Sounds like a stream of consciousness Monty Python gag. Like when they were being chased by an animated monster, but then the animator died so they were safe.
XaviX may cause nausea, heartburn, morning sickness, afternoon leprosy, evening AIDS, sudden but intermittent homicidal tendencies, blurred vision, cramps, mildly soft stool, purple blood, cancer, and itchy toenails. Do not take XaviX if you are a human or animal, as well as if you are driving or operating heavy machinery. In a clinical trial, some patients reported a rash that resulted in severe hemorrhaging throughout the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and anus resulting in a painful but quick death. If you start to experience the symptoms of this condition, stop taking XaviX immediately and call your doctor.
The console slot looks like something that's be repurposed by a props department for a sci-fi movie. "Quick, put the macguffin drive into the flux capacitor!"
The two thin PCBs that frame the giant hole in the console, the hand-soldered design, the way a cartridge sits flush in the top of the box, and the piezoelectric speaker being an impact sensor... this is McGyver-level electronics assembly
“So there I was, trapped in Ireland with two tennis rackets. Fortunately, I’d been chewing rosin core solder balls. Now, they didn’t taste good, but they just might get me out of a bind…”
@@AfferbeckBeats you know what? i checked some things and it's still somewhat popular on the second hand market, in my region even more popular than the actual wii (only cause it's cheaper)
I remember these! The Domyos (PAL) version went on sale when I had my part time job at Decathlon and the staff was very confused as to why we were selling crappy video games in a shop for sports equipment.
@@autistic_furry Almost certainly. You see that all the time, vaguely related products being stocked to try and grab more customers. Almost all of them end up at discount retailers after a few months.
that issue of the tv remote actually made me understand *why* the wii sensor bar is actually the ir transmitter, with the reciever being in the wiimote
See this is why I like your channel. You not only introduce us to weird and rare electronics but you also take them apart. I love seeing the internals of these things!
Exactly, I love seeing all this old wacky crap get dissected purely out of curiosity by someone who actually knows what they’re looking at when they get down to the guts and bolts of it. I can waste a whole afternoon watching stuff like this or Techmoan and Posy
Yea, cheap portable DVD player and other electronics as well. I worked at an auto parts store 02-03 _(here in the US)_ and they started having us sell all this literal junk. Said portable DVD player, with a *_TINY_* screen that it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually 1/2 the actual resultion, since the pixels were basically the size of my head lol
I’m Irish, ands it’s cool you got a console from Ireland! The fact that console even had a proper Irish release, and printed that on the box rather than just send us the UKs leftovers is a novelty!
1:32 It is strange, but it's not never seen on a game console. The Xbox One had HDMI in and you could use the media remote to control like a cable box or other device over CEC. The whole One line kept this, even the One X, but it was dropped on the Series X|S, probably from lack of use or cost cutting. Sidebar, that startup sound is absolutely fire.
I have a hard time seeing any use for a passthrough connection in the modern era of SmartTVs and streaming services. Lots of people have ditched or never picked up cable, and a singular device can usually serve your entertainment needs. Used to be you had a single video port and changing devices meant having a switcher or manually changing your plugged in devices, so having passthrough reduced the need for secondary solutions. Having a DVD player or game console plugged into the VHS player wasn’t an uncommon sight even 20 years ago. There was also a weird obsession with making the XBone a “media center,” so having passthrough for your cable receiver just made sense to some weird football guy working for Microsoft at the time.
ive had a decoders, vhs players/dvd players with that feature and the xbox included. it used to be a lot more commen back when your tv didnt come with many innput ports.
Before my dad was able ot get the Wii during the craze, he bought the family an Xavix (they were all on clearance, so he bought tennis, bowling, and baseball). Thank you for this video, it brought back many memories of my childhood. 🥺
My neighbors had this thing with the tennis game and boy is it just as good as I remember. Didn't take long for us to realize you could just sit down and hit the racket instead of getting up and being active as intended.
including the serial number stickers is actually quite ingenious. you can't lose your S/N with that thing unless you lose the stickers. meanwhile Sorny finds out you rubbed the serial number off of your DualSense from use and leaves you for dead.
