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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

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.
        Karuma 4y ago
        > 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.
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?

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.
      - Karuma 4y ago
        > 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.

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?