Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Converter and More | Hacker News Reader

Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Converter and More

nicole.express

51 pointszdw15 comments

I 'member scouring flea markets for one of these back in the 2000s by bringing a non-adapter copy of Gyromite with me and weighing them by hand until I found one that was ~25% heavier: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-t...

> NES and Famicom cartridges

They are Game Paks and cassettes, respectively. Of course it's obvious what the author is referring to, but I really enjoy seeing the term “cassette” used for something that doesn't contain magnetic tape, so please pardon my pedantry :)

Peep the Famicom system manual where the cartridge connector is straight-up labeled in English as 「ＣＡＳＳＥＴＴＥＣＯＮＮＥＣＴＯＲ」with katakana furigana (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_198...

TBH even as a native English speaker who grew up with them, I never realized that "cassettes" were (only) supposed to contain magnetic tape; I just internalized that audio and video tapes were "cassettes" and games came on "cartridges" (regardless of what Nintendo wanted us to call them). A Japanese audience was probably even less inclined to learn yet another loanword to preserve that technical distinction.

I think the cassette is the thing that holds the media, as opposed to a reel-to-reel tape, which is just on a spool, for example. To this reading, it makes sense to call the game cartridge a cassette, but I haven’t ever heard of carts called cassettes in English.

> A Japanese audience was probably even less inclined to learn yet another loanword to preserve that technical distinction.

That's what I mean, though, is that my internalized idea of cassette == tape was the one that was wrong. It was one of those words I learned incorrectly as a child based on the observation that everything adults called “cassettes” had magnetic tape in common, not realizing that “cassette” is describing the enclosure instead of the contents and literally means “little box” (case-ette). Nintendo were using it correctly and taught me something in the process and that's why I think it's cool and wanted to share.

For a counterexample in the other direction, the 8-track system uses "cartridge" for its enclosure-with-audio-on-magnetic-tape object.

Japanese is full of loanwords precisely because those good folks on the other side of the world find so many things about Western culture fascinating.

My Japanese father-in-law even played QB and Safety for his university's American-style football team in the 80s and grew up as a fan of Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.

Many people in Japan are just as much "Americanophiles" as some of us are "Japanophiles".

Their word for (part time) job (as opposed to career position) is literally the German word for "work": arbeit. Of course transliterated with some minor phonetic loss, but that's expected.

Early home console players in my country (USA) sometimes referred to game cartridges as "tapes" because of their resemblance to audiocassettes or 8-track cassettes (e.g., "Atari tapes"). In the Homestar Runner canon, Strong Bad has been known to make reference to "Sega tapes".

And then there's the generation of UK gamers who got their games for Commodore or the Speccy, on actual audiocassette for 10 quid apiece at the chemist's. Games on cassette were available on American micros as well, but didn't attract nearly as much interest.

Those region converters were used in the initial production runs of every NES launch title from when the system was test marketed in New York in 1985. Presumably, Nintendo didn't yet have tooling set up for manufacturing NES cartridge PCBs (or wanted to be able to reuse the PCBs for sale in Japan if the test launch went poorly), so the best solution was to use Famicom PCBs in an adapter.

> One frustrating thing here is that this adapter was never designed to be used with loose cartridges, but only PCBs. Famicom cartridges are a nightmare to open without damaging them due to reinforced plastic snap tabs, so people who wanted to use these as adapters would just take a rotary tool to it, as this blog post from 2006 shows.

You can plug a Famicom cartridge into the Nintendo converter by pulling off the gender adapter and plugging it in the other way so the tabs that block the cartridge are on the bottom. Note that it's tricky to remove the converter from a front-loading NES, which is why most aftermarket Famicom-NES converters have a ribbon to help with pulling them out of the system.

I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.

It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly that:

https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.ht...

"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."

This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.

The lockout chip isn't related to the converters, per se. The converter has a lockout chip, but so does every official NES game.

The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace; Nintendo added the lockout mechanism for the international release precisely in response to that. Each cartridge contains a "key" chip that unlocks the "lock" chip on the NES main board, which then releases the reset line on the CPU allowing it to operate.

Naturally, this means that Famicom carts don't have the lockout mechanism, so those signals need to come from the converter.

FWIW, the chip on the game and the chip on the system are the same (within a region). Pin 4 is used to determine if it should be a lock or a key.

Which means disconnecting pin 4 of the lockout chip in the NES causes it to think it's a key and not reset the system, effectively disabling it.

> The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace

Unlicensed/bootleg Famicom games weren't very common in Japan due to the control Nintendo had over game distribution. In Japan, Nintendo sold all their Famicom consoles and games through a wholesaler organization called Shoshinkai. If you wanted to sell Famicom games without a license from Nintendo, you needed to deal directly with stores and/or wholesalers who both wanted to sell Famicom games and didn't sell any Nintendo products. This limited unlicensed games to being niche underground products that were mainly sold in back-alley shops and through mail order. In the US, this level of control over distribution would probably be ruled anticompetitive, so the lockout chip was a technical solution that accomplished a similar goal.

There was also another method of bypassing the lockout chip that some of those awful bible games used. It was to put a capacitor in the cartridge to literally shock the lockout chip, disabling it long enough for the game to boot.

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