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>> 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 a

>> 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!
    - bigmattystyles 4y ago
      With the NES speedrunning scene being so popular, I wonder if any one has ever made use of this.
      - 0des 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure you're going to be hearing from Billy Mitchell's lawyers over this comment.
      - ishjoh 4y ago
        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 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.
        ComputerGuru 4y ago
        > 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.
- rcfox 4y ago
  As I recall, you could also disable the lockout chip by just desoldering/cutting one of the leads.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  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?
Melatonic 4y ago
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.
- tacker2000 4y ago
  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!
- ryanmcbride 4y ago
  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.
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    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!

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!
  - bigmattystyles 4y ago
    With the NES speedrunning scene being so popular, I wonder if any one has ever made use of this.
    - 0des 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure you're going to be hearing from Billy Mitchell's lawyers over this comment.
    - ishjoh 4y ago
      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 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.
      - ComputerGuru 4y ago
        > 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.
rcfox 4y ago
As I recall, you could also disable the lockout chip by just desoldering/cutting one of the leads.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
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?

Melatonic 4y ago

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.

tacker2000 4y ago
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!
ryanmcbride 4y ago
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.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  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!