 | Aladdin Deck Enhancer Better Games Or Cheaper Costs? |
Around 1992, Codemasters and Camerica announced a game enhancer for Nintendo named Aladdin Deck Enhancer. This enhancer was an adapter wich ran after you connected it to a mini cart, which was about the size of a Genesis cart. Codemasters claimed that their Aladdin Deck Enhancer would provide gamers with better graphics and faster games. But was this really the reason Codemasters designed the Aladdin Deck Enhancer? Was it really for speed, or was their something in it for Codemasters too?
I got to thinking about it, long hard hours you see. Why would Codemasters make a device, Patent it, and hardly market it at all? There had to be some reason to design this great device. But what? I pondered the issue for hours, wrote a quick e-mail, and had the answer to my question in no time flat. How did I do this, you may say? Absolutly Brilliant.
As written by Richard Darling:
"The idea came from looking closely at the make-up of NES cartridges with a view to trying to get the manufacturing costs reduced so we could sell them at the lowest possible price. In overview, there are several components of each cartridge that are generic: the Graphics RAM chip, the memory management chip and a few other parts. The only part of the cartridge that needed to be unique for each game was the game ROM chip. So, we thought that if we could put all the common parts onto an adapter we could make the cheapest possible cartridges by packaging just the ROM chip onto a mini-cartridge. When this mini cartridge was combined with the adapter it would effectively be identical to an ordinary cartridge of the same game."
It seems I was right. Codemasters wanted to produce cheaper games, though I have heard that the Aladdin Deck Enhancer version of Fantastic Dizzy was alot faster than the original version. Overall there were seven Aladdin carts made, which were:
After Camerica went out, Codemasters marketed the Aladdin Deck Enhancer in the US. Due to poor marketing techniques, the adapter never caught on and multiple games were planned and never finished, such as:
This enhancer would be so cool to own, but they are hard as heck to find. If you can snag one for a good price, due so, and snag me one also :) I do know that Dreamworld Pogie made it into the preproduction form of Alpha, and I think a proto of Metal Man does exist also so please, if you have any good info on these Aladdin games, let me know for I'm sure alot of folks would like to know more about the unreleased Aladdin games also.
From left to right: {Fantastic Dizzy}{Bignose Freaks Out}{Linus Spacehead}{Micro Machines}{Quattro Adventure}{Quattro Sports}
