So What's a Gameking?
The Gameking is a handheld game console made in 2003 by Timetop for the Hong Kong consumer market. Ever since then, they have been distributed to the USA and UK by wholesalers. It has been featured in a review by internet pseudo-celebrity Stuart Ashen, and has gained a cult following ever since. This can mainly be attributed to the broken english on the back of the boxes for the games.
The console itself is fashioned after Nintendo's Game Boy Advance and is available in a wide variety of colors, both opaque and transparent. It takes 2 AAA batteries.
The console itself is fashioned after Nintendo's Game Boy Advance and is available in a wide variety of colors, both opaque and transparent. It takes 2 AAA batteries.
The Games
The Gameking comes with three built in games and uses a proprietary cartridge format and it has its own games. Nearly all of them are clones of games for other systems, and all of them have stolen box art, mostly from other games, although this is not always the case. The box art for Penguin is stolen from National Geographic, and the box art for Ares is stolen from Deviantart.
The stolen content doesn't stop at the boxes, though. While the graphics are mostly original, a lot of the music is stolen. Places the music has been stolen from include Castlevania, Mega Man X, Mega Man II, Theme Hospital, City Connection, Adventure Island, Spybot: The Nightfall Incident, Tengen Tetris, and many more.
37 of these games are rumored to exist, however, only 17 of these were released on standalone cartridges, and 2 are completely unknown. The remaining games were all only released on 4-in-1 multicarts.
Built in games:
-Drifter (Adventure Island/Wonder Boy clone)
-2003 (1942 clone)
-Miner/Mine Battle (Bomberman clone)
Confirmed games:
-2004 (Sequel to 2003, 1943 clone)
-Adventure Legend Carlo (Super Mario Bros. Clone)
-Ares (Generic space shooter)
-Dino Adventure Legend (Another Super Mario Bros. Clone)
-Duckman (Darkwing Duck clone)
-F1-2004 (F1 Race clone)
-Feichuan (Space shooter, seems to take place in a river)
-Happy Ball (Lode Runner clone)
-Happy Killer (Lode runner clone, uses the same engine as Happy Ball)
-Lanneret (Choplifter clone)
-Penguin (Slalom/Tux Racer clone)
-Popper (Bomberman Clone)
-Seatercel (Another generic shooter)
-Soldier (Contra/Gryzor clone)
-Street Hero (Double Dragon clone)
-Supermotor (F1-2004 altered to mimic Mach Rider)
-Trojan Legend (Mega Man clone)
Multicart Only Games:
-Star Wars
-Nagual
-Blaster
-Chaser
-Star Chazi
-HERO
-Dracula Zone/Surf Eidolon
-Pocket Tank
-Warrior
-Clever Hawk
-Valliant
-Metal Deform
-Three Battles
-Lightsword
-Risker
-Catman
-Armada
-Brains
A few more were also released only on multicarts, nearly all of which seem to run on modified engines of other Gameking games.
-Cyclon Action
-Might (Uses the Soldier engine, has a stolen Contra sprite in the intro)
-CarMan
-Spectask (Uses the Street Hero engine)
-Captain (Uses the Trojan Legend engine and Mega Man X music)
-Seaguard
-Whirlybird (Uses the Seatercel engine)
-Happy Garden
-Airhero
-Magician
-Explorer
-Farer
-Seabedwar
-Sortie
-Phantom Fighter
The stolen content doesn't stop at the boxes, though. While the graphics are mostly original, a lot of the music is stolen. Places the music has been stolen from include Castlevania, Mega Man X, Mega Man II, Theme Hospital, City Connection, Adventure Island, Spybot: The Nightfall Incident, Tengen Tetris, and many more.
37 of these games are rumored to exist, however, only 17 of these were released on standalone cartridges, and 2 are completely unknown. The remaining games were all only released on 4-in-1 multicarts.
Built in games:
-Drifter (Adventure Island/Wonder Boy clone)
-2003 (1942 clone)
-Miner/Mine Battle (Bomberman clone)
Confirmed games:
-2004 (Sequel to 2003, 1943 clone)
-Adventure Legend Carlo (Super Mario Bros. Clone)
-Ares (Generic space shooter)
-Dino Adventure Legend (Another Super Mario Bros. Clone)
-Duckman (Darkwing Duck clone)
-F1-2004 (F1 Race clone)
-Feichuan (Space shooter, seems to take place in a river)
-Happy Ball (Lode Runner clone)
-Happy Killer (Lode runner clone, uses the same engine as Happy Ball)
-Lanneret (Choplifter clone)
-Penguin (Slalom/Tux Racer clone)
-Popper (Bomberman Clone)
-Seatercel (Another generic shooter)
-Soldier (Contra/Gryzor clone)
-Street Hero (Double Dragon clone)
-Supermotor (F1-2004 altered to mimic Mach Rider)
-Trojan Legend (Mega Man clone)
Multicart Only Games:
-Star Wars
-Nagual
-Blaster
-Chaser
-Star Chazi
-HERO
-Dracula Zone/Surf Eidolon
-Pocket Tank
-Warrior
-Clever Hawk
-Valliant
-Metal Deform
-Three Battles
-Lightsword
-Risker
-Catman
-Armada
-Brains
A few more were also released only on multicarts, nearly all of which seem to run on modified engines of other Gameking games.
-Cyclon Action
-Might (Uses the Soldier engine, has a stolen Contra sprite in the intro)
-CarMan
-Spectask (Uses the Street Hero engine)
-Captain (Uses the Trojan Legend engine and Mega Man X music)
-Seaguard
-Whirlybird (Uses the Seatercel engine)
-Happy Garden
-Airhero
-Magician
-Explorer
-Farer
-Seabedwar
-Sortie
-Phantom Fighter
Technical Specifications
The original Gameking uses a 65C02 CPU running at 6.0 MHz.
The consoles have above-average sound circuitry capable of multi-channel music and digital sound playback, but a comparably low quality greyscale LCD screen, only supporting four shades of grey and having a 48x32 screen resolution.
According to Brian Provinciano's reverse engineering of the GameKing, most GameKing games heavily rely on bitmap rather than tile-based rendering of the screen, e.g. most levels in its platform and shoot-em-up games are in reality large 4-colour bitmaps, instead of using the most common method of graphic tiles and tile maps, like in most other game consoles and arcade games. This was probably done for economic reasons (the CPU alone can handle all graphics easily, at that resolution) and easy development of the games, apart from the objectively low resolution of the screen. While such a scheme seems to work, it has the disadvantage of using cartridge space inefficiently, so that e.g. most platform games are limited to 3 levels. At this point, it is unknown if the GameKing uses some form of sprite rendering, although this is probably unlikely and unnecessary.
Most of its games have digital sound effects, but it's unclear whether the machine has a traditional sound chip or relies only on digital samples for music and sound effects. Many of the "soundtracks" of its games are in fact very short looping tunes appearing to be sampled around 8 KHz. which would mean the cartridge space is used very inefficiently in this sense, like what happens with graphics. In other words, the machine just plays back digital samples with no other manipulation and appears unable to do traditional music synthesis. The overall result is however functional.
According to Brian Provinciano's reverse engineering of the GameKing, most GameKing games heavily rely on bitmap rather than tile-based rendering of the screen, e.g. most levels in its platform and shoot-em-up games are in reality large 4-colour bitmaps, instead of using the most common method of graphic tiles and tile maps, like in most other game consoles and arcade games. This was probably done for economic reasons (the CPU alone can handle all graphics easily, at that resolution) and easy development of the games, apart from the objectively low resolution of the screen. While such a scheme seems to work, it has the disadvantage of using cartridge space inefficiently, so that e.g. most platform games are limited to 3 levels. At this point, it is unknown if the GameKing uses some form of sprite rendering, although this is probably unlikely and unnecessary.
Most of its games have digital sound effects, but it's unclear whether the machine has a traditional sound chip or relies only on digital samples for music and sound effects. Many of the "soundtracks" of its games are in fact very short looping tunes appearing to be sampled around 8 KHz. which would mean the cartridge space is used very inefficiently in this sense, like what happens with graphics. In other words, the machine just plays back digital samples with no other manipulation and appears unable to do traditional music synthesis. The overall result is however functional.
Game King II
The Game King II is a redesigned model of the first Gameking, styled after the PSP rather than the Game Boy Advance. This model also uses a built in audio amplifier (a bit more powerful than the original Gameking) and a backlit screen. It also has a fixed color background to give the impression of color. The background picture varies between models, but they all mostly have a negative effect on screen visibility when the backlight is on. However, these can be easily removed by opening the system and pulling out the transparency.
Game King III
TimeTop quietly released a third GameKing machine, called the 'GameKing III' or GM-220 sometime in 2005. While early advertisements showed the GameKing III with the same "false color" background picture as the GameKing I and II, which would indicate that the system is actually black and white like the previous GameKing models,the GM-220 is in fact full colour. Another distinction of the GM-220 is that unlike the Gameking I and II, which were promoted and marketed worldwide, the Gameking III was not actively distributed outside of Asia, making it much less common than the earlier models. It is not known why Timetop eventually decided to offer only a limited release.
Although accurate technical information is hard to obtain, it seems to be using a 64-colour (or grey shades) LCD or TFT screen, although little else is known about it. It was available in black, silver, dark violet, and blue. Although Timetop claims that 12 games are available, only 10 are known to exist. There used to be a picture online showing the games, but this has since been taken off the internet.
These are the only known games:
-Galaxy Crisis (built in)
-Adventure
-Urgent Action
-2030
-Diamond
-Panzer
-Fly Car
-Blaze Plane
-Hermic Battle
-Vagrant
Although accurate technical information is hard to obtain, it seems to be using a 64-colour (or grey shades) LCD or TFT screen, although little else is known about it. It was available in black, silver, dark violet, and blue. Although Timetop claims that 12 games are available, only 10 are known to exist. There used to be a picture online showing the games, but this has since been taken off the internet.
These are the only known games:
-Galaxy Crisis (built in)
-Adventure
-Urgent Action
-2030
-Diamond
-Panzer
-Fly Car
-Blaze Plane
-Hermic Battle
-Vagrant
GM-222
The GM-222 was a unique design as far as hardware goes, but in reality it was just a repackaged version of the original Gameking, despite having "Gameking 2" stamped on the front.
Gameking Clones
While the Gameking itself appears to no longer be in direct production by Timetop, a few clone consoles have been released that seem to run on Gameking hardware. The games themselves all appear to be clones of existing games, with modified graphics and/or slightly modified engines. A couple of these consoles are:
-the LTPS handy game (PSP Go ripoff, has nothing to do with the Timetop NES clone with the same name)
-The YD-965/YD-960 Dot Matrix LCD Game (Nintendo DS Ripoffs, YD-965 pictured)
The Games known to exiat on these are:
-King Boxing (a seemingly original fighting game)
-Sea-Wolf (uses the Sea Guard engine)
-Apache (uses the Seatercel engine)
-CS-1 (Soldier altered to mimic Counter-Strike)
-Motor (uses the Supermotor engine)
-The Wall (seemingly original breakout clone)
-Star War (uses the 2004 engine)
-Tank (seems to use the Pocket Tank engine)
-Risk King (uses the Adventure Legend Carlo/Dino Adventure Legend engine and a modified sprite from Drifter on the title screen)
-the LTPS handy game (PSP Go ripoff, has nothing to do with the Timetop NES clone with the same name)
-The YD-965/YD-960 Dot Matrix LCD Game (Nintendo DS Ripoffs, YD-965 pictured)
The Games known to exiat on these are:
-King Boxing (a seemingly original fighting game)
-Sea-Wolf (uses the Sea Guard engine)
-Apache (uses the Seatercel engine)
-CS-1 (Soldier altered to mimic Counter-Strike)
-Motor (uses the Supermotor engine)
-The Wall (seemingly original breakout clone)
-Star War (uses the 2004 engine)
-Tank (seems to use the Pocket Tank engine)
-Risk King (uses the Adventure Legend Carlo/Dino Adventure Legend engine and a modified sprite from Drifter on the title screen)
Links
TimeTop's Website
TimeTop's Game King Page
Brian Provinciano's Game King page
Wikipedia's Game King article
The Arctic Computer and Console Museum's Game King page
Gameking - Unleash the Games!
Ultimate Console Database - Game King
TimeTop's Game King Page
Brian Provinciano's Game King page
Wikipedia's Game King article
The Arctic Computer and Console Museum's Game King page
Gameking - Unleash the Games!
Ultimate Console Database - Game King