NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

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M_Tee
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NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by M_Tee »

A place to discuss elephants and samurai.

DementedPurple wrote:Speaking of stuff be[/img]ing imported to other countries, in Korea, they had a ban on imports from Japan, so in order for Japanese companies like Sega to sell their consoles in Korea, they gave Samsung the right to sell their consoles, which lead to a SMS clone called "The Gam Boy" :roll: Totally original guys!Image
93143 wrote:The NES was the Hyundai Comboy in Korea. It seems the Korean naming sense is fairly distinctive... yeah, that must be it...
DementedPurple wrote:I think they were able to get away with that name because Samsung was not only working with Sega but also with Nintendo, so they had rights to both the Sega Master System and Game Boy.
As was stated earlier, Hyundai licensed Nintendo products, not Samsung.
The NES was released as the Hyundai Comboy (surprisingly based off of the North American model) in 1989, although multiple mass marketed Famiclones were already on the market. In fact, despite its officially licensed presence, all Korean exclusive games were developed for famiclones.

Hyundai would later release the Game Boy as the Mini Comboy, as well as a Super Comboy (based off of the Super Famicom this time around), and the Comboy 64.

Samsung licensed Sega products, and your implication that the Samsung Gam*Boy was named after the Game Boy may or may not be true. However, the Gam*Boy was released in the same month in Korea as the Game Boy launched in Japan (April 1989). Considering the cultural embargo on Japanese products (and the heavy localization of Japanese-based media aired in Korea at the time), I don't know how aware the average consumer would have been of the upcoming Game Boy, so I don't believe there would have been any merit in an intentional similarity.

These weren't the only instances of licensed consoles in Korea either, Daewoo sold MSX compatible machines under the name, Zemmix.
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Fisher
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Fisher »

Wow! I didn't know much about this Korea embargo to Japan.
It seems to come from the end of WW2, and are still valid for japanese music and TV dramas.
I think I've read about the "comfort womens" used by japanese soldiers back them. Seems to be another of the big atrocities war gives to mankind. :-(

Do north koreans play any kind of video games? I think that unfortunately no.:-(
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Pokun »

From what we have heard of North Koreans that escaped the country, people hardly have electricity there. But I also heard that they do watch a lot of TV drama (especially South Korean) that's illegally imported via China (the communist system of course collapsed long ago and they allow business and trade with China to survive), so I guess they could play whatever games reach them via Chinese traders, legal or not.

All official non-Japanese versions of Famicom/NES seems to be based on the NES, with the exception of Hong Kong and Taiwan versions of the Famicom that was only sold to compete with the imported Japanese Famicoms in these countries (as the official NES didn't sell very much there anyway).
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by M_Tee »

This was posted in 2008, from a North Korean arcade.

It sports a few of the white, universal arcade cabinets which make up the majority of South Korean arcades:

Image

…as well as a handful of much older looking machines, more akin to what one would find in the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines.

In 2013, these were officially released through to a Chinese news source, showing a more modern, polished arcade, but it looks about as legit as an early 90s magazine advert for a family arcade.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Drag »

How do you display Hangul text on the screen? At first glance, the fact that several parts combine to form one character suggests that you can't just store a table of every possible character like you can with English or Katakana/Hiragana, but there does seem to be a limited number of shapes possible, so maybe you can store them as tiles. Is it like Chinese where a framebuffer is needed to effectively display dialogue?
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freem
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by freem »

Considering the Korean versions of Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal only work on Game Boy Color (requires the GBC's extra VRAM), I'd assume a framebuffer is needed.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Pokun »

There are apparently only 11 172 possible combinations (compare with Chinese characters of which over 80 000 are known), and the Korean language doesn't even have enough sounds for that many characters.

I've never seen any older games with limited font memory that have Hangul though.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Drag »

hangul_tiles.png
hangul_tiles.png (4.06 KiB) Viewed 5053 times
This is as far as I got before realizing those horizontal vowels would be a problem...

Each wide part would need alternative versions that have a line with zero, one, or two dashes above or below, and then each small part would need the same. It's doable, but man that's a lot of tiles, and I hadn't even added the double-consonants in yet.
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Fisher
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Fisher »

Maybe the best solution should be making whole words as tiles?
Now I know why all japanese XT-age computers that I saw used english!
I may have missed some...
M_Tee
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by M_Tee »

Jang Dujin Baduk Gyosil has the best use of Korean on the NES, IMO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utnvawH22LU

The manner in which the characters combine, and the slightly altered shapes the characters can have depending on their position makes it a hassle, for sure.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Pokun »

I can't read hangul but that's nice and big characters.
Fisher wrote:Maybe the best solution should be making whole words as tiles?
Now I know why all japanese XT-age computers that I saw used english!
Wouldn't that require even more memory?
Japanese is easier since you can get away with only using katakana in many cases. But even that requires quite a bit of memory (46 characters plus a few extras). Family BASIC is almost using a fourth of the 8 kB CHR ROM for its fonts, and it only has a Latin alphabet and katakana.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by tepples »

There was a failed movement to restructure hangul sequentially like every other alphabet. A compromise is the UnJamo fonts (seen here and on the following page), which make each consonant letter a fixed size rather than the traditional method of stretching each syllable to fit a square.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by DementedPurple »

I wonder why China had not only one famiclone, but so many others as well. I know why they would have a few, because China was once a communist country and they had a ban on video games until 2014, but come on! Are the people buying these consoles just not aware that they are buying the exact same console? Sure, a lot of consoles had similar graphics, and I could get confused too if that was the same, but most of these consoles have built in games, which are the exact games built in to every other famiclone! Do they just not know any better? It was probably like the pong consoles of the 1970's when video games were considered more of a novelty toy rather then an actual form of media and entertainment.
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tokumaru
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by tokumaru »

China is the most populated country in the world, so it's no surprise that multiple companies would try to make a profit on the current fad. Business is hardly ever driven by originality, most people just want a slice of a market that already exists. If you can offer any advantage over the competition, such as price, quality or availability, you might be successful at maintaining a business.
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Re: NES presence (official and otherwise) in other markets

Post by Pokun »

Yes and since patents probably doesn't work as it should in China, no one (including Nintendo) are able to prevent anyone else from making clones. That's why Nintendo have problems selling in China, there are too many illegal copies and clones for them to be able to make a profit, and no way to prevent this.

In later years Nintendo have marketed their own iQue series of consoles in China that are often made too look like one of those cheap clones with built-in games. Only that you have to pay to unlock the games in it, and the games aren't bad hacks but official Chinese localizations of Nintendo games.
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