The CIC & 10NES Explained

A brief history and technical deep dive into the Nintendo CIC and 10NES Lockout System.
Support the channel on Patreon: / neshacker
References
Wikipedia: CIC (Nintendo) - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Ni...)
NesDev Wiki: CIC lockout chip - www.nesdev.org/wiki/CIC_locko...
NesDev Forums: Reverse Engineering the CIC - forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.p...
SHARP Microcomputers Data Book (1990) - bitsavers.org/components/sharp...
Patent Arcade - Case: Atari v. Nintendo (N.D. Cal. 1993) [C, P] - patentarcade.com/2005/08/case-...
Video Games and Reverse Engineering - www.jthtl.org/content/articles...
US Patent 4799635A (The Nintendo 10NES Patent) - patents.google.com/patent/US4...
Music (licensed through artlist.io):
Power Punch by 2050
Where by Tobias Bergson
The Chosen by Notize
Midnight Tokyo by Downtown Binary
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
2:08 Motivations
6:29 Technical Details
12:16 Circumvention
18:04 Conclusion
CC Attributions
E.T. Landfill Photo by Matt Lyons of GameGavel.com
Modified via cropping and pan zooming for video effect
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

[@NesHacker]

After two months I've finally finished! Hope you all enjoy exploring the CIC with me and make sure to check out the description for links to sources I used when making the video :)

[@chemaperez8293]

Thank you!!! Looking forward for more amazing content.

[@AndyScott]

fantastic quality content! your hard work definitely shows. looking forward to your next release even if it happens to be more than two months away 😊

[@gabrielcamacho6112]

Yay! You’re back! I was worried for a while!😅

[@Harosho]

Awesome! Great job!

[@YourIdeologyIsDelusional]

I absolutely support what Atari did. Everything that Nintendo did with the 10NES chip should be what was considered illegal. Intellectual property law is anti-competitive and monopolistic, it's not something anyone should respect.

[@gwalla]

IIRC there was another way of circumventing the CIC: manufacturing the cartridge with a port for another cartridge (sort of like the Game Genie) so that the 10NES pins were connected to the new socket. To make this work, you would have to insert another game cart with a working CIC into the unlicensed game's socket. Since the 10NES system is entirely separate from the rest of the game cart circuitry (aside from power and ground rails), the NES itself could not detect this. As far as the lock could tell, it was communicating with a functional key and everything was groovy. This did make manufacturing more complicated, though, and also made it pretty obvious to the user that they were involved with Shenanigans, so I don't think it was used often. I think it was used by at least one unlicensed publisher, though.

[@BagOfMagicFood]

It was used by Codemasters for the first few games they published in Europe--Micro Machines, The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, and Super Sports Challenge/Quattro Sports--and they called it "Plug-thru". Such carts were in fact shaped just like their Game Genie!

[@dastoddo]

I've read and viewed numerous explanations of the 10NES CIC subsystem. This is by far the best and clearest explanation. Also including the explanation of the Tengen Rabbit chip, the non-technical industry context, as well as the subtle differences in intellectual property protections used to cover the 10NES ties all of this info together in a masterfully crafted way. This channel's videos not only beautifully explain subject matter, but present it with excellent video production quality that makes it a pleasure to watch. Keep up the excellent work! I really hope this channel takes off.

[@BillAnt]

Just cut pin 4 on the CIC chip to turn it from a lock into a key... easiest hack ever. ;)

[@fraserrisc]

Very clear description of the CIC lockout chip, especially considering the history, legal and technical aspects. Thanks! I'll add that Nintendo really liked the 4-Bit Sharp "Micro-Computers" since they were used in the Game & Watch series all the way up to the N64's lockout chip the "PIF".

[@NesHacker]

They also used them as motor controllers in the R.O.B. too, I can't wait to do a video on that funny little guy.

[@Tamhvm]

Nintendo and Sharp have had a fruitful relationship since their incursion in the consumer electronics and video game industry. Sharp has provided screens, chips and even more components to them. It is well known they built the only TV with an incorporated NES console in it. A couple modern examples: The 3D screen for the 3DS is built by Sharp based in other autostereoscopic technologies they originally used in laptops in early 2000s. Sharp got a license by Nintendo to build the Switch, to ease the problems that arose from the US-China economic tension.

[@scootergirl3662]

This is the best part of KZbin - people like this that go full geek on very specific areas that wouldn't be able to get a platform anywhere else because its so niche.

