8 ms·

Nintendo wasn't the first to introduce region locking, after all

73 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

boomboomsubban 4y ago
This is an interesting story about Turkish region locking with a strange "Nintendo isn't actually the worst" message tacked on.
- tinco 4y ago
  It's posted on a Nintendo fansite. Amongst Nintendo fans it is known that amongst all the awesome creative products Nintendo has created and enabled, it has also always been ruthlessly controlling of its ecosystem. It basically invented the walled-garden strategy that was later copied by all other capital intensive hardware manufacturers like Apple. And even amongst those Nintendo is known to be particularly strict. You should read this article as being tongue in cheek seen in that context. It allows a Nintendo fan to go "Well technically.." as a joke, because obviously some minor Atari reseller in Turkey is not really relevant on the global scale.
- Root_Denied 4y ago
  I was going to say, it's an historically interesting tidbit but as a consumer I'm so constantly baffled by Nintendo's bad business decisions and anti-consumer practices that I kind of don't care.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Nintendo is smart. They saw a near crash in Japan on the Famicom (no lockout) and what happened to Atari/etc in the US (also no lockout). They wanted to be very sure they didn’t run into that. So with the US launch they controlled publishing, licensing, lockout chips, the “Nintendo Seal of Quality”, etc. They were trying to avoid another disaster. And it worked. So they stuck to it. Combined with being very conservative and opinionated (for better or worse) it continues to this day. Yes, they’ve loosened compared to the NES days, but that’s why. Sony and MS came along MUCH later to a very different industry. By that generation consoles were normal and gaming was there to stay. The risks were different.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > Nintendo's bad business decisions Do you mean bad like you think they're bad people, or do you mean bad like you think they left money on the table?
    - Root_Denied 4y ago
      I do indeed mean bad as in "left money on the table" - or possibly "pissed off their fanbase" which tends to lead to reduced revenue and loss of respect. The former they don't see to care about as much as the latter. I probably should have used a word like poor instead of bad.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Not sure what this is supposed to mean, really. Atari didn't region lock their consoles, this weird Turkish retailer changed the consoles to get a monopoly on games in Turkey. Nintendo actually designed and built the devices for all markets. In my opinion, the Turkish "Atari" is a sabotaged fork of the original Atari rather than a region locked console. I can yank open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins around in the console and in the cartridge but that doesn't mean the Oddyssey suddenly becomes region locked.
- fredoralive 4y ago
  It looks like the Meta was the official distributor / licensee for Turkey, and the ads warning about the region lock certainly have Atari logos on them. So I'd say it's fairly official, if not Atari directly then an affiliate. I was personally wondering if main reason for the the region lock was Meta wanting to lock out European games, or Atari wanting to lock out (cheaper?) Turkish games from the European market. Either side has reasons to want it. I'd also kinda note that although not a direct region lock, AFAIK the way the 2600 handles video timing (generated by the game programme, not the video chip) would have basically mutually locked out 50Hz and 60Hz regions at the time, as 1980s TV usually didn't "multisync" (plus there are palette differences between PAL/NTSC/SECAM systems as well).
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Zuckerberg strikes again.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  > I can yank open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins around in the console and in the cartridge but that doesn't mean the Oddyssey suddenly becomes region locked. Are you an official Magnavox licensed distributor?
- jccalhoun 4y ago
  Videogame companies would often license their consoles for sale in countries in which they either couldn't or didn't want to sell directly. For example the Sega Master system in Brazil and the NES and SNES in South Korea. So this was an attempt by the company who was the legal distributor of Atari 2600 in Turkey to prevent 2500 games from elsewhere to work on their system. That sounds like a region lock to me even if it was easy to circumvent.
Zenst 4y ago
Thinking about regional restrictions in history, I'm thinking there may well be older examples. Though those would be standards driven in many ways. As from a manufacturers driven aspect, I feel there may well be earlier examples given how some companies would sell sales rights for other regions to control, then limits to prevent grey-market products would certainly of been something addressed in the past. That said, I'm pondering if IBM had some level of restrictions if only to compartmentalise their sales regions. As an aside in respect of regional restrictions in history, then the era prior to railway time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time would certainly see some regional locking in a way as local time varied. Then the whole utility market, surely beyond country variations has some aspect of restrictions.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Railways had some "region locking" themselves, as the gauges could vary - there's still a few places in the world where the trains change gauge when crossing a border. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEvt2lSPLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEvt2lSPLc
  - SllX 4y ago
    Or where you just have to change trains within the same country within the same agency within the same region. https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180525 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180525
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Some of the older examples though are not region locking just for region locking reasons - it is just different standards that are not compatible. Intentional locking (without another technical justification) seems like a totally different ballgame.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
>> 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'
- simcop2387 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFCwDJq1gU
  - bigmattystyles 4y ago
    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...
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    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.
    - ComputerGuru 4y ago
      Maybe I can finally beat Pac-Man!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
formerkrogemp 4y ago
Oh, look. A prior first time event precludes anything wrong with my follow-up controversial practices that everyone accused me or implementing and pioneering. Nintendo will keep doing what they've always done until it doesn't work anymore. Selling nostalgia.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jaywalk 4y ago
  This is a textbook strawman argument. Literally no one is saying the thing you're arguing against.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    It's not a strawman argument when you argue against a claim that no one is making. It's a strawman argument when you create a bad argument for a claim that someone actually is making, in order to knock it down. edit: this is a "cynically muttering to oneself."
    - xeromal 4y ago
      LOL at your edit
    - formerkrogemp 4y ago
      > edit: this is a "cynically muttering to oneself." lol, that's exactly right.
pvaldes 4y ago
There is a really, accessible, very low hanging fruit technique for stopping weapons working inside areas marked as schools. And it will never happen, it seems.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
A decent overview of how the pair of 10NES chips in the NES and in the inserted cartridge worked together to authenticate licensed games, for those that are interested: https://www.retronintendoreviews.com/retro/10nes-lockout-chip-basics.html https://www.retronintendoreviews.com/retro/10nes-lockout-chi... (It’s not exactly a technical deep-dive but it’s a good enough overview. I was surprised that something as studied and reverse-engineered as the 10NES didn’t seem to come up with a “golden standard reference” article as the first google hit, not even on hackaday or eeevblog).
- sircastor 4y ago
  My manager built a Gameboy emulator last year for a side project, and he was explaining to me the genius authorization mechanism that the Gameboy used: Every gameboy game starts up by showing the Nintendo® logo. The system checks the displayed value against a known checksum (or hash or something) that has to be perfect or the software won't go to the next instruction. So in order to make an unauthorized game for Gameboy, you have you put Nintendo's Registered Trademark as the very first thing that appears on your game, without permission. So instead of a technical limitation which can be broken with enough effort and engineering, you have to simply violate well-established Trademark law. Pretty smart.
  - Sesse__ 4y ago
    Except the US courts rejected this concept (on appeal); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade .
fguerraz 4y ago
It's Türkiye by the way :rolleyes:

