Games Tornado 355-in-1 Quick Review

srarcade80

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Before you start to read: I know, its a multi-board from China, instant red flag, but this one intrigued me to the point where I wanted to see how bad it was, so here it is.

I recently came across a new Chinese multi-game board called the "Games Tornado 355-in-1 Horizontal" by "Games Family". I have not found much to be said about this particular board so I thought I would type up a little review so others can beware. It was cheaply priced around $77 US and came to $99 shipped. I decided to give it a try, because if it happened to work well, even with a fraction of the impressive title list, this would be a cheap board to toss in some extra cabs I can sell off. That said, I know the history of other versions of these so I did not have high expectations and knew I was taking a $99 risk.

The package arrived in a EMS box from China that was securely wrapped in styrofoam. The contents included 1 Games Tornado board and a manual. I was very happy with the packaging and the shipping time of under a week.

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The manual was written in Engrish, with some confusing and sometimes hard to follow wording. It did not cover all aspects of this board which I will try to do for it.

Board Features:
-JAMMA card edge
-Test Mode button
-2 DIP switches (undocumented):
(1) - Screen Flip (off/on)
(2) - Video Output (16khz CGA /32khz VGA)
-10 pin connector for trackball input
-VGA output connector
-1/8" audio output jack
-volume knob
-USB input connector (more on this shortly)
-SD Card slot (more on this shortly)
-PC style 4 pin power connector for alternative power method. (Manual says DO NOT use both the JAMMA card edge AND PC power connector at same time or you will kill the board)
-Plastic enclosure
-4 built in feet for mounting

USB Input Connector:
According to the manual, this is where you insert your PS2 controller. Now when I say PS2, they do mean PC joystick, not PlayStation2. You can also add a USB hub for a 2nd player using PC joysticks. Lastly, the PC joystick is the ONLY way you can utilize extra buttons like kick buttons in Street Fighter.

SD Card:
I pulled this card and attempted to read it. It is a 4GB Kingston card. It has 2 files on it, a 64 byte serial number and then a 3.7mb file that I was not able to identify either in ascii or hex. This card is probably used as RAM.

The PCB outside of its case:
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Powered On:
When you turn on the board, you get a splash screen that says "Game Family" and a little happy crab. He must be happy because he didn't spend $99 on this board. At this point, you can press the "test" button on the side and access the test menu. The test menu simply has an I/O test and ability to turn the game options like timer, free play, credit options, demo sound, language and configure mode. Configure mode will let you customize the game list and turn titles on or off. This is handy to disable clones and games that play like crap. Although if you turned off all the games that played like crap, you'd probably only have about 10 titles on here.

Past the test screens is the main menu. It has a nice list you can scroll through and a preview image of the game. In the bottom right corner you get a timer (if turned on) and credit counter. These can be disabled so you can have free play active and you can take your time to browse the list.

Once you start a game, it will automatically coin up for you. In free play mode, pressing the start button will insert a credit and press start simultaneously. Not sure how i like that. Also, if you have the configure mode active in the soft dip settings, you will get the very familiar MAME options, exactly like when you press the 'tab' button in MAME. This menu has been abbreviated to dip switches, resume game and exit however. It is nice you can use the MAME dips to customize each game.

The Good News:
The board is built really well. I removed it from the case and inside it looks ever so familiar like a lot of the programmable PCBs out there. It has a socketed Samsung ARM cpu board. Inside there a 2 unused 4 pin connectors and a reset button on the cpu board. Nothing spectacular.

The other good news is the game list. There are 355 games on this board with a few clones here and there but over all, the selection is very well balanced and there are some great titles, mostly form the late 80s and early 90s. There were quite a bit of NeoGeo titles, that was the only downside. The game list is what peaked my interest to purchase.

game list page 1: http://i00.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/946/929/522/522929946_170.jpg
game list page 2: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/948/929/522/522929948_285.jpg
game list page 3: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/949/929/522/522929949_107.jpg
game list page 4: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/950/929/522/522929950_026.jpg
game list page 5: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/img/pb/951/929/522/522929951_319.jpg

The Bad News:
Having an ARM CPU, you can't expect much in terms of pure processing power, the key ingredient in emulation. At the core of this device lies a customized version of MAME (big surprise!) MAME + ARM CPU = Fail. This means that about 95% of the games on this list will play slow and or have major sound issues.

Overall:
So in case you haven't picked up on my hints in this review of my opinion of this, here it is out flat: DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. It's a nice effort to build a low cost multi game with some of the better late 80s and early 90s titles but seriously, this thing is so incredibly underpowered it couldn't dream of playing 98% of them full speed.

Even after all that, there are still some games on here that you can play and enjoy full speed, like Moon Patrol, or Klax... yea, the little guys. Basically anything that is not CPU intensive or older in nature, they work fine.

