Cartridge Chaos: the Official Nintendo Region Converter and More
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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The article discusses Nintendo's official region converter for NES cartridges, sparking a discussion among commenters about its historical significance, technical details, and impact on the gaming industry.
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> 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 「ＣＡＳＳＥＴＴＥ ＣＯＮＮＥＣＴＯＲ」with katakana furigana (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_198...
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.
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".
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.