Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

>> for every one of its consoles except the Nintendo Switch

This made me laugh because when I was a kid living in Europe, my dad would often travel to the US and bring back unreleased in Europe and/or NES games from the US because they were much cheaper. To get them to work with PAL/Secam NES, we took our NES to this (shady?) electronics shop that installed this silver mechanical switch. You would insert the US cartridge and if memory serves, the screen would blink and when the image was on, you flipped this switch and the blinking would stop, permitting you to play the US cartridge in the European console. That was my 'Nintendo Switch'

View on HN

Not sure when Nintendo started implementing this more but I fondly remember buying Pokemon Silver (for gameboy) in my teenage years LONG before it was released in the US. I was too young to get a credit card or an eBay account but my friend and I realized we could buy a one time use Visa gift card with cash from a local store. Each of us saved up for god knows how long and then I bought Silver while he bought Gold. All in (including shipping) I think we paid close to 70$ each which seemed like a HUGE amount of money at the time (almost 123$ today!). I don't think either of us even considered that the Japanese cartridge might not play in our US gameboys.

What we did not realize was that there of course was no way to switch the game to English as it had not been translated yet. Playing the game entirely in Japanese was for sure a challenge but I think I still vaguely remember the symbols for Poke Ball and the Health restore items. This was of course still fairly early internet days so there was not a ton of online help and translators were much less accurate.

Back in the day, I received a copy of Pokemon Gold from a japanese friend of my parents, months before the euro release. I was extremely excited but then i saw that it was completely in japanese! It ended up collecting dust, since I didnt understand a word and never played it. Maybe I should have powered through anyway like you though!

I had a similar experience with one of my friends, except instead of buying physical carts we just downloaded the rom and used a gameboy emulator. This was just a little while before gold/silver came out in the US and we brute forced our way through as much as we could, ultimately getting stuck on the Sudowoodo blocking a path. We tried everything we could think of but without knowing japanese we just couldn't figure out that we needed that squirt bottle or whatever it was.

It helped a ton to have a friend playing through it at the same time. Honestly our main strategy was just to go through and talk to every person in the game and then blaze through the menu items as fast as you can. Then you went up to every useable item / environment piece and did the same thing. Rinse repeat. Worked better than you would think!

I actually got a copy for around the same price at a local independent game store back then. Weirdly enough, I went to Waldenbooks immediately afterward, and was very surprised, and also quite pleased, to find a player's guide specifically for Americans playing the Japanese imports.

Thats wild - was this before they released gold/silver abroad? From what I remember it was a solid 1-2 years before the english release.

If it was blinking that sounds like the whole 10NES[1] copy protection chip stuff. Likely the switch was choosing between which 10NES chip was hooked up to the CPU for validating the cartridges. Though I am entirely curious how the games would play given that there'd be timing and other small differences between the consoles.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFCwDJq1gU

Wow - that's awesome to learn about the 10NES, thank you for that!

>> Though I am entirely curious how the games would play given that there'd be timing and other small differences between the consoles.

It's been too long for to remember any differences, plus I was quite young, but I am now going to blame the fact that I was never any good on this timing tidbit...

I believe that an NTSC game running on a PAL system would just run slower, since the timings would be for 60Hz but the system would be running at 50Hz.

Maybe I can finally beat Pac-Man!

With the NES speedrunning scene being so popular, I wonder if any one has ever made use of this.

I'm pretty sure you're going to be hearing from Billy Mitchell's lawyers over this comment.

these advantages/disadvantages are widely known in the speed running community. They occasionally will have a calculation to normalize between regions where an in game clock is used due to PAL vs NTSC, but having more time while still having the same in game clock time is a competitive advantage and you will see all top records using a particular region platform.

A different trick in games that don't have an internal clock, but are instead timed by wall clock is to use a region platform where the text loads faster. For example for Zelda Ocarina of time, the Japanese Wii Virtual Console version is used almost exclusively because of faster text and loading times: https://www.speedrun.com/oot#100

As a developer I find Speed running extremely interesting. The creativity used to eek out performance gains is incredible.

> use a region platform where the text loads faster

Using a GBA (and later, a DS) emulator on a PC to (re)play Pokémon, I was absolutely stunned by how much of the wall time was spent waiting for the ridiculously slow page-after-page of speech bubbles to scroll into view.

I don’t think it’s an accident that they’re that slow (because this is with the “text loading speed” in the game options set to so-called “fast”) but rather a much-gamed and an integral part of stretching out the “playable campaign hours” metric. When you 16x the speech scenes with a keyboard shortcut, the whole game is laughably short.

> rather a much-gamed and an integral part of stretching out the “playable campaign hours” metric

That may be the case in many games, but in most games that were translated from Japanese, the reason is that Japanese is a much more compact language (many words are just 1 character long, for example) so the speed is OK in Japanese, but horribly slow in Western languages. A few devs actually increased the text speed for oversea releases, but most didn't.

As I recall, you could also disable the lockout chip by just desoldering/cutting one of the leads.

Per online sources, the switch flipped between one of two defeat strategies. The first is grounding the 10NES’s pin 5 (putting it in “key” rather than “lock” mode). I’m not sure what the second mode was. Or perhaps the switch just operated to choose between 10NES-active and 10NES-deactivated (with pin 5 redirected to ground instead of the line coming from the cartridge) but I’m not aware of any reason why the 10NES would need to remain active for any game? Perhaps some later, official Nintendo cartridges would halt/reset if they didn’t detect a functioning 10NES in the console?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com