Atari Gamestation Pro

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Atari Gamestation Pro
Developers: Various Publisher: My Arcade Platform: Plug & Play Released in US: December 2023 This game has unused music. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material.

I can't believe it's not NES-on-a-chip!

Unused Music

To do: Check if the .mp3 files labeled "Track1" through "Track4" are used; has not yet been verified.

An excerpt of Cantonese song "Guang Hui Sui Yue" by Beyond can be seen in the rootfs.img image (in the "etc" folder).

A stock selection sound that is notably used on many Arcade1UP machines. The general coding of the Gamestation Pro is very similar to the 1UPs, suggesting the software may have come from the same factory.

A man speaking in Mandarin; it switches between the left and right speakers, likely serving as an audio test. This leads to an excerpt of Korean song "Gee" by Girls' Generation.

Oddities

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: There are many instances of strange, game-related text, similar to MAME GitHub notices; these are not present in the current RetroArch ELF files. Are these specifically from "Jungle" or are they leftover from cache, are they in older RetroArch builds, etc.? (Example at 9F0950: "This game has an identical control panel layout as discs of tron. Unfortunately due to the fact that it's a platformer, it is extremely akward [sic] to play unless you have those exact controls")

The console uses a trimmed-down, probably unlicensed build of RetroArch for emulation. Curiously, three of its "[...]_libretro.so" ELF files are labeled "Jungle2003", "Jungle2014", and "Jungle2016"; these are actually forks of RetroArch's MAME cores (an emulator noticeably missing from the list). The cores are still internally referred to as MAME in code, and are largely unmodified; though feature some additional legal information, and label the control schemes for specific games.

In the "games.db" file, there is a large amount of cached data related to the SD card. In this folder is a massive list of pirated ROMs - albeit without the ROMs present - under similar poorly-translated names as some recent bootleg consoles (e.g. "Little white rabbit lost.nes", "Round little angel.nes"). Some of these titles are in Chinese or Korean (e.g. "彈球" [Pinball], "토끼 모험 3" [Tiny Toon Adventures 3?]); there is also Thai text, which seems to be corrupted. These game names are buried within the on-screen instructions for the actual built-in Atari games.