IANAL, but there was a similar trick on the Sega Genesis. But the Tengen lawsuit established that unlicensed games were legal to produce. I ran through this in

IANAL, but there was a similar trick on the Sega Genesis. But the Tengen lawsuit established that unlicensed games were legal to produce. I ran through this in my head when I was messing with homebrew GBA in 1999-ish, why was it there if it was already case law that the trick was ineffectual? It didn't occur to me at the time that in different legal jurisdictions than the USA it might still be an effective legal protection. The GBA had the same sort of trick (as part of the bootstrap process you had to push some data into a memory location that contained Nintendo trademarks or the bios wouldn't boot your cart.)