So there you have it, I spent my $99 so you don't have to! It was a risk like I said at the beginning, sometimes you win, most of the time you don't. Especially if its from China. There have been a share of multi boards that have done well, like the ever popular 60-in-1, which still isn't perfect by any means, but its at least enjoyable. This board, not so much. So my goal form here is to find a way to reprogram the game list and put much older games on it that will be able to run under the hardware provided.

EDIT: I'm going down the list through each game and rating it into 1 of 3 possible categories as shown below.

Enjoyable and playable. Minimal frame rate slow down or music/sound issues: (and I'm being picky here too)
Klax
Tetris
Wonderboy III
Crime Fighters
Ninja Gaiden
Tecmo Knight
The Main Event
Super Burger Time
Hippodrome
Bad Dudes
Garyo Retsuden
Makyou Senshi / Gondomania
Trio Punch - Never Forget Me
Act Fancer
Final Blow
Rainbow Islands
P.O.W.
Street Smart
Silkworm
Gradius
Prehistoric Isle 1930


Playable but has some frame rate slowdown, some slight music problems or inaccurate sound.
Ninja Kids
Bionic Commando
Moonwalker
Joe & Mac
Solitary Fighter (Violence Fight)
Warriors of Fate (Capcom CPS1)
UN Squadron (Capcom CPS1)
Carrier Air Wing (Capcom CPS1)
Parodius DA! (not too bad)
R-Type
R-Type II
Strider (CPS1)
Magic Sword (CPS1)
Nemo (CPS1)
Sunset Riders
Final Fight

Games that suffer very noticeable frame rate slowdown and music issues. These games are not enjoyable to play:
All NeoGeo titles! (Everything!! Its terrible!)
Most CPS1 titles! (Street Fighter II, Knights of the Round, King of Dragons, Pnickies)
All Sega System16/System24 titles! (Shinobi, Golden Axe, Shadow Dancer, E-Swat)
Bubble Bobble
TMNT
TMNT 2
Simpsons
X-Men
Rolling Thunder 2
Gradius II
Gradius III
almost everything made after 1989 lol

more to come..
 
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Thanks for the review. Sounds like any of us would want to put together a cheap PC to run MAME on instead of buy a ready made board.
 
Thanks for the review. Sounds like any of us would want to put together a cheap PC to run MAME on instead of buy a ready made board.

Ya, i understand people don't want the hassle of setting up a MAME machine, but with the JPAC it sure makes it easy to throw a computer in a Jamma cab and play what you want to and the emulation is better than the mulit-jamma cards. No harm done to the cab that way.
 
I wish they would just sell those hard drive based 1xxx in 1 setups without software on them so I could just install my own windows setup and do it right.
 
I have always found the J-Pac thing to be more trouble than it is worth unless you happened to be doing a machine with the full jamma controls already installed and with a monitor that took VGA. Otherwise you still need a video solution and still need to do custom wiring. At that point I would rather just start from scratch.

Ya, i understand people don't want the hassle of setting up a MAME machine, but with the JPAC it sure makes it easy to throw a computer in a Jamma cab and play what you want to and the emulation is better than the mulit-jamma cards. No harm done to the cab that way.
 
Why does the monitor need VGA? I have a Jamma wired cabinet, plugged in the JPAC and was playing on the cab within 10 minutes after I figured out my ground issue/problem (not JPAC related). I just made sure I had soft15khz installed and activated and my desktop resolution set to 640x480. Everything was cherry. You need everything wired for JAMMA anyways for these XXX in 1 cards no?
 
Yea, the XXX-in-1s are a unfaithful one stop shop JAMMA solution that are plug and play on any jamma cabinet. Its just too bad they try to bite off more than they can chew with the aggressive game selection. If this board was loaded with older games that require less intensive cpu emulation, it would work great. The whole setup is nice and easy to use, no sitting down and configuring front end menus, or building xml lists, or tweaking mame ini, interfacing hardware or j-pac. It's literally a 30 second solution. Someone just needs to tweak this setup with a realistic lineup and it would work.
 
how does
xmen
TMNT
TMNT Tit
Simpsons
Moonwalker
play on this board?

Remember on the 4 players titles there is only 2 player support. Some games like TMNT and Simpsons don't allow character selection like X-Men, they all use 4 player rom versions.

Moonwalker - decent frame rate with some slowdown and poor sound
X-Men - at least 25+% slowdown and poor sound, not good
TMNT - frame rate is good, sound suffers, almost like it was hard coded to have reduced sound to keep frame rate up.
TMNT 2- slowdown, frame skipping, sound poor, not good
Simpsons - frame rate good, some sound issues, much like TMNT 1.

I would say none of these titles would be a close replacement. There are issues and it will bother you when you play them.
 
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