I've seen those screws on some garbage like my $2 electric insect racket. I've never seen it on anything expensive though, odd because it seems like a premium thing.
That cartridge slot is actually cool, only thing that would be bad is if the spring or arms break and then you have to flip the console to get the game out.
If these things were more common, I bet someone would've made a homebrew carteidge by now to toss (insert your retro gaming compute unit of choice here) into the cart slot, thereby using the console itself just as a horrible AV and controller solution.
i actually knew what a XaviX is because i used to work at a retro games store, and we had a game where we'd hide the XaviX Tennis cartridge from one another to make sure we were actually cleaning the shop. anytime you found it, you'd have your picture taken, posted to the work text chain, and you'd hide it again. good times.
James, thanks to you and the James Channel I was able to fix my dads and gramps phone. Your explanations about "this thing does this thing and stuff happens" is really good to someone like me that just needs to understand the principle behind things. Thanks.
"Would you like a game of the old Tennis Father?" "Oh no, I'm fine Mrs.Doyle..." "Ahh go on, go on, go on, go on" 😂 I remember seeing these in my local Market back in the day. Thought it looked rubbish. Nice to see I was right 😂
So it's basically a reverse wii. The "sensor bar" is on the racquets. EDIT: ok I should've waited a bit more before posting lol... interesting solution to transmit the action via IR but one problem, the leds will 100% be pointing somewhere else if I'm moving the controller arround!
I remember this console; my uncle owns a store I worked at and he made the questionable decision to buy a bunch of these back in like 2006 or 2007 to sell for the holiday season. I think we sold like 1 or 2. They were weirdly expensive. I think the base console was like $200 and each game was like $50-75. I told him it was overpriced at the time but, being 16, I was ignored. Knowing his hording tendancies, the unsold consoles are probably sitting in the back of the store somewhere to this day.
Oh my god, I actually played this. I remember a classmate bringing this console and rackets to a school summer camp... Playtime ended when the owner of the console, unaware of his surroundings, swung the racket so hard that it exploded on the back of a really annoying kid that was playing with us. I cried laughing, but felt bad for the kid afterwards.
Watching this channel gives me more appreciation for the engineers and designers of these boards and tech behind the difficult and simple tasks a game cartridge does. The insane amount of knowledge on such a small scale is amazing.
My cousin had one of these!! My memory of this randomly came back to me YEARS after the Wii lost its relevance and I couldn’t tell if my brain was making it up or not 😂
I remember seeing these advertised on TV back in the mid-2000s, usually in crappy, cheap commercial timeslots in the middle of the night. I always assumed they were trying to jump on the Wii hype/popularity.
I once had a 3rd party ps4 controller I think you’d love to have seen the insides of, it featured 0 solder work, it was all hot glue, even on the circuit board it was honestly funny how ass it was
The Xbox One has the same in-line HDMI in feature. You could jam a cable box directly into the Xbox then navigate your cable/satellite with an Xbox controller instead of a remote control with buttons designed for that (I think you can also use it as a DVR?)
Anything non mainstream and Poundland based is great to document. So many boots and clones and just downright lies in the 2000s it was madness. ❤ keep buying the weird stuff and I’ll keep watching
Good to know that I'm not the only one with one of these nuggets! I found a boxed one with the Tennis set in, ironically enough, a Cashies. I'm from the UK mainland though my box also says that it's for Ireland / Northern Ireland only, and seems to be identical to this one. No clue whether it was also sold here or was purchased in Ireland and found its way here. Never thought I'd see James talk about this thing
I wish so much for someone to find my childhood handheld. It was a dungeon crawling mech builder very basic dot matrix screen. But it has a wireless network. In the 00's that if there was another near by they would connect and be able to share between each other or battle
Did it come in 3 colours, each of which were a different "archetype" of mech you could build, and fighting other units of different colours allow you to collect their parts? I think I had something like that, but I forget what it was called. EDIT: the one I'm thinking of is called P-O-X, released by Hasbro in 2001.