[@macrophage7584]

If Nintendo was so concerned about game quality, how the hell did LJN get a license??

[@beastworm]

Despite that I knew the story and how it worked, I was glued to the screen watching the video. Great job!

[@DemureDave]

Great job on this! This was definitely worth the wait!

[@NesHacker]

I'm glad to hear it, was a whopper to produce, tbh xD

[@chrisd6287]

This is the best technical explanation of 10NES I've ever seen. Definitely cleared a few things up for me. Thanks Ne Shacker!

[@thtroyer]

So glad to see a new episode!

[@mbh9566]

I just recently discovered your channel and absolutely love what you’re doing. As a gamer that first started with the NES I find it fascinating to learn about the hardware and how everything worked. I hope to see more great content in the future. -New subscriber

[@dark_larva]

Thanks for your work. I stumbled into your channel randomly and love the content you put out. I also really like the Power Punch song so thank you for linking the song in your credits.

[@Martial_Monkey]

Outstanding work, dude. You must keep posting those videos. I love them. I'm developing a 6502 emulator. Sometimes I get stuck, and watch your videos. Helps a lot.

[@davecool42]

Great video! I was hoping for the explanation of the voltage spike disable though... it's the one I never understood. Can't wait for your next video.

[@Gamers_of_Oz]

Thankyou for your work man I look forward to your next video keep them coming strong

[@NesHacker]

I’ll be trying, they kick the crap out of me 😂

[@Gamers_of_Oz]

@@NesHacker teaching me so much man, hope to get nes maker and make my own game but I dont just want to use nes maker, I really want to learn everything that is happening behind the scenes. you are a wealth of knowledge. As said looking forward to all future videos.

[@mattcrane1]

Great video! Excellent scripting, informative, simple animations and fun backstory on Atari V Nintendo

[@ChrisBouchard]

Very clear and informative! This channel is a great resource. I notice your latest videos don't use the intro music that the earlier ones did. I kinda miss it! It was a rocking song, and I loved how well-timed the gameplay was with it. I'll just have to rewatch the 6502 crash course. 😄

[@NesHacker]

Haha thanks! It’s an original tune I wrote myself, but the intro was pretty long and I was seeing some intense viewer drop off so I moved to a faster title screen. Should I make an extended version of the song and post it as a standalone video?

[@ChrisBouchard]

@@NesHacker I suspected it might be something like that. Too bad, but you gotta do what gets the views. I'd watch an extended version if you put it up, for sure. 👍

[@geterdonein01]

Brilliant video as always. Thanks NesHacker!

[@NesHacker]

Thanks :), it was a lot of fun to make.

[@RealSpectrum]

babe wake up, new heshacker just dropped

[@flibidydibidy]

This is very well put together and a great video! Awesome job :-)

[@NesHacker]

Thanks! It's always nice to hear from folks who appreciate the effort I put in :D

[@AmarKap]

Thank you so much for this video. It is so well done and I learned so much too. Really great video.

[@robertrft]

Hey you’re back!!!! Your videos are amazing!

[@Wineman3383]

Dude great video!!! Love your channel.

[@jimmymkirk]

In the court case, Atari cited the chip shortages leading to low game yields which made their ROI artificially low. Atari originally asked if they could make their own chips before getting the code directly from the Copyright office.

[@NesHacker]

Ohhh interesting 🤔

[@claudiosettiart]

You're videos are of such high quality and very engaging to watch. You can tell the amount of work you put into each one. I also love the humor you interject here and there. I'm learning 6502 for the NES and I had just learned about the CIC chip. I was wondering how this is being circumvented in the homebrew community since there are companies like Limited Run Games publishing new NES games?

[@zilouge]

Interesting, and excellent editing!

[@lostrocket9126]

Thank you for your channel, it's a treasure among YT channels!

[@chicoern]

Absolutely awesome content! Thanks

[@kirby0louise]

Amazing video!! 17:24 - IIRC It's the same idea as the modern day "USB Killer". In short: - charge up an internal capacitor of the "evil CIC" using power from the host device - once fully charged, send a super high voltage down a specific pin to the lock chip (Too much voltage can be very harmful to electronics on the receiving end as voltage is basically electrical pressure, thanks Schoolhouse Rock!) - Lock chip puts out magic smoke and can no longer reset the NES - Freedom! There is a downside to this method though - Attempting to use the trick on a system without the 10NES will end up bricking it (this even happened in an episode of AVGN where his top loader NES was killed by one of those carts!) The best way today to disable the 10NES is simply to open up the console and cut pin 4 of the lock chip. Unfortunately the NES uses an inverted motherboard so it's a little more work than just removing the case and cartridge housing, but iFixit has a step-by-step teardown you can follow and there's no soldered controllers like the Famicom

[@NesHacker]

As always you’re amazing Kirby

[@SianaGearz]

This isn't nearly how it worked! All the lockout defeat systems sent a NEGATIVE voltage to the chip, and it wasn't actually that high, it ranged between -0.6V and -6V. The mechanism HOW exactly it defeated the chip isn't known, but it certainly wasn't intended to cause a latch-up or permanent damage, the chip usually survived perfectly fine. The fact that the voltage is pulsed appears to have been vital to the operation. Simply connecting a 7660 which would generate -5V to the data lines doesn't lead to quite the desired effect at all, the chip wouldn't work properly but would reset the console anyway. Somehow the negative voltage must have reverse biased a part of the logic in the chip and suppressed it from functioning correctly, but that's only part of the puzzle. With modern CMOS chips, such a system wouldn't work like that, because nowadays and in the last 30+ years, all IO pins have ESD diodes on them, diodes going to VCC and GND. However these diodes form the attack vector for "USB Killer" and such like, since if you force enough current through, you can cause this diode to turn into a permanent conductor and thus "latch up", and USB is particularly difficult to damage, since it has in-line resistors on data pins, and the "USB Killer" must overcome those. Maybe NMOS didn't need ESD diodes to ground yet for some reason?

[@jaysonl]

@@SianaGearz I was always under the impression that they "stunned" the chip, like you said, and didn't destroy it like the USB killers do. But, I've never seen one of these dodgy carts, and I'm not an EE anyways! I think a better analogy might be more like "chip fuzzing" than "USB Killer"...

[@ZarateAdriel]

Yeah! you are back, thanks for this video

[@NesHacker]

Heck yeah I am :)

[@shaddixamigo]

You are gift send by the gods. Thanks a lot for making these high quality NES Videos. I wonder if you are going to further elaborate on the path of NES game programming. Also,maybe you could take a look at the NES game Maker? Cheers.

[@Breene4422]

I live in Youngstown OH, cool to see that Vindicator newspaper quote!

[@NesHacker]

Nice! I'm just super happy I found it. Always cool to see primary sources and read old articles like that :D

[@LorenHelgeson]

From what I've heard, part of what clinched the lawsuit against ATARI was that they just lifted the CIC code wholesale, including a bunch of code that was commented out, legacy code that was not even being used by the CIC at the time. So, I don't think "up to the task" was the issue there. Their developers were just being extremely lazy, and I can imagine those who said "we can't do it" were promptly fired as part of the blowback for losing the lawsuit. One thing I've learned over the past 20 years as a web developer is that when you bang your head against the wall for hours trying to figure something out, and the solution is then magically presented to you by someone else who DID actually figure it out, you sure as hell better take the time to figure out how they did it. ATARI's devs failing even that, I'm sure that with just a cursory scan of the CIC source code, the commented segments would stick out like a sore thumb.

[@kasugaryuichi9767]

Hey, ET was constrained by some very intense issues like a release that was too early but the programmer did some awesome work... considering how limited 2600 was.

[@ChairmanMeow1]

Looking back, the 10NES chip was ingenious

[@BillAnt]

OMG that fictitious legal letter by ATARI at 15:35 got me rolling "How's the fam? Can haz full 10NES listing?" ba-ha-ha

[@NesHacker]

Lol I forgot I did that 😂

[@donoteatmikezila]

Great video.

[@tr48092]

The return of the king

[@kevintappminville195]

Wait, if the chip recieves 5V, it acts as a cartridge side chip. If it's grounded, it acts as a console side chip... What happen if we cut the ground to the console chip and run a jump wire from 5V to it?

[@RetroDawn]

Great video that accurately describes the CIC form a not-too-high-level (as someone who understands it at a lower level and is creating a clone for my own carts). However, it needs to be clarified that the Atari in question here was Atari Games, the arcade game company. Atari Games was a 100% separate company from Atari Corp., which was making the Atari computer and video game consoles at the time. Time Warner had sold the later to Jack Tramiel in 1984, and then the former to Namco, and Atari Games was soon after bought out by its own management and/or staff. Technically, it was Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari Games, who cloned the CIC and published NES games. And Atari Corp had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

[@danielg.2945]

Excellent work on the video, but I'm giving a like for the TWRP poster in the background!

[@LukeAvedon]

Hey any new videos in the works? Love, love, love your channel!

[@NesHacker]

Literally working on one right now 😂

[@helloww_]

good stuff :)

[@RJSF9]

Wait... did you list 3D Tic Tac Toe in the list of *bad* games? That was incredibly impressive in a 2 KB ROM. And the AI was difficult, with 9 different levels. It was simple, but exactly as advertised :)

[@NesHacker]

I’ll have to go back and really give it a try then 😆

[@RJSF9]

@@NesHacker Hehe, yeah it's not going to blow your socks off but it's surprisingly hard. The AI on the harder difficulties takes a long time using a minimax-like algorithm. It plans ahead and will block you. All in 2KB and 128 bytes of RAM to work with. 6502 wizard Carol Shaw (of River Raid fame) was the programmer: kzbin.info/www/bejne/l2ibpnWEoa5rkJI. Still, I like it more as an engineer than a player. Also, loved the video. IIRC a few unlicensed games used a "Sonic and Knuckles"-like approach with a pass-through cartridge connector on the game. You had to plug any licensed game into the unlicensed game so it could pass through the CIC signals. It didn't even matter if the licensed game's CHR or PRG ROMs were fried, so long as the CIC was there.

[@xnetpc]

Defeating a chip by spiking it with varying amounts of voltage, causing the CPU to halt executing its program has been used for a long time, but I don't know if the technique is as old as the NES. I became familiar with the technique in the late 1990s while learning how Satellite TV was hacked. The technique was called glitching.

[@jaysonl]

It's also called fuzzing. Another thing they do is cut out or drastically reduce the voltage coming from the power supply for short periods, inducing what's called a "brownout" condition. Processor chips act weird when they're not getting enough volts, much like humans act weird when they're hypoglycemic.

[@simonradowitzky4837]

Man this is good content

[@NesHacker]

Thanks 😊

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

I live in the Philippines where most of my friends had Famicoms rather than NES. I had an NES and I bought a converter to convert the famicom cartridges to the NES. Games that used this converter kept crashing because Famicom games dont have the 10NES. Then I brought the converter to a repair shop where they soldered a wire to connect 2 of the pins together... And ever since, the converter worked perfectly. I would love to know how this worked in the same pin-per-pin breakdown that you presented.

[@NesHacker]

So they probably wired one of the pins to the ground pin, which would trick the NES into thinking that it’s CIC was meant for the cartridge. When this happens the two chips end up going into an inescapable loop and the reset signals are never triggered. I have an idea for a video that shows how you can do a similar hardware hack that I plan on producing in the future.

[@salduchi1785]

Great video! Is the CIC used only upon boot up or is it checking throughout your play session?

[@NesHacker]

It just keeps checking and checking

[@nekomasteryoutube3232]

From what I gather over the years, a voltage spike to the CIC would cause it to reset, and if you kept doing that it'd not be able to authenticate a game, done this way, a game could run without issue for the most part but this work around can damage the CIC and render the NES unable to play legit games after a while when the CIC burns out.

[@NesHacker]

Yeah I read that somewhere when I was researching the video, but I didn’t fully get how it worked, so lacking detailed information on how it worked and how it might damage the chip, I opted to just note it and move on, haha

[@hhectorlector]

great video.

[@AT-zr9tv]

We miss you man. I hope you'll come back!

[@NesHacker]

New video in the works, should have it out soon :)

[@AT-zr9tv]

@@NesHacker That's great! Thanks for responding

[@VinsCool]

If I am not mistaken, disabling the CIC on the NES itself is only a matter of cutting off one of the pins, effectively forcing it to always grant access to the system

[@jaysonl]

Yep, I think you just cut the pin that it uses to reset the CPU and PPU. blah blah "what good is a mouth if you can't speak" outdated Matrix reference.

[@thinksie]

So interesting

[@3DSage]

That's fascinating about the lawsuits. Sounds like a great movie plot.

[@NesHacker]

Yeah, I had no idea that any of that happened when I first started researching for the video. I found the whole thing kinda hilarious.

[@3DSage]

@@NesHacker You have a great way of explaining all the details and making it all easy to follow and understand. I enjoyed it!

[@ozrithclay6921]

In my collection I have a NES to Famicom converter with no CIC chip. It has some Capacitors and Transistors connected there. So I'd be very interested to know how that crashes the CIC chip.

[@iwir3d]

Oscilloscope time!!

[@mattgaia]

I'm a little late to the video, but using a reference from the Vindicator in the Yo? Appreciate that one. (I grew up in the area)

[@NesHacker]

Nah, you can never be too late to a video 😆And yeah, it was really cool to find an actual news paper source to use for the video, I'm glad you liked it!

[@jaymesjmathias9390]

Neat info, Thanks(-:

[@Lita1]

Interesting from a development perspective I liked this video yes!!!!👍😅

[@SimpleCarGuy]

Who edits your videos? Love the style and would like to learn more

[@NesHacker]

I edit my own videos 😊

[@TheSwillMan]

this is actually very strong security for a product from 1985. microcontrollers are everywhere now, but in the mid-80s? in a children's toy? no wonder Tengen had to cheat.

[@NesHacker]

That’s a pretty keen insight, yeah it’s wildly powerful for use in a children’s toy 😂

[@joshstout]

what is your process for creating your animations? they are quite great and a joy to watch!

[@NesHacker]

I use a combination of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects. Each episode is scripted and I storyboard each of the animations out ahead of time. After the video and audio has been recorded I use it as the basis for the animations and cue timings from the storyboards in specific AE animations. Creating the animations is the most time consuming part of of producing a video. It’s fun but sometimes aspects of it can get quite tedious, 😂

[@davidmccormack99]

They’re one of the standouts in your videos so that tedious work is noticed and appreciated!

[@valshaped]

It's interesting that, until the Switch, Nintendo used general-purpose microcontrollers/microprocessors for copy protection/authentication. Now they use a pair of ASICs instead!

[@xnetpc]

Nintenduo is just now figuring out what DirecTV learned about 3rd party encryption 15 years ago. DirecTV used to use standard 7816 cards and used NDS's encryption, same as many European DSS providers. Once NDS's encryption was defeated for one carrier, it didn't take long to hack them all. DirecTV swapped out their standard cards for an in house designed 7816-ASIC and developed their own encryption and have been mostly able to stay ahead of hackers ever since.

[@valshaped]

@@xnetpc rolling your own encryption is a very bad idea. At least if you get your software/hardware from a vendor, you have some legal recourse if it gets broken! If you roll your own, you just end up being the Nintendo Wii/Wii U. That said, their ASIC takes some kind of firmware, which is provided to it by the operating system and verified in its hardware, so it's updatable (and it's been updated multiple times-on retail units, in 1.0.0, 4.0.0, 9.0.0, 11.0.0, and 12.0.0)

[@xnetpc]

@@valshaped What do you do when every third party encryption you've tried has been compromised? Move development in house or give up.

[@valshaped]

@@xnetpc Encryption is broken when the math is flawed, (i.e. every Pokemon game that encrypts saved data,) when the implementation is flawed, (i.e. the Wii's Trucha bug), when the hardware is flawed, (i.e. the entire Nvidia Tegra line prior to the TX2,) and when technology catches up to the point where keys are trivially cracked or hash collisions are shown to be possible (i.e. DES, MD5.) "Don't roll your own crypto" refers to the math. Don't toss around random cryptographic primitives and expect your system to be secure. Write your own RSA implementation, implement it in hardware all you want, just don't modify it unless you're a researcher looking to develop something new, or you want to explain to your boss, your peers, or your customers why the cryptosystem you developed is broken before its time.

[@SA77888]

You didnt mention the voltage spike method...........Im thinking of the same thing (the lockout chip) right??

[@bitlong4669]

So one thing maybe I missed… CIC controlled the enable pins on cpu and ppu. Why not just cut that trace and set those chips to be always enabled?

[@NesHacker]

Good thought, and there is an even cleaner way to hack it out of submission. Just gotta cut the pin that tells it whether or not to be a lock or a key. Internally the chip will pull that pin down to ground by default causing it to bypass the reset functionality entirely.

[@ChrisGrigg-ci4nl]

So I saw on the internet of you make pin 4 the key on the nes system by moving pin 4 so it is grounded it disables cic.

[@NesHacker]

Yeah it's a thing. I have been considering doing a follow-up video to this one about a nicer way to handle this without damaging the CIC on the NES motherboard...

