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Inventor was a Chinese developer of various original games and hacks, believed to be responsible for the majority of hacks found on Famiclones dating from 2000 onward, such as the Arcade Action II. Its original games and some advanced hacks use Sunsoft's sound engine.

Although Inventor itself is believed to no longer exist, many of its games and hacks appear to have passed to other companies, including Waixing, Cube Technology, and Nice Code Software. For particular, its graphics appear to have been copied and reused by Shenzhen Nanjing in at least three games so far.

Other names used by Inventor or related companies include Shanghai Paradise & BBG (Bitter Brain Group - not to be confused with BBK Electronics, which also went by the name BBG on earlier products).

Original Games[]

Shanghai Paradise originals[]

These games can usually be identified by a Shanghai Paradise logo found in the game tiles, although it is displayed in only the original versions of them. Certain redistributions remove all mentions of Shanghai Paradise, remove any instance of (presumably) Chinese, give title screens new graphics, or even cut down the whole game severely.

Out of all the original Shanghai Paradise releases, only Blood of Jurassic has been dumped properly, due to the copy protection that lies within each Shanghai Paradise board.

  • Blood of Jurassic (獵殺侏羅紀) [GD-98] - An advanced, first-person lightgun game where the player hunts dinosaurs. A cut-down version was released by Waixing as Jurassic Park.
  • Monkey King - An action game based on the "Journey to the West" novel. Later re-released by Waixing.
  • Underground Mission - An action-puzzle game where the player must rescue a kidnapped soldier. The game appears on several Power Joy plug & plays.

Others[]

  • Cha Cha Amigo - A game included with an obscure "Jazz Samba" Famiclone system, which uses wireless maracas as controllers. The game is credited to "eMAR" and dated 2000; some assets are reused from Street Dance, while others are custom (including a character loosely resembling Donkey Kong).[1][2]
  • MusicBox - A karaoke game with three songs; features graphics of Pikachu and a penguin holding pom-poms during gameplay. An "INVENT" credit sometimes appears in the background; some graphics are reused from Street Dance. The third song was also used in 2002 World Cup P.K. by Nice Code.
    • The game features a copyright of 2002 on the title screen, but it is cut off by the TV overscan.
    • It is possible that MusicBox is some sort of "demo" ROM for the VT02 hardware, as it is not known to have actually been released. Its ROM was seemingly leaked online in the early 2000s by Maxzhou88, labeled as a "karaoke demo"; however, the original file is no longer archived.
  • Pingpong Qiu - A first-person ping pong game, with multiple characters and game modes. The game was also released as just Ping Pong and Table Tennis; these variants were seemingly published by Nice Code. A cut-down version was released by Waixing as Table Tennis 2006, which adds an intro showcasing a Chinese table tennis tournament.
  • Street Dance - A Dance Dance Revolution clone. The original version was released in 2000 (credited to "INVENT") and uses standard NES music (with the Sunsoft sound engine). An updated version was released in 2008, which adds PCM sampled music of actual songs; the 2008 release was possibly published by Nice Code Software, though the copyright notice still says "Invent". A combined game pack with the 2008 version of Street Dance and Hit Mouse also came bundled with certain third-party dance pads.[3] Infamously, one of the dancers is Jar Jar Binks from the Star Wars series.
    • A further hacked version titled Dance Gangnam Style was released in the early 2010s, which features Gangnam Style as the only song; some of its graphics are reused from Cha Cha Amigo.
  • Tennis Ball - Seemingly only published by Nice Code Software, but uses the same music as Pingpong Qui on the title screen; dated 2001.Also released as just Tennis.

Hacks[]

Shanghai Paradise hacks[]

  • Alienis - An advanced hack of Battle City with scrolling levels. Nice Code and Waixing both republished Alienis, with the former producing a series of further hacks of the game (such as Pulveration and Bugs).
  • F-22 - A very advanced hack of 1943, to the point it is often confused for an entirely new game. A variant was published by Nice Code under the name Navigator; a cut-down version was released by Waixing, which only has 3 levels (as opposed to the original's 16 stages).
  • Power Boat - An advanced hack of Road Fighter; the game appears on several Power Joy plug & plays.
  • Super Hang-On 97 - A fairly comprehensive hack of Highway Star, also known as Rad Racer. Many later hacked variants were also released, such as Alps Skiing and Rallye [sic].

Other hacks[]

After the initial Shanghai Paradise releases, Inventor would release a massive amount of further ROM hacks based on commercial Famicom/NES releases. Some of these hacks feature popular characters of the time period: including Pikachu, Harry Potter, the Teletubbies, and Shrek. The larger majority of them, however, were designed to "hide" copyrighted material from the games; this was done by altering the games' titles, graphics, sounds, and any other potential copyrighted/trademarked factor (a notable example being Pandamar, a Super Mario Bros. hack). Surprisingly, this strategy seemingly worked; as no known legal action has ever been taken against Inventor's bootleg hacks.

In total, well over 100 different Famicom/NES games have an Inventor-hacked version; with many hacks having further variants, sometimes upwards of 5 per game. These hacks commonly appear on "plug & play" consoles, and occasionally multi-cartridge releases. Many are of rather low quality; frequently having nonsensical titles and concepts, and infamously poor "music" (which is merely corrupted notes from the original games). Some Inventor hacks flat-out break their original games; such as Goodhand, a hack of City Connection that uses the same colored graphic for painting over the road, making it effectively unplayable.

Subpages[]

List of standard hacks

Less advanced hacks that were produced by Inventor.

References[]

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