“But now that I’m an adult with no spare time…” felt that and I don’t even have kids like you do. I keep buying things that my childhood self would’ve wanted hoping that he can feel like he’s less hated xD I think I need therapy xD
if they are infrared LEDs you can point a cell phone camera at them to see if they are working. This will work with any TV remote as well. You will see a white flashing light pulsing when you press a button.
I remember seeing this system at a local thrift shop many years ago and being fascinated by the strange cartridge slot. Wish I’d bought it cause it seems like an interesting thing to mess around with.
@@MDPToaster Waste of a hard to find/get cartridge, would be easy to get a new PCB after figuring out what each line does/needs. It's just video out and some time of limited GPIO type interface from the IR receiver.
the CPUs would be a 65C02 in the 8 bit game and a 65C816 in the 16 games. the 65C02 is a upgraded CMOS version of the MOS Technology 6502 made by WDC. what WDC did to upgrade the 6502 was add some more instructions to the CPU by using about half of the 105 unused 8 bit opcodes from the original mos 6502 giving it some more addressing modes. the 65C816 is a highly upgraded 16 bit extension of the 65C02 also made by WDC however it still only has an external 8 bit data bus (much like the 8088 with 16 bit internals but only 8 bit data). I know that they are using these chips as WDC will license out the cores to basically anyone willing to pay the fee, this is why the SNESs' Ricoh 5A22 CPU was using a 65C816 core. now one thing you might have noticed is I have not been talking in the past tense as WDC still makes and sells DIP and PLCC versions of both chips and works to improve the clock speed, the latest versions from just a few years ago will can clock at up to 14mhz and they are still commonly used embedded cores
The CPUs used in the XaviX cartridges are all made by a very shady company named Sunplus, based in Taiwan. They are copies of the 65C02/65C816 but they also used their own proprietary µArch called S+Core which a 32/16-bit hybrid. The 8-bit CPUs were also used by HP in there low-cost graphing calculators (HP 35s, HP 12c P., etc...). The Mattel Hyperscan console used a Sunplus S+Core CPU (it was a terrible console).
@@Erebus-PCFX had never heard of S+core before so glad to learn something new, I was actually expecting that they were all just NOACs and the "16 bit" ones were using an NOAC with a 65C816 core and an upgraded PPU like most other trash plug and play systems
Now that i think about it, you said you made the first game with a built-in console with the NES cartridge that can play itself, but this console had the first game with a console built in, Lmao
I love the aesthetics of this thing. The metallic silver plastic with faux chrome buttons, weird translucent acryllic panel thing, even the font, it all screams mid 00s cheap electronics.
I have a friend who had one of these. The wonky controls can be attributed to how the games were intended to have the user step a certain distance and angle away from the console (not the TV). If you're not moving INSIDE of the box that the console wants you to be in, you're gonna have a bad time.
Had to come back to say that I was at an estate sale last weekend and a) saw one of these and knew what it was, and b) made the informed decision to absolutely not buy it. Thanks, James Channel!
From what I have read the CPU is actually on the game cartridge, and was either a 65C02 or a 65C816 depending on the game. The developer was from Japan.
10:00, It's slightly similar to the SNES then with how it used special extra processing chips in the cartridge to help run the game. I think it'd be cool to see a comeback of that in a world where making custom chips is easy and cheap, so that games could be hardwired into a chip so everything is super accelerated instead of having to run like proper software.
The reason there's no icons after the Money icon is because they ran out of money.
Considering 2007 and Ireland... yeah you are right 😳
Sounds like a stream of consciousness Monty Python gag. Like when they were being chased by an animated monster, but then the animator died so they were safe.
"XaviX" sounds like a medication where half the commercial is listing off it's horrific side effects.
A drug with the properties of both xanax and plavix so you get high and a stomach bleed all at once!