[@michaeldauria5477]

What generation was the 5200 and colecovision?

[@unexpecteditem7919]

Hey... NesHacker(?) What do you think of the rumour/myth that the 10NES was figured out MUCH earlier than previously believed, and that some unlicensed games (multicarts?) are running a fully functional green-room reverse engineered clone?

[@adaminjp]

How did wisdom tree bypass the cic??

[@iwir3d]

So wait a minute, you have an actual copy of the source?? Few questions, how.. and how big is it.. really curious if it was a complex code, or relatively simple.

[@SatoshiMatrix1]

Although destructive, I would recommend every NES-001 owner to just open their system and physically disable the damn NES 10 chip. The Famicom, twin, AV Famicom, and even the NES 101 all work perfectly fine without the CIC, and besides, those who choose to play NES on original hardware these days are going to be the kinds of people whom Nintendo never thought about all those years ago when they designed the system. They are the homebrew enthusiasts, ROM hackers, fan translators, power players who keep retro gaming alive. If the CIC being disabled negatively affected the NES in any tangible way, I could see keeping it intact but that simply isn’t the case. The CIC was a good idea at least initially in order to prevent the same fate as the 2600 had seen in 1984, but at the peak of its popularity in the latter years of the 1980s the CIC no longer was needed. Atari might have been underhanded but they were at least right in the concept that third-party developers should be able to make as many games as they like to. Nintendo artificially limiting third-party developers was draconian and revenue limiting even for Nintendo themselves.

[@jaysonl]

Yeah, from what I recall, all you really need to do is sever the pin that the 10NES uses to issue the reset signal to the CPU and PPU. Presto chango, it can be as unhappy as it likes and call for a reset all day long, and nobody cares. But, I've got a toploader, which supposedly doesn't even have the 10NES chip. Though these days I just use a MiSTer...

[@SuperM789]

nah

[@ChrisGrigg-ci4nl]

So in layman terms, the nes generates a random number between 0-15 inclusive and then using a lookup table of 16 possible entries that is identical on both the nes and cartridge spit out electrical synchronized impulses that need to match each other otherwise the NES resets.

[@NesHacker]

Kinda. It creates a stream of pseudorandom bits that repeat after a really long sequence and goes into a reset loop if the chip on the cart doesn't repeat the exact sequence it's expecting (aka it wants a 1 but the cart gives it a 0 or visa versa).

[@the_devils_advocate]

2:38 "Such as the Intellivision and the Atari 2600" ... that's actually the Atari 2600 Jr. The six-switch box with a wooden finish is the original model Atari VCS. Minor oops.

[@NesHacker]

Cheers :)

[@dimitrimotor2861]

i could do this in several ways that aff and even if its broken i know a way to do it work without ship in the nes completely gone can still work by changing things

[@TheSkubna]

I have a copy of e.t. for atari. Best game ever.

[@bouchert]

The bit on the low quality of games for the Atari 2600, and in particular the additional focus on E.T., while a fun story, doesn't really set the context for Nintendo wanting to restrict who could develop for their systems. All of the 2600 games listed were **first-party** games, developed and approved by Atari, even E.T. There were definitely third-party developers that churned out bad games and cheap knockoffs, like Mythicon, Ultravision, and Zellers, which provide better justification for authenticating approved games. Probably would have been better to show some of those as examples instead.

[@brunch1572]

How did Color Dreams go about it?

[@retrogamestudios7649]

When in doubt ....voltage regulate it out.....plus 3V will do it

[@theowillis6870]

i am wondering if the key exists on the rom. couldn't someone take an existing key chip and put it on their unofficial rom?

[@jarmanolivares]

What about RBI Baseball?

[@edinkogoggamer2732]

Where have you been such a long time? I was kinda scared the channel is dead after 6 months I believe of no new video.

[@NesHacker]

Making episodes takes an enormous amount of time and energy. Forgive me, but I believe I’ll be putting some time between videos from now on :)

[@edinkogoggamer2732]

@@NesHacker Of course but 6 months is probably too much time between videos. I basically binge watched all your stuff and was hungry for more :) I presume the problem is that you are of course not a fulltime youtuber. Its not your dayjob. How long does it take you to prepare one of the longer ones? Lets say that one about NES graphics or the architecture. Is it weeks in your spare time?

[@robintst]

The Rabbit chip did it's job in spades years after the fact when hackers decapped it and dumped it's code to learn how the CIC works, finally reverse engineering it after 2 decades.

[@theendofit]

For the record nintendo was later told they pretty much were not alowed to control what and how many games came out on thier systems. Thus ending most of thier power in the quality control realm.

[@SianaGearz]

Told by whom? They cannot prevent reverse engineering for compatibility purposes, as per Apple vs. Franklin case and similar; however later consoles would simply check a copyrighted portion of the ROM that it's present verbatim, which couldn't be legally reproduced without a license, which allowed console manufacturers to exert full control over which titles are released and which aren't.

[@DavidRomigJr]

To be fair regarding E.T., it is one of the better games on the 2600. I had it and I played it. It was a commercial failure to be sure, but that had more to do with Atari having to pay a huge licensing fee to Speilburg and overproducing carts which they also did with Pac-Man. The crash was largely due to a flooding of the market with poor games, everyone was making them. Bad games became super cheap, and spending several times more on a better game suddenly seemed too expensive. During this time, Atari thought people would buy games like Pac-Mac and E.T. just to collect them and produced a lot of carts- people didn’t collect them. E.T. was just one of the final nails in the coffin. People assume since it was a commercial failure, it must have been a bad game. Who doesn’t like a good scapegoat? Considering most games took 6 to 18 months to make, and that E.T. was made in 6 weeks (1 week design, 5 weeks programming and debugging), it’s amazing the game itself wasn’t bad. Spielberg wanted it to be a Pac-Man clone. The short time was due to negotiations for the license taking so long and Atari still paid a ton to license it. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a far more confusing game but it sold well, and was made by the same guy in far more time. (Fret not for the programmer, Warshaw, he proudly wears the “worst game” badge because his first game Yars’ Revenge is called the “best game”, so he says it means he has the widest range of any Atari programmer.) Sorry for the long story, but I find people bash the game simply because they’ve seen other stories bash the game, and it’s a shame, so, this is at least a little context. Oh, the reason the NES was a front loader and why it was called “Entertainment System” was because it was not sold as a video game console, it was sold as a toy. Around 84-85, video games were toxic and would likely not sell well at all. So NOA modeled the loader after common VCR tape loaders of the time and sold it as a toy. They had tried to get Atari to be their international distributor outside of Japan, but Atari refused, so NOA made the model we all love and test marketed it in New York City, and it was a success, so they went national.

[@jaysonl]

The guy who wrote that game recently released a book. It was good. It's called "Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry".

[@johneymute]

If those lockout chips are still communicating with each other after finding a match after the console is turned on and the game is running,like if those lockout chips will communicate indefinitly then there will be always a risk that the nes could randomly reset overtime,due a bad connection or a missmatch,wich is something you absolutely don’t want,just imagine if such shit will happen during the last boss fight,i had it so many times that the nes did all the sudden reset itself after beating level 1 in mario 3 due a dirty cartride connector,, OUCH.

[@SianaGearz]

It's just two more vital pins against around 30 others, so the marginal reliability compromise isn't that bad, you really want the cartridge and socket connections to always be in good condition. We can disregard around 30 pins for the CHR ROM since a single false read on those will recover within the next frame, and audio expansion pins are not too critical either; but every couple cycles there's necessarily a PRG ROM fetch for the instruction to be executed by the system CPU and that being wrong will usually cause the game to either do something unexpected, reset or lock up as well. The whole adventurous assembly that would turn the socket 90° and exerts uneven pin pressure to make it a front loading unit was actually a bad idea and contributes to mediocre operational reliability of the NES. Top loaded consoles are the correct construction that doesn't abuse the connectors. The speed of CIC communication is low so the connection quality is actually less critical than PRG ROM, there is more time for the signal to settle into the expected value, and the CIC firmware waits for the other chip to communicate for a while, and only then advances the key math, so they couldn't just drift against each other in time.

[@16bitdude36]

This comment isn't about this video but it's your most recent so I am gonna ask here. So, before using VS I used codeblocks, and there, you could press F9, to build and run the file. This feature is really convinient, so, is there something like that VS? Edit: After a bit of thinking, I found another way to make my life easier, I put a shortcut of the foler with roms on desktops, and made it so when i open a file with the extension .nes it immediatly opens the games, still it would be nice to be able to press f9 and get all of that imediatly

[@user-oc5mw3fe3x]

The common narrative I usually hear is that the “video game crash” (the “Atari shock”) was contained in the US and the Japanese market was unscratched. Where did you source your explanation that it was “global but mostly felt in the US”?

