So there wasn’t any practical purpose to any of this, it was purely for the “record.”
Huh, I hadn’t considered all the early single-game consoles. I would have assumed the bulk of weird off-brand consoles would be more recent (especially now that you can produce an NES clone for practically pennies). I know there were a certain number of fairly contemporaneous hardware clones in the early decades of consoles (which while technically distinct, existed to run games for the console they were knocking off, so functionally aren’t different) but there’s a surprising number of modern knock-off consoles (“Vii,” “Wi Wi” “Polystation” etc.) all of which either run a limited selection of primitive games made specifically for them (and/or bootleg earlier generation games, usually NES), or are just basically something like Android phone hardware, capable of running some phone games, but in a console form.
Seems especially fuzzy now that various companies in China are throwing, say, Android phone hardware in a box with an HDMI cable and calling it a console.