Closely related to Xanax..
Sounds like cyberpunk company from 2077
XaviX may cause nausea, heartburn, morning sickness, afternoon leprosy, evening AIDS, sudden but intermittent homicidal tendencies, blurred vision, cramps, mildly soft stool, purple blood, cancer, and itchy toenails. Do not take XaviX if you are a human or animal, as well as if you are driving or operating heavy machinery. In a clinical trial, some patients reported a rash that resulted in severe hemorrhaging throughout the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and anus resulting in a painful but quick death. If you start to experience the symptoms of this condition, stop taking XaviX immediately and call your doctor.
@@TRLTheRandomLab
With all of that, it's advertising death, 🎵And a rare form of kidney disease🎵
The console slot looks like something that's be repurposed by a props department for a sci-fi movie. "Quick, put the macguffin drive into the flux capacitor!"
Or looks like a knock off 5th gen console, like a mix of the PS1 and N64
@@nickrustyson8124the NPS61
@@nickrustyson8124 the ns65!
The two thin PCBs that frame the giant hole in the console, the hand-soldered design, the way a cartridge sits flush in the top of the box, and the piezoelectric speaker being an impact sensor... this is McGyver-level electronics assembly
“So there I was, trapped in Ireland with two tennis rackets. Fortunately, I’d been chewing rosin core solder balls. Now, they didn’t taste good, but they just might get me out of a bind…”
16:11 this thing actually OUTLIVED the Wii and was only discontinued in around 2017-2018
Holy heck, that's actually insane! I think if it hadn't been discontinued in that timeframe you mentioned, it absolutely would not have survived 2020.
Who was buying them all that time?!
Shakedown Hawaii
@@AfferbeckBeats you know what? i checked some things and it's still somewhat popular on the second hand market, in my region even more popular than the actual wii (only cause it's cheaper)
@@bootmii98 Just Dance 2020
I remember these! The Domyos (PAL) version went on sale when I had my part time job at Decathlon and the staff was very confused as to why we were selling crappy video games in a shop for sports equipment.
Maybe they sold it because the games are sport related.
@@autistic_furry Almost certainly.
You see that all the time, vaguely related products being stocked to try and grab more customers.
Almost all of them end up at discount retailers after a few months.
I assume the pitch to corporate was something like, "This is like a golf simulator, but cheaper and with a dozen more sports!"
"Now I'm an adult with no spare time..."
That's always the best reason to buy stuff you don't really need.
15:30 this feels like the old AVGN bit where he screams fire into Top Gun
FUCK! FUCK FIRE
Australian Video Game Nerd *or* Australian Nugget Game Nerd before "Big Nugget" made him change his name for copylefts.
Ah yes the Konami LaserScope “I just shot a duck by saying fuck!”
FIRE. FIRE. FIRE. FIRE. FUCK. FUCK FIRE.
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN😅
that issue of the tv remote actually made me understand *why* the wii sensor bar is actually the ir transmitter, with the reciever being in the wiimote
Wait WTF-
See this is why I like your channel. You not only introduce us to weird and rare electronics but you also take them apart. I love seeing the internals of these things!
Exactly, I love seeing all this old wacky crap get dissected purely out of curiosity by someone who actually knows what they’re looking at when they get down to the guts and bolts of it. I can waste a whole afternoon watching stuff like this or Techmoan and Posy
1:23 Those buttons look like they were nicked from a cheap radio from the 2000s and an old Vauxhall
Yea, cheap portable DVD player and other electronics as well.
I worked at an auto parts store 02-03 _(here in the US)_ and they started having us sell all this literal junk. Said portable DVD player, with a *_TINY_* screen that it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually 1/2 the actual resultion, since the pixels were basically the size of my head lol
I’m Irish, ands it’s cool you got a console from Ireland! The fact that console even had a proper Irish release, and printed that on the box rather than just send us the UKs leftovers is a novelty!
Wade: "oh my PKcells!!"
James: "OH MY SERIAL NUMBER STICKERS!!"
Wade: ends video with quiet frank snake
James: RRRREEEOOWW
Wade: *Random noises, shouts, and screaming *
James: * idk, something something serious and mature *
@@ZeroWind2014 Also James: *angle grinder*
The reason the XaviX was named that in Ireland instead of Domyos is because Domyos is part of decathlon which didn’t exist here until around 2019
Ohh good info
1:32 It is strange, but it's not never seen on a game console.
The Xbox One had HDMI in and you could use the media remote to control like a cable box or other device over CEC. The whole One line kept this, even the One X, but it was dropped on the Series X|S, probably from lack of use or cost cutting.
Sidebar, that startup sound is absolutely fire.
>Xbox One had HDMI in
I still remember that Microsoft conference from 2013. "Xbox is about to become the next water cooler. Sports."
I have a hard time seeing any use for a passthrough connection in the modern era of SmartTVs and streaming services. Lots of people have ditched or never picked up cable, and a singular device can usually serve your entertainment needs.
Used to be you had a single video port and changing devices meant having a switcher or manually changing your plugged in devices, so having passthrough reduced the need for secondary solutions. Having a DVD player or game console plugged into the VHS player wasn’t an uncommon sight even 20 years ago. There was also a weird obsession with making the XBone a “media center,” so having passthrough for your cable receiver just made sense to some weird football guy working for Microsoft at the time.
@@robotbootyhunter6878 I liked it for routing my ps3 through it. was like inception, but with menus and consoles. Smart tv UI -> xbox UI -> ps3 UI.
@@robotbootyhunter6878 Tradition. Also, cable is still great for side offerings and less cancerous studff compared to streaming.
ive had a decoders, vhs players/dvd players with that feature and the xbox included. it used to be a lot more commen back when your tv didnt come with many innput ports.
I actually adore that cartridge insertion mechanism. I want like, a hotswappable set of hard drives that use that same system. Seems so satisfying.
Hot swap SAS hard drives aren't satisfying enough?
It amazes me that this thing is from 2004, the back of the box looks like a Pong console from around 1979.
Trueee! I love the nostalgic vibes though!
So theoretically someone could make a miniature Wii that could fit in the Xavix? That sounds like a cool project
The smallest Wii mod project gets it down to only slightly larger than two Game Boy Color cartridges stacked, so absolutely.
bringus studios
This HAS to happen.
Shankmods
@@TheTwister999 I thought the same, hasn't he made a mini GameCube a while ago?
Before my dad was able ot get the Wii during the craze, he bought the family an Xavix (they were all on clearance, so he bought tennis, bowling, and baseball). Thank you for this video, it brought back many memories of my childhood. 🥺
Ketchup Bottle
my favorite fragrance
James Channel
James Channel
Cames Jhannel
James Channel
My neighbors had this thing with the tennis game and boy is it just as good as I remember.
Didn't take long for us to realize you could just sit down and hit the racket instead of getting up and being active as intended.
...This is just a Pop Station on steroids. Down to the interchangeable cartridges being the actual guts of the console.
Amazing stuff.
Lmao, where’s Ashens when you need him?
doesn't have any sad onions though 😔
That clear plastic over grey plastic aesthetic was definitely mid 2000's aesthetic; I've seen it on Sony Walkmans of the time.
including the serial number stickers is actually quite ingenious. you can't lose your S/N with that thing unless you lose the stickers. meanwhile Sorny finds out you rubbed the serial number off of your DualSense from use and leaves you for dead.
I've seen those screws on some garbage like my $2 electric insect racket. I've never seen it on anything expensive though, odd because it seems like a premium thing.
When making something expensive, you cut corners wherever you can
That cartridge slot is actually cool, only thing that would be bad is if the spring or arms break and then you have to flip the console to get the game out.
The 2000s metro aesthetic is so good and that box is so cool for it
I thought the Wii booting its games like they were operating systems was wild, but having the game be the entire console is next level tomfoolery
If these things were more common, I bet someone would've made a homebrew carteidge by now to toss (insert your retro gaming compute unit of choice here) into the cart slot, thereby using the console itself just as a horrible AV and controller solution.
essentially an early approach to pi cm4 carrier boards
i actually knew what a XaviX is because i used to work at a retro games store, and we had a game where we'd hide the XaviX Tennis cartridge from one another to make sure we were actually cleaning the shop. anytime you found it, you'd have your picture taken, posted to the work text chain, and you'd hide it again. good times.
Such a strange oddity. The game loading mechanism reminds me of super old school VHS and Beta players.
James, thanks to you and the James Channel I was able to fix my dads and gramps phone. Your explanations about "this thing does this thing and stuff happens" is really good to someone like me that just needs to understand the principle behind things.
Thanks.
"Would you like a game of the old Tennis Father?"
"Oh no, I'm fine Mrs.Doyle..."
"Ahh go on, go on, go on, go on" 😂
I remember seeing these in my local Market back in the day. Thought it looked rubbish. Nice to see I was right 😂
"But now that I'm an adult, with no spare time, I get to finally own one." I feel attacked.
The way the cartridges go in looks really satisfying.
So it's basically a reverse wii. The "sensor bar" is on the racquets.
EDIT: ok I should've waited a bit more before posting lol... interesting solution to transmit the action via IR but one problem, the leds will 100% be pointing somewhere else if I'm moving the controller arround!
I remember this console; my uncle owns a store I worked at and he made the questionable decision to buy a bunch of these back in like 2006 or 2007 to sell for the holiday season. I think we sold like 1 or 2. They were weirdly expensive. I think the base console was like $200 and each game was like $50-75. I told him it was overpriced at the time but, being 16, I was ignored.
Knowing his hording tendancies, the unsold consoles are probably sitting in the back of the store somewhere to this day.
1:40 the xbox's have this feature too, just with HDMI
That cartridge slot really is hypnotizing; it makes the console look like a prop one from a TV show.
Oh my god, I actually played this. I remember a classmate bringing this console and rackets to a school summer camp... Playtime ended when the owner of the console, unaware of his surroundings, swung the racket so hard that it exploded on the back of a really annoying kid that was playing with us. I cried laughing, but felt bad for the kid afterwards.
I worked for two high end electronics manufacturers and the hot glue technique was used at both
Literally professional quality
A wise man once said, "I can't believe no one bought this!".
Laying the screws out in the orientation they came from, I do this too, and I learnt it from Angelina Jolies Tomb Raider movie.
I'm always confused why the top comments are almost always 'James channel'
Jame Chanel
I genuinely want to know if it detects a TV remote as input. What a fascinating pile of junk.
With the right outputs it would. A programmable remote would do it. It probably only has two outputs, movement and button.
@@ZanpaaI bet you could program a remote to do the same thing
Watching this channel gives me more appreciation for the engineers and designers of these boards and tech behind the difficult and simple tasks a game cartridge does. The insane amount of knowledge on such a small scale is amazing.
I have a CD player that looks identical to that.. it's somewhere out in the shed awaiting repair tho
My cousin had one of these!! My memory of this randomly came back to me YEARS after the Wii lost its relevance and I couldn’t tell if my brain was making it up or not 😂
I feel like thousands of these exact consoles came out back during these times, but I didn't know some of them came out BEFORE the Wii.
10:39 i love the gamecube too, james
So some disgruntled former Nintendo employees who knew about the Wii in advance got together and said "we can make that." And than proceded to not.
I like how James is super precise and worried about damaging things while Wade Dankpods will do anything in his power to get to what he's after.
XaviX also made a plug n play mini golf game.
James, I bloody love how you explain stuff and make it easy to understand exactly what it is you’re talking about, I could watch you all day mate 👍🏼
2008:
James Rolfe: Wow, i just shot a duck by saying fuck.
2024:
Other James: I just wanna hit the ball by saying Hit!
As an Irish person, I’m mystified by this, never heard of the company or product, cool piece of gaming history, great video James
This is definitely the weirdest game thingy I've ever seen. And I love it too. It's so unusual, I wonder what other games it has.
There’s even a Jackie Chan Fitness game lol
3:32 wait that's literally the Windows 11 logo
IKR
I remember this console and I used to call it the Jackie Chan console since he marketed this gaming device back then and most commercials featured him
I actually dig that cartridge port, keeps everything simple and compact.
I remember seeing these advertised on TV back in the mid-2000s, usually in crappy, cheap commercial timeslots in the middle of the night. I always assumed they were trying to jump on the Wii hype/popularity.
I once had a 3rd party ps4 controller I think you’d love to have seen the insides of, it featured 0 solder work, it was all hot glue, even on the circuit board it was honestly funny how ass it was
I love to see notifications for your videos, thank you so much for making them!
the higher camera of other tennis games makes a lot of sense when dealing with a complete lack of depth perception
Oh my god this unlocked lost memories I had one of these as a kid with the bowling game
James,
You might be the most chill person I've never met.
The Xbox One has the same in-line HDMI in feature. You could jam a cable box directly into the Xbox then navigate your cable/satellite with an Xbox controller instead of a remote control with buttons designed for that (I think you can also use it as a DVR?)
Wait, you can jam a TV box INTO it?
@@josha_254 yeah the whole entire thing into the port. They’re really roomy if you relax.
@@totalphantasm Huh, that's neat. My friend has an Xbox One, I'll ask 'em.
@@totalphantasm the trick is to get the TV into the Xbox _before_ you put the Xbox up your butt
@@josha_254 You gotta ask nicely
The cat is the best part of watching. You better not cease the meow
"Mom, can we get a Wii?" "No, we have a Wii at home."
Crazy to think Crysis came out this same year!
10:54 dude the NES released in 85 and the famicom in 83
The SNES in 1990!
Oh wait, that's probably for Australia my bad
wow, really nice video. never heard of this "console" before. and big surprise how the "motion controls" was working!
I've heard of a lot of non name consoles, but I have never heard of this thing. Pretty cool. Thanks for showing.
Anything non mainstream and Poundland based is great to document. So many boots and clones and just downright lies in the 2000s it was madness. ❤ keep buying the weird stuff and I’ll keep watching
3:31 Non-standard Windows 11 logo.
i remember reading about these maaaany years ago. the article made it look soo cool lol
Good to know that I'm not the only one with one of these nuggets! I found a boxed one with the Tennis set in, ironically enough, a Cashies. I'm from the UK mainland though my box also says that it's for Ireland / Northern Ireland only, and seems to be identical to this one. No clue whether it was also sold here or was purchased in Ireland and found its way here. Never thought I'd see James talk about this thing
I wish so much for someone to find my childhood handheld. It was a dungeon crawling mech builder very basic dot matrix screen. But it has a wireless network. In the 00's that if there was another near by they would connect and be able to share between each other or battle
Did it come in 3 colours, each of which were a different "archetype" of mech you could build, and fighting other units of different colours allow you to collect their parts?
I think I had something like that, but I forget what it was called.
EDIT: the one I'm thinking of is called P-O-X, released by Hasbro in 2001.
@@TheDarkNerd holy shit you did it. If I could describe the chills I just received. Thank you for this
Thank you for tearing apart your precious collectables for us James.
i LOVE this console, and the cartridge mechanism makes me happy
“But now that I’m an adult with no spare time…” felt that and I don’t even have kids like you do. I keep buying things that my childhood self would’ve wanted hoping that he can feel like he’s less hated xD I think I need therapy xD
this is easily the most dvd player looking console i've ever seen
I'm Irish and anytime i see ireland mentioned in a youtube video i'm like :O
if they are infrared LEDs you can point a cell phone camera at them to see if they are working. This will work with any TV remote as well. You will see a white flashing light pulsing when you press a button.
I know but modern cameras filter it out, otherwise you’d have seen it in the vid. I keep meaning to find one which doesn’t
@@Games_for_James If you have one floating around, the iPhone 4s doesn’t filter out infrared.
I remember seeing this system at a local thrift shop many years ago and being fascinated by the strange cartridge slot. Wish I’d bought it cause it seems like an interesting thing to mess around with.
Thanks for these vids man, they are very entertaining!
Okay but has anyone made it run Doom yet???
since the SoC is on the game cartridge, should be easy to just put a pi in it to make it run Doom.
@@minirop I like the way you think
You really could just use a raspberry pie to hijack an existing cartridge and make it run doom that way.
@@MDPToaster Waste of a hard to find/get cartridge, would be easy to get a new PCB after figuring out what each line does/needs. It's just video out and some time of limited GPIO type interface from the IR receiver.
@@MDPToasterplaying doom with a tennis racket sounds a little difficult
0:23 - Founded on my birthday? a-
Not only is it motion control but it had voice control. It's amazing!
the CPUs would be a 65C02 in the 8 bit game and a 65C816 in the 16 games. the 65C02 is a upgraded CMOS version of the MOS Technology 6502 made by WDC. what WDC did to upgrade the 6502 was add some more instructions to the CPU by using about half of the 105 unused 8 bit opcodes from the original mos 6502 giving it some more addressing modes. the 65C816 is a highly upgraded 16 bit extension of the 65C02 also made by WDC however it still only has an external 8 bit data bus (much like the 8088 with 16 bit internals but only 8 bit data). I know that they are using these chips as WDC will license out the cores to basically anyone willing to pay the fee, this is why the SNESs' Ricoh 5A22 CPU was using a 65C816 core. now one thing you might have noticed is I have not been talking in the past tense as WDC still makes and sells DIP and PLCC versions of both chips and works to improve the clock speed, the latest versions from just a few years ago will can clock at up to 14mhz and they are still commonly used embedded cores
The CPUs used in the XaviX cartridges are all made by a very shady company named Sunplus, based in Taiwan.
They are copies of the 65C02/65C816 but they also used their own proprietary µArch called S+Core which a 32/16-bit hybrid.
The 8-bit CPUs were also used by HP in there low-cost graphing calculators (HP 35s, HP 12c P., etc...). The Mattel Hyperscan console used a Sunplus S+Core CPU (it was a terrible console).
@@Erebus-PCFX had never heard of S+core before so glad to learn something new, I was actually expecting that they were all just NOACs and the "16 bit" ones were using an NOAC with a 65C816 core and an upgraded PPU like most other trash plug and play systems
Now that i think about it, you said you made the first game with a built-in console with the NES cartridge that can play itself, but this console had the first game with a console built in, Lmao
I had one of these growing up, theres baseball and snowboarding games we had along with tennis. The baseball bat that came with the game was fun.
I like the idea of games being able to expand hardware through extra chips
11:47 James casually headed in a Linda Belcher direction “all riiight”
I love the aesthetics of this thing. The metallic silver plastic with faux chrome buttons, weird translucent acryllic panel thing, even the font, it all screams mid 00s cheap electronics.
I have a friend who had one of these. The wonky controls can be attributed to how the games were intended to have the user step a certain distance and angle away from the console (not the TV). If you're not moving INSIDE of the box that the console wants you to be in, you're gonna have a bad time.
Had to come back to say that I was at an estate sale last weekend and a) saw one of these and knew what it was, and b) made the informed decision to absolutely not buy it. Thanks, James Channel!
From what I have read the CPU is actually on the game cartridge, and was either a 65C02 or a 65C816 depending on the game. The developer was from Japan.
The cartridge loading section is actually really cool
10:00, It's slightly similar to the SNES then with how it used special extra processing chips in the cartridge to help run the game.
I think it'd be cool to see a comeback of that in a world where making custom chips is easy and cheap, so that games could be hardwired into a chip so everything is super accelerated instead of having to run like proper software.