[@NesHacker]

Under the long term impacts section on Wikipedia they mention that the effect was global, along with this citation: archive.org/details/ultimatehistoryofvideogamesrevisited/page/n291/mode/2up

[@user-oc5mw3fe3x]

@@NesHacker Thank you. Looking through the reference, maybe the “global effect” is not about regional consumer perceptions or sales figures but that it made companies in other regions cautious?

[@NesHacker]

@@user-oc5mw3fe3x Yeah maybe, I got the impression from the Wikipedia article and the graphs that it was a fully global economic effect. But I’m no economist or markets expert so I may have just interpreted that incorrectly.

[@quickcurechef5373]

Wow, presentation style blows any Big tech training .. even in house .. for employees 🤭✌️😃

[@geowar20]

As an independent developer (read: “hacker) I’d just buy a cheap (“used”) title and replace their ROM’s with my ROM’s leaving the lock out chip in place. I even build a lock-out cart that you could plug an illegal cart into. QED.

[@johnwade7963]

hmm .....looks legit to me🤣🤣

[@Dr_Mario2007]

It's almost ironic that the game quality especially from Nintendo themselves have been on a gradual decline compared to when the hardware DRM was used, let alone during NES and SNES ages.

[@The-E-Base]

[ERROR: Brain overloaded]

[@maritoguionyo]

0:43 gameboard

[@NesHacker]

Indeed

[@nngnnadas]

Poems are copyrighter, but you can analyze them line-by-line in a video for educational porpuse. Don't see how it's different.

[@install_gentoo]

The problem is the KZbin copyright system because it enables abusive claimants / corporate censorship. Nintendo is known to claim videos (the very detailed ones) about their security being circumvented. For example, the channel stacksmashing had to censor his videos about the Game&Watch.

[@SlinkyStoney]

Ah.. That thing just holds the reset line for the cpu and ppu.

[@DankUser]

Broooo!!

[@chrisd6287]

5:12 I thought it was 5 games a year no?

[@Pulverrostmannen]

Interesting to see how much effort was made to get around this chip when all they had to do was to cut one leg of the chip to disable it lol

[@NesHacker]

What is funny is that if they would have made the lock be GND and the key 5V it would be considerably harder to bypass 😂

[@Pulverrostmannen]

@@NesHacker it’s a good thing they did not think of that back then right? :P

[@elcouz]

yeah but think about it... in Atari manual of the game: to play our game you need to open your NES, void the warranty and cut a PCB trace... no way people would have done that to play a game! They probably knew about the RESET pin ... let alone the risk of publicly showing how to defeat lock on an active product being sold!

[@Pulverrostmannen]

@@elcouz that may be the case but that does not stop people from buying way more expensive consoles and mod to oblivion today as well. If people back then had known that single cut leg would disable the legendary blinking lock for good I bet people would have done this much more. Besides that warranty only lasted one year anyway. But sure I get your point too that it surely gonna be awkward to do this for people that never held a screwdriver before just like that, but I was born with it in my hand and my way of playing with toys was to take them apart and play with the parts instead when I was only a few years old so I don’t think I can really put myself into how that feels

[@matthewrease2376]

I'm so done with the E.T. slander. That is unironically a top 20 game on the system.

[@jaysonl]

I was not aware of the seed capacitor. Neat. I've always wondered why none of the game consoles ever put in a hardware RNG, like a diode noise source or whatnot. I can only imagine the answer is "true random numbers make debugging more difficult". It'd be a great way to troll the TAS community, though! I was hoping you'd go into detail about the chips that use voltage spikes to disable the 10NES. That always fascinated me. Supposedly, Nintendo removed the 10NES chip for the Nintendo top loader. Probably to improve reliability. I don't know for sure, I haven't checked in my toploader and my everdrive cart Just Works. Are you still reading this? Here's the "well actually" pushing-up-my-glasses stereotypical KZbin Commentator bit: The name "TENGEN" is of Japanese origin, just like "ATARI". As such, it's pronounced with a hard G, like gun, guts, and goo.

[@watchm4ker]

Having a true RNG source both costs more money, and is difficult to test and diagnose, especially if there's a hardware fault that biases, but does not completely break, the generator.

[@AmethystSpeaks]

Wouldn't be showing the code be considered fair use?

[@NesHacker]

"I'm no IP Lawyer" xD