/int/ - International

burger here

i remember when i first stumbled upon kc/int/ years ago, i was blown away to hear how soviets had their own version of the NES, called the "dendy". it was basically just a cheap bootleg NES manufactured in USSR, to get around USSR law which prohibited importing any western cultural shit like that.
most of the games for dendy were just romdumps of western NES games with crude translations (or totally untranslated), but some were romhacks that swapped the sprites for characters that soviet kids were more familiar with. and then there were a few that were actually just original games, albeit usually pretty wonky.

about ten or so years ago, i went down to NYCs chinatown and bought in some weird chinatown shop, for like $30, some little handheld thing called a "dingoo A320". it was a cheap little piece of shit (ya get what ya pay for), but it honestly emulated 8-bit games pretty well so i used to play it a lot when i was on the road.
the guy at the store wasnt so good at engrish, but he kept telling me:
>"gib $10 more, ill give you game"
figured it would just be a bunch of roms (and it was), but why the hell not? it was so cheap already anyways. and so he hooked it up to his computer and gave me a bunch of roms of weird chinese translations of old NES games. but a few of them were outright original games. one of the ones i remember playing the most was called "Bao Qing Tian" (picrel), which was apparently some old chinese tv show.
like the russian dendy games i was talking about before, this game was pretty wonky, but it was mostly fair enough and fun enough to where i used to play it a lot. there were a couple other chinese games i used to play on the dingoo, but since i cant into chinese, its hard for me to remember any of the names.
also, the dingoo finally broke (RIP in pieces), so i cant even look at the files on it anymore even if i wanted too ;_;

anyways, blogpost aside, im curious to hear what exactly was your guys experience with vidya during the 8bit/16bit era. i would imagine that emulation was pretty big over there, as importing physical games was prolly way out of most peoples price range, if not outright impossible/illegal to get. ive heard that nowadays in china its all just mobile phone games (which are almost all entirely garbage), so im not too interested in that particularly. but i love old 8/16bit games, even the "bad" ones, and its still basically all i play nowadays.

so a couple questions:
>what kinds of consoles did you guys play/emulate on?
>what games do you remember playing a lot back then, chinese or otherwise?
>can you think of any chinese exclusive games that are worth checking out?
>got any cool stories about importing foreign games on the blackmarket?
thx