Who was Camerica

Camerica, the company responsible for the American distribution of Codemasters stuff, had a pretty much typical relationship with Nintendo. In 1988 it released the Freedom Stick, which was basically a cordless clone of the NES Advantage joystick, and promptly got the pants sued off of it by Nintendo for copyright infringement. Two years later it got involved in a legal fight over Nintendo about the Game Genie. Nintendo was able to keep the Genie from being released for nearly a year in the US, but Camerica won its battle against Nintendo in the Canadian courts, and was able to market it in Canada a few months before the US release. Camerica took advantage of the free publicity and ran full-page ads in VG&CE blaring "THANK YOU CANADA" and taking the piss out of Nintendo.

Having beaten the great shiny machine that Nintendo was back then, Camerica decided to really piss it off and announced several neat things in 1991. These announcements included the promise of about 20 unlicensed carts (made by Codemasters), a device that let NES users play Game Boy games on their TVs (wow, a Super Game Boy three years earlier), and a portable NES clone called The Express.

Neither of the last two ever saw the light of day, but the other thing Camerica announced - the Aladdin Deck Enhancer - did (kinda). The Aladdin was announced in mid-1992 and got mega amount of press. Basically, it was a cart-shaped piece of hardware that had a small cart port on the back of it to accept smaller cartridges. It was going to have an extra 64k of memory, a built-in battery to let you save games like you can on the TG16, and some kind of graphics SuperChip like Color Dreams announced earlier. All this was going to sell for $30, with "Compact Cartridges" to go with it to be priced for around $15-20.