73 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

This is an interesting story about Turkish region locking with a strange "Nintendo isn't actually the worst" message tacked on.

tinco 4y ago
It's posted on a Nintendo fansite. Amongst Nintendo fans it is known that amongst all the awesome creative products Nintendo has created and enabled, it has also always been ruthlessly controlling of its ecosystem. It basically invented the walled-garden strategy that was later copied by all other capital intensive hardware manufacturers like Apple. And even amongst those Nintendo is known to be particularly strict. You should read this article as being tongue in cheek seen in that context. It allows a Nintendo fan to go "Well technically.." as a joke, because obviously some minor Atari reseller in Turkey is not really relevant on the global scale.
Root_Denied 4y ago
I was going to say, it's an historically interesting tidbit but as a consumer I'm so constantly baffled by Nintendo's bad business decisions and anti-consumer practices that I kind of don't care.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Nintendo is smart. They saw a near crash in Japan on the Famicom (no lockout) and what happened to Atari/etc in the US (also no lockout). They wanted to be very sure they didn’t run into that. So with the US launch they controlled publishing, licensing, lockout chips, the “Nintendo Seal of Quality”, etc. They were trying to avoid another disaster. And it worked. So they stuck to it. Combined with being very conservative and opinionated (for better or worse) it continues to this day. Yes, they’ve loosened compared to the NES days, but that’s why. Sony and MS came along MUCH later to a very different industry. By that generation consoles were normal and gaming was there to stay. The risks were different.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Nintendo's bad business decisions Do you mean bad like you think they're bad people, or do you mean bad like you think they left money on the table?
  - Root_Denied 4y ago
    I do indeed mean bad as in "left money on the table" - or possibly "pissed off their fanbase" which tends to lead to reduced revenue and loss of respect. The former they don't see to care about as much as the latter. I probably should have used a word like poor instead of bad.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Not sure what this is supposed to mean, really. Atari didn't region lock their consoles, this weird Turkish retailer changed the consoles to get a monopoly on games in Turkey. Nintendo actually designed and built the devices for all markets. In my opinion, the Turkish "Atari" is a sabotaged fork of the original Atari rather than a region locked console. I can yank open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins around in the console and in the cartridge but that doesn't mean the Oddyssey suddenly becomes region locked.

fredoralive 4y ago
It looks like the Meta was the official distributor / licensee for Turkey, and the ads warning about the region lock certainly have Atari logos on them. So I'd say it's fairly official, if not Atari directly then an affiliate. I was personally wondering if main reason for the the region lock was Meta wanting to lock out European games, or Atari wanting to lock out (cheaper?) Turkish games from the European market. Either side has reasons to want it. I'd also kinda note that although not a direct region lock, AFAIK the way the 2600 handles video timing (generated by the game programme, not the video chip) would have basically mutually locked out 50Hz and 60Hz regions at the time, as 1980s TV usually didn't "multisync" (plus there are palette differences between PAL/NTSC/SECAM systems as well).
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Zuckerberg strikes again.
jonny_eh 4y ago
> I can yank open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins around in the console and in the cartridge but that doesn't mean the Oddyssey suddenly becomes region locked. Are you an official Magnavox licensed distributor?
jccalhoun 4y ago
Videogame companies would often license their consoles for sale in countries in which they either couldn't or didn't want to sell directly. For example the Sega Master system in Brazil and the NES and SNES in South Korea. So this was an attempt by the company who was the legal distributor of Atari 2600 in Turkey to prevent 2500 games from elsewhere to work on their system. That sounds like a region lock to me even if it was easy to circumvent.

Zenst 4y ago

Thinking about regional restrictions in history, I'm thinking there may well be older examples. Though those would be standards driven in many ways. As from a manufacturers driven aspect, I feel there may well be earlier examples given how some companies would sell sales rights for other regions to control, then limits to prevent grey-market products would certainly of been something addressed in the past. That said, I'm pondering if IBM had some level of restrictions if only to compartmentalise their sales regions. As an aside in respect of regional restrictions in history, then the era prior to railway time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time would certainly see some regional locking in a way as local time varied. Then the whole utility market, surely beyond country variations has some aspect of restrictions.

bombcar 4y ago
Railways had some "region locking" themselves, as the gauges could vary - there's still a few places in the world where the trains change gauge when crossing a border. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEvt2lSPLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEvt2lSPLc
- SllX 4y ago
  Or where you just have to change trains within the same country within the same agency within the same region. https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180525 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180525
Melatonic 4y ago
Some of the older examples though are not region locking just for region locking reasons - it is just different standards that are not compatible. Intentional locking (without another technical justification) seems like a totally different ballgame.

bigmattystyles 4y ago

>> 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'

simcop2387 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFCwDJq1gU
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  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...
- jaywalk 4y ago
  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.
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    Maybe I can finally beat Pac-Man!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

formerkrogemp 4y ago

Oh, look. A prior first time event precludes anything wrong with my follow-up controversial practices that everyone accused me or implementing and pioneering. Nintendo will keep doing what they've always done until it doesn't work anymore. Selling nostalgia.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jaywalk 4y ago
This is a textbook strawman argument. Literally no one is saying the thing you're arguing against.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  It's not a strawman argument when you argue against a claim that no one is making. It's a strawman argument when you create a bad argument for a claim that someone actually is making, in order to knock it down. edit: this is a "cynically muttering to oneself."
  - xeromal 4y ago
    LOL at your edit
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    > edit: this is a "cynically muttering to oneself." lol, that's exactly right.

pvaldes 4y ago

There is a really, accessible, very low hanging fruit technique for stopping weapons working inside areas marked as schools. And it will never happen, it seems.

ComputerGuru 4y ago

A decent overview of how the pair of 10NES chips in the NES and in the inserted cartridge worked together to authenticate licensed games, for those that are interested: https://www.retronintendoreviews.com/retro/10nes-lockout-chip-basics.html https://www.retronintendoreviews.com/retro/10nes-lockout-chi... (It’s not exactly a technical deep-dive but it’s a good enough overview. I was surprised that something as studied and reverse-engineered as the 10NES didn’t seem to come up with a “golden standard reference” article as the first google hit, not even on hackaday or eeevblog).

sircastor 4y ago
My manager built a Gameboy emulator last year for a side project, and he was explaining to me the genius authorization mechanism that the Gameboy used: Every gameboy game starts up by showing the Nintendo® logo. The system checks the displayed value against a known checksum (or hash or something) that has to be perfect or the software won't go to the next instruction. So in order to make an unauthorized game for Gameboy, you have you put Nintendo's Registered Trademark as the very first thing that appears on your game, without permission. So instead of a technical limitation which can be broken with enough effort and engineering, you have to simply violate well-established Trademark law. Pretty smart.
- Sesse__ 4y ago
  Except the US courts rejected this concept (on appeal); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade .

fguerraz 4y ago

It's Türkiye by the way :rolleyes: