[WTF] SSamba Festival 1999 - Single Gameplay

Welcome to one of Brazil's most hated PIU bootleg! It is a miracle that this dump of the game has even come to be and I would very much like to start by thanking Gabiru from DanceFit for dumping it and Thales from Konmairo for figuring out the memory mapping for input control.
Well, what is this game you might ask? The TL;DR: It's a bastardized attempt of the arcade industry in the early 2000s trying to keep up with demand. Pump It Up was a legitimate success hit in the Korean and Asian market early on, which by itself was considered a clone of Dance Dance Revolution fueled by the difficulty of being able to find a machine. Well, what happens when even the clone becomes hard to obtain with factories capping out their production limits? Go make some more clones, obviously.
SSamba in specific was a product made by order from a group of arcade chains in Brazil back in late 1999/early 2000, Playland being one of the big ones that to this very day still has the game at some locations. The company behind it was Big-A Korea Company, which according to their website had only ever made dance machine clones during its history. People believe that their machines are converted DDR 3rdMIX Korean cabs, however gutting a more valued game and spending more money doing required modifications wouldn't make much sense, hence my belief that factories were essentially just passing blueprints from other products to each other and resulting in scary similar machines.
The hard drive that this game was pulled from contained a barebones computer box with the following specs:
- Slot 1 Intel Celeron Mendocino @ 366 MHz
- 128MB of SDRAM
- 80GB MAXTOR STM380215A Hard Drive
- Creative Labs CT4750 Sound Blaster PCI 128
- Nvidia e-TNT2 Vanta M64 GPU
Comparing to an Andamiro MK3 system, this was significantly beefier and could handle a lot more feature-wise, such as Cinepak Videos for most song backgrounds and a larger storage medium which allowed for song upgrades (which this dump does contain as well). Gameplay wise this also feels shockingly better than PIU games from its time (OBG, Perfect), kind of how Technomotion plays but with very wide timing windows and tad bit early.
This video showcases only the songs that were supposedly originally included with the game, the dump also had a backup folder of additional charts for Brazilian songs which is most likely an add-on as part of the original order request. The game engine also surprisingly supports 4 panel and contains several tools for media conversion and step editing, which means it was probably used in countless other bootlegs that we've never heard of outside from Korea.
I hope to showcase Double charts soon, however figuring out the memory mapping for the entire IO has been difficult and mostly a result of fuck around and find out, due to the original step boards connecting to the game through a serial parallel port. Hope you enjoy this little piece of trivia!
Game files are available here: drive.google.c...

[@exiavaganza]

We have pump it up at home

[@brunoguitardreamer]

0:44 Park Jin Young - Honey
2:36 Lee Jung Hyun - Ban (Half)
5:01 Seung Jun Yoo - I'll Be Back
Ainda bem que alguns discos têm o nome correto das músicas em caracteres romanos. Lembro que em 2004 penei bastante pra encontrar as músicas com capas escritas em coreano. Hoje existe o Shazam, que dispensa o suplício da pesquisa frenética e te entrega em poucos segundos o nome da música que você procura.

[@gameguii]

For nostalgic reasons I’ve requested access to the game files you’ve linked!
Thank you for this!
Also spent my teens playing on a SSamba as it was the only dance machine in town. Very curious to see how it works under the hood!

[@brunoguitardreamer]

Whoa!!! It was a GREAT success here in my city at 2000s!! I made freestyle steps on this thing, playing it on Double Mode. The game has that 666 from Amokk, which is one of the hardest musics from Hard Mode. Livin' La Vida Loca is on it too. Wow... Great memories! Don't ask me how, but even knowing the original Pump It Up titles, I love this game.

[@JoNB3x]

btw bro I’ve requested access to the game files you’ve linked! i would like to see it

[@SheepyChris]

Updated link permissions, my bad

[@JoNB3x]

@@SheepyChris Thanks bro ! If you are looking for something send me ;)

[@NamedKid10]

Is there an image of what the cabinet looks like?

[@JoNB3x]

Is the same cab from ddr 1st gen but with piu dance pad

[@BedrockSolid]

thank you for sharing great footage of this cursed game!