Bought a Dendy branded console recently, and wrote
a detailed review of it. So if you were wondering how it is these days, it may be an interesting read.
In case you're curious, the warped plastic on the bottom comes from ejecting the plastic from the mold before it's cooled sufficiently.
What always amazed me about the Dendy is how they managed to find a better solution for the NTSC to PAL problem than Nintendo itself did. The PAL NES is different from the NTSC NES in all timing aspects you can think of, but the Dendy is mostly compatible because it kept the CPU:PPU clock ratio. They couldn't do anything about the frame rate, of course, but programmers would have had a much easier time programming games for both regions if the PAL NES was more like the Dendy. Does this new console function the same way?
Yes, it is a PAL one, I ran it on PAL TV set that does not support NTSC at all, and it felt xactly like Dendy speed-wise. I think almost all the built-in games are NTSC versions. I haven't made any direct comparison tests yet, though, would be interesting to see if it has switched the duty cycle bug, for example.
God I love seeing what you guys in Russia got/have. It brings me so much closer to understanding Landy (Alex Krasivsky) and what he went through as a young adult.
What I'm trying to say is that, for me, seeing what you Russians had is not only educational/interesting from a technology or even social perspective, but is also significantly cultural. It's akin to when I hear about all the crazy NES/Famicom clones from friends of mine in Hong Kong, or even the stuff Acey (Martin Nielsen) brings back from bazaars whenever he visits Turkey.
Thank you so much for sharing this stuff. <3