The Childhood Memory – Subor Famicom Clone SB-486D (Xiao Ba Wang)

The Subor, also known as XiaoBaWang in Chinese, is the famous 8-bit Famiclone produced in China in 1990s. Most of the Subor Series (SB) comes with a keyboard, which the parents believed that they are used to help kids study. But like most kids, I spent most of my childhood playing 8-bit Nintendo Games e.g. Super Mario on SB Famiclones. I had a SB-926D when I was a kid. The SB926 is much alike the SB-486D and I don’t know any difference between these two models, but I guess SB926 is a improved model of SB486. Both models support two joysticks (15 pins), one connected from the left side and the other connects to the right of the keyboard. There is a game cartridge and it is 60 pin rather than 72 pin for NES. You can use a adapter to use 72-pin cartridges.

Recently, I’ve purchased a SB486D and four cartridges at a reasonable price.

Notice that the power button is located that the top right of the keyboard, near the keyboard indicators.

These are four versions: 3.0, 4.0, 8.0 and 10.0.

N8 everdrive

The N8 everdrive works perfectly on SB486D.

V3.0

V4.0

V8.0

The v8.0 ROM allows you to control the cursor (shown like a mouse) using the master joystick. So you can move slowly the cursor the select the menu items. I have also tried to plug in the BBG Mouse, but it doesn’t work (mouse pointer moves randomly slowly, without clear responses)

V10.0

QBasic and FBasic

The F stands for floating, I guess. Since there is no such FPU thing in famiclone, it uses 6502-CPU to emulate the floating point computation. For efficiency, you may want to see this post, this post and this post.

The G stands for Gaming/Game. In G-basic, you can easily control joysticks and spirits (such as Mario) with a few lines of code.

Well, the ROM cartridges are not so useful to me, but it guided me (as well as many others) into Computer Science world. I believe it will help my sons as well. At least, you can play 8-bit games on such cool thing!

In fact, I have tried these four versions of ROM cartridges on the same model, which is SB486D, and they all work! So I guess, what matters most is the ROM cartridge, as it carries the main programs/applications. However, these ROMs don’t work on the SB2000 model (with floppy drive) which is somehow different.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —