pretty sure they just took one of those and trimmed it down for this 4 in 1. I'm not sure if the other color reprints are also like this. Kinda disappointing since some of the mono multis had really cool menus. One had a mouse cursor where you clicked on icons

[Tanooki | 4,930]

That's impressive, what are you going to do with all those insane amount of doubles on those gba(but not?) carts and the others?  They're the same or some change or just same sticker?

[Ankos | 433]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

That's impressive, what are you going to do with all those insane amount of doubles on those gba(but not?) carts and the others?  They're the same or some change or just same sticker?

No idea. I might look into trading some eventually. The Fatal Fury and Story of Lasama carts appear to just be doubles

[Link | 2,708]

Cool. The Gameking sounds very interesting. 

[Tanooki | 4,930]

Ahh ok makes sense, could be a good bit of trade or sale goods to the right person definitely then which is good with strange games like that as it's so odd to get so many copies of just one.

 

And @Link GK2 I've used, it's like this strange mix of sampled 16bit music clips (15sec or so) looped usually but mixed with a very low res dot matrix pixel array with a little blur like a Pokemon Mini.  It's strange but it works.

[Link | 2,708]

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

And @Link GK2 I've used, it's like this strange mix of sampled 16bit music clips (15sec or so) looped usually but mixed with a very low res dot matrix pixel array with a little blur like a Pokemon Mini.  It's strange but it works.

Wow, yeah, sounds really cool. Weird, and cheap junk product, but interesting. 

[Tanooki | 4,930]

1 hour ago, Link said:

Wow, yeah, sounds really cool. Weird, and cheap junk product, but interesting. 

It was, the problem you run into isn't the games not being good enough to enjoy, but getting new ones where it's not laughable on the price from some overseas scalper.  A good many games are just blatant ripoffs of existing games already dumbed down to the smaller screen.  Some of them even use stolen music or sound effects from Nintendo games too.  One of the titles on a multi cart I had (most are multis or on them) was basically Darkwing Duck overly simplified, but I think it used some Castlevania or Megaman clip on a 15sec rotation..it was weird but worked.

[Ankos | 433]

8 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

It was, the problem you run into isn't the games not being good enough to enjoy, but getting new ones where it's not laughable on the price from some overseas scalper.  A good many games are just blatant ripoffs of existing games already dumbed down to the smaller screen.  Some of them even use stolen music or sound effects from Nintendo games too.  One of the titles on a multi cart I had (most are multis or on them) was basically Darkwing Duck overly simplified, but I think it used some Castlevania or Megaman clip on a 15sec rotation..it was weird but worked.

The games cost very little to get CIB on xianyu. Unless you want the games specifically for Gameking III, in which case you'll be paying quite a lot. I don't have any Gameking carts myself. Pretty much all Timetop machines come with built in games though. I think fcgamer is selling some on his site if you don't want the hassle of dealing with agents

[Tanooki | 4,930]

3 minutes ago, Ankos said:

The games cost very little to get CIB on xianyu. Unless you want the games specifically for Gameking III, in which case you'll be paying quite a lot. I don't have any Gameking carts myself. Pretty much all Timetop machines come with built in games though. I think fcgamer is selling some on his site if you don't want the hassle of dealing with agents

That would be handy if one could read chinese and access it.  When I was looking it was limited to facebook, mercari, and ebay.  A single multicart usually ended up being north of $70USD which for the high level of quality there I would have been uncomfortable even at 1/2 that.

[Ankos | 433]

I can read very little Chinese, but I have bought stuff on it pretty often. All you need is a taobao account (or an alipay account) and the phone app. It is a little tricky to setup, but it is very useful for finding this sort of stuff

[Ankos | 433]

Here's Timetop's Chinese name: 代代星. Cartridges are usually called 卡帶 or 卡

[Ankos | 433]

I recently bought some more stuff off of Xianyu

In the first picture (GB 1) from top to bottom, left to right there is-

• JPK-011 (says SCS011 when booted): A multicart with a ridiculous game count as far as GB multis go. JPK multis don't have repeats, so it really does have 70 games, some of which are pretty good. Its got two Mario Land games, two Bubble Bobbles, two Contras, two Castlevanias, and  two Wario Land games. It also has Megaman Xtreme and the five classic Megaman games.
• PT-074B: Multi by the same company as the previous. PT multis also don't repeat. I'd say the game selection was better on the other one, though this one isn't bad. The higher game count is also nice.
• Soul Falchion: This is a rare variant of Soul Falchion by Vast Fame that Kong Feng published. Soul Falchion was a really complex hack of KOF 96 that tried to push it to the quality of the NGPC fighting games. The soundtrack was composed by Yishen Liao and is pretty good. It made it onto the list of the 10 best 8 bit fighting games by "the Gamer", so that's cool.
• Digimon Sapphire Emerald: This is a Kong Feng release of a strategy game by Vast Fame. They pulled out the custom shell and foil paper for this one. The original Taiwan release of this game is really rare. Off the top of my head I've only ever heard of it surfacing twice. This release is a lot more common (though still pretty rare for a Kong Feng cart).
• Panzer: I needed some carts so I could test the cartridge slot on that Gameking 3 I bought last time. I'm pleased to say that that works. This is a Blaster Master clone. It is a true Gameking 3 game, so it won't work on other Gameking models.
• Adventure: Another Gameking 3 game. It is a platformer.
• Digimon Sapphire (GBA): This is the Kong Feng release of a Vast Fame game. Taiwan originals seem to have stopped being a thing after the GBA. This is one of the few on it that plays good (most were terrible games by Sintax). It is a platformer. Be wary if you want to get an English copy. Some of those use a weird version that crashes after level one, and there isn't a way to tell whether or not it is that version just by looking at the cart.

In the second picture (GB 2)-

• Pokemon Ruby: A very competent strategy game developed by BBD and published by Sintax. It is one of their more common titles, and got an English release.
• Final Fantasy IX: This is the Kong Feng version of a game developed by BBD and published by TD-SOFT. TD-SOFT was a mysterious company that published games by Vast Fame and BBD. This game is great. It is a Final Fantasy themed beat em up with RPG elements. It has multiple playable characters (one of which you have to unlock) and the graphics are pretty nice looking. The music is stolen from RPG Maker GB. If you haven't given that soundtrack a listen, I highly recommend you do, it is really good.
• Metal Slug X: No sticker on this one sadly. It is a reskin of a super hard Megaman clone that takes away the level select and save system, and makes robot master weapons consumable enemy drops instead of unlockables. It has no continues and enemies never respawn, so you cannot grind for lives or health. If you use an E-Tank or die, you've just lost resources for the rest of the game. Knockback is almost as intense as Castlevania knockback, there are tons of death pits and spikes, and these are MM1 spikes so you'll die even if you have mercy invulnerability. Also the music is from MM2 GB, so don't use headphones.
• Pokemon V: The four Gen I Pokemon games were often numbered when Chinese pirate translations were released. I is Red, II is Green, III is Blue, and IV is Yellow. On very rare occasions a secret fifth one has surfaced.
• Super Robot Wars A: No sticker again sadly. This is a very obscure strategy game by SKOB. It was done by their in-house team, which were not very good. It is very rare though, so finding any copy for cheap to me was worth it.
• Pokemon Silver: Taiwan originals and Mainland China originals usually have copy protection in them. This was to prevent other companies from making pirate carts of their games, something that would absolutely happen considering where they were releasing their games. One company called Winsen or Li Cheng was very proficient at editing this out, and they made pirate carts of tons of protected games. They are still around and still have new old stock from way back in the day. Something you won't find in the new old stock they have is this cart, which uses their unique cartridge mold. I don't know why they stopped using this, I think it looks pretty nice. Their other carts just use GBC style shells, and seem to be made of some sort of extra heavy duty plastic.
• Castlevania 2 Book of the Wind: Vast Fame had multiple series of cartridges that they released their games in. The one they used in Taiwan sometimes had ID codes on the boxes that start with VF, so I call those the VF series. Those I would say are the original releases of Vast Fame games, though there is another series that sort of has a case for also being called the original releases. This is the SL series. They have clear plastic with sparkles and were released in both Mainland China and Taiwan. This game is SL-008. To my knowledge no VF series equivalent of it has surfaced, so this is the original release. It is a very good port of Getsu Fuma Den. I highly recommend giving it a shot if you are a fan of the original.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms: SL-006. This one has zero differences from the VF series version. It was the last SL series GBC game (there are SLA games for GBA) that I both knew of and didn't have a cart form. There are tons of SL IDs unaccounted for, so I wouldn't exactly call it a full set, though it is progress.

Finally two more pictures. The Famicom cart is EW-300. It has an odd scent to it unfortunately, so I'll be keeping it in a sealed container until I figure out how to get rid of that. It is a multicart by Waixing. This version does not use the Waixing shell, though to my knowledge the internals are the same. Of the three games on it the most noteworthy is Flowers in the Mirror. Its an all original game that plays like a hybrid of Contra and Getsu Fuma Den. It is based on an old Chinese novel.

And last but not least, a Famiclone by Timetop. Released in the early 2000s it is one of the earliest examples of an enhanced Famiclone. It uses cartridges and can play regular Famicom carts as well (though its own carts do not work on normal Famicoms). The box is a lot bigger than I though it would be, so it was kinda expensive to ship.

[Ankos | 433]

So I was browsing around on Shopee when something caught my eye: two SKOB games I don't own, Digimon D6 and Super Robot Wars F2. I went ahead and asked an agent to help me buy them and they gave me a price that sounded reasonable. Then they came back with everything the seller had in the picture. Turns out they wanted to sell it all as a lot and just didn't have a very high price. They even threw in some accessories to go with the GBC (link cables and stuff)

 

Anyways, the multis are pretty neat. A few look like they are from the JY Company, and one of them is by Ka Sheng. Both of those companies had access to a larger library than most multicart manufacturers in the day and made carts with much higher game counts, so they provide lots of oddball titles to play around with

 

This is also my first Gameboy Color, though unfortunately the display looks busted on this one

[Ankos | 433]

Now that I think about it, it is probably worth it to post a picture of game lists on the backs of the boxes for the multis

The tall one's ID code is JR1603. I've seen these with similar menus to JY multis at times, but the sticker art does not really match JY multis, so it could just be coincidence that they use similar menus

The 70 in 1 is CA64059. It is a Ka Sheng multi. I have not seen many of these with IDs that start with the letters CA. The other one that I have also has Digimon games by Makon Soft, though only the first four

The rest of the carts appear to be JY carts

The 126 in 1 is JYY12641. It has a fancy multicart menu that has boring submenus. I've heard that hidden in the binary for the menu code there are credits for Vast Fame. It's got some neat hacks and unlicensed games on it. JY's most famous multis were for the Famicom, so it is neat to see what they came up with for a GBA multi with PocketNES games

The 88 in 1 is LTM-CH02. It is a more well known type of GBC multi that uses Last Bible music in its menu. These have high game counts, usually starting with really popular games, and then halfway through getting filled with random stuff. Sachen games, homebrews made for competitions ages ago, Makon games, weird hacks, I've even seen a Gowin game on one of these. Easily my favorite type of GBC multi

The 60 in 1 is a GBA multi. ID code is ACM-004. It sadly does not have the fancy menu, and the game selection seems not so well thought out. They put Game Genie in as one of the games, but that isn't useful because you can't plug anything into this cart

 

Edited October 7, 2023 by Ankos
fixing typos

[Ankos | 433]

Some carts from Türkiye.

Most notably a copy of Princess Maker, one of the last games Sachen made for Famicom (I have not seen an NES version). It's a port of one of the Gainax games. Sachen games got a lot more infringing during their later years. It's a bit harder to find than most Sachen games, and sometimes comes in a generic shell (like this one), so it is important to watch for fakes. I shined a light into the cart and saw shadows of the chips in the correct places, so I think this copy is legit (also the seller only had the one copy, if they had more I'd be a little more scared). I view the shift to more infringing stuff the beginning of what I call the life support era of Sachen, since it feels like sort of a desperation move

On the left is Pokemon Sapphire Special Pikachu Edition by Makon Soft. If my understanding is correct some staff at Sachen made games outside of the company as a side gig, usually being hired by a company called Ka Sheng, and the name they used for their Gameboy team was Makon Soft. Ka Sheng would hire them to make very infringing games and is believed to have rushed deadlines, so pretty much every Makon game turned out terrible. Not bad as in uninteresting or mediocre, really bad. Bad physics, bad graphics, bad music, and lots of glitches. This one is at least beatable, though there are some that crash before the end of the first level. Makon games have interesting stuff put in them, like tricks to squeeze out more colors out of the Gameboy and rumble built into most of their games (though Ka Sheng rarely put them on actual rumble carts, so that doesn't matter)

Finally the GBA one is Digimon Sapphire by Vast Fame. This is an NGCA cart. For this and Digimon Rury (they misspelled it) there is a good and a bad version. The bad version has no copy protection, and seems to use a worse version of the ROM. In the case of Sapphire it crashes after the first level on the bad version.  The bad version will have E7 stamped on the back of the board.

Edit: I appear to have been mistaken, the good version has E7 written on the board, while the bad version has it stamped, so this is the good version of the game

Edited October 15, 2023 by Ankos

[Ankos | 433]

For a while there was this PC Engine clone on Xianyu called the GP 2000. It is a bit more common than some of the other ones, but PCE clones were never really a big thing. The seller did a sizable price cut and I wound up buying it. Shipping costed a ton though. I've heard PCE clones can brick original controllers, so it's a good thing this came with the ones made for the clone. What's nice about this one is that it can do original Hu Cards and the made up cartridge format pirates came up with so they didn't have to learn to make fake Hu Cards

Here's an old commercial for it

I also picked up some Sachen games (they have original Sachen boards, but they're the Mainland Chinese version so they use generic shells) a flashcart and a Firebird cheat cart that isn't broken

[Ankos | 433]

New pickups: The GBC/GBA stuff came from Malaysia, the rest of the stuff is freebies @fcgamer sent me (Thanks dude)

Some info on the games

• Powermon: A 2.5D platformer game for Windows. Most copies of this seem to pop up in South Korea, though I'm not sure where the original version was made. To my knowledge there are three Powermon games, though recently I saw something labeled Powermon Plus, so maybe there are more?
• Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Rings: One of the rarer Makon Soft titles. On top of that it appears on very few multicarts. It is sort of a hybrid of their older titles instead of being just a reskin
• Rockman and Crystal: The final Zook Hero game made by Vast Fame. My old cart for this is faulty, so I picked up a replacement. I remember back when bootleg game collectors thought very highly of this one, though I think overtime people realized it isn't as good as the other Zook games. VF was new to making GBA games and appear to have made this one run too fast
• Terrifying 9/11: No comment  An infamous port of Metal Slug developed in Mainland China by Ruanxin and published by Hitek (pronounced High Tech judging by their Chinese name, 高科) in 2002. The port is very well done in terms of gameplay and animations. There was a rumor/hoax going around for a while that it was built off of a leaked prototype by SNK, but this is false, Ruanxin genuinely was a talented team. I think it should be obvious why this game is infamous. They even managed to pull of an FMV sequence of one of the planes as the intro, something very uncommon for GBC games. In Mainland China it was released as 驚爆雙子星 and in Taiwan it was released as 驚爆 911, though original copies of either Chinese version are extremely hard to come by. The English version is mostly found in Spain, though it can be found in other locations as well

Edited January 28 by Ankos

[Ankos | 433]

Found some more good stuff, most notably the English release of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon by Gowin (ID code GS17E)

GS17E is hard to come by. It used to be straight up impossible to come by (for like...two decades after its release nobody was finding any cartridges of it) but nowadays the number of known copies has been steadily increasing, so wherever all the copies were holed up, they seem to have finally been shaken loose. It still doesn't grow on trees though

Some cool stuff about it is that it was officially licensed by the wife of the author of the original novel (who tragically passed away much earlier than her). So, it is based off of the book, not the movie like the GBA game. Also, it starts adapting from an earlier point in the story than the movie. The game begins with Li Mu Bai meeting Yu Shu Lien, which I believe is a plot point from the second book, Precious Sword Golden Hairpin (the movie starts on book four, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). I say I believe because I don't know Chinese, and the books are not translated into English. I have all the comics, but those are known for being unfaithful (towards the end of them Li Mu Bai fights Satan, who is depicted as a green owl). Oh, also there was a distributor in the USA who on their website listed it as up for pre-order, but there is no archive on the Wayback Machine that says "for sale" for this cart, so I'm not sure they were ever able to get it out the door. That distributor did not have the best reputation based on what I have read. If you decide to count that though, then this would be one of the last "Taiwan Originals" to ever get a USA release (If my understanding is correct, those kinda stopped being a thing in 2003, though companies in Mainland China were still making stuff)

My copy came from Indonesia. There aren't any good shopping agents that help Americans buy from there, but there are agents that help people in Mainland China shop there, so I got some help from a friend to buy it. The seller had a condition that they would only sell if the buyer bought ten carts at a time, so I picked out the ones at the bottom of the picture. Four are multis by NGCA, one is a multi by JY, and there are two more multis that I'm not sure what company made. Also a neat sticker variant of Pokemon Adventure (a title hack of an infamous Makon game) and Digimon 2 by Makon

As for stuff from Mainland China, I picked up two carts by "SeegaStation". I do not know the story behind these. Apparently the trademark for them is owned by some shopping mall, so maybe they were intended to be carts that could be rewritten at some kiosk there? One looks like it fits into a SFC, while the other is too thick to fit into any of my consoles. They have a bunch of dip switches on them, which is kinda neat. Crossing my fingers that I can figure out how to use them

Finally there is the other big ticket item, a light colored Mega Duck cart. Early ads for Mega Duck carts in Taiwan showed them with light plastic and ridges on the sides of the cart, but most carts use darker plastic with no ridges. The PCB looks different from the ones most Mega Duck carts use. I'm not sure what the exact story is on this, but I'm hoping to find out. Now all I need to do is find a Mega Duck. If anyone here is looking to part ways with one then please let me know