Happy Birthday NES!

25 years ago today the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US. As anyone who has an original generation NES knows the system didn't age well. By this I mean 25 years later the consoles don't exactly work optimally anymore. Plug a game in and you're apt to see the power light blink on and off. On and off. On and off. I knew all the old wives tales on how to fix it. Blow in the game! Blow in the machine! Hold he reset button down and power it on and off! Hit the NES! Don't push the game all the way in! Force the spring thing down lower than it should go! Hold it a little higher than it should go!

Very rarely did any of that stuff work. Today I did a little poking around to try to figure out why the blinking happened and the actual reason really surprised me. You see, it all comes down to DRM, and none of that earlier stuff dealt with that underlying problem at all.

What those other things tried to deal with was two other flaws in the design of the NES. The first is they made the internal connectors out of low quality metals so they easily corroded with dirt and wear. The second is that the whole spring loaded system slowly but surely bent the low quality connectors with each use until eventually they stopped connecting as well as they used to. (Both of these problems were fixed with the second generation NES which loaded the game in from the top like the SNES did. Also, you can argue the spring loaded system was needed due to wanting the NES to look like a VCR instead of an Atari what with the console crash and all.) These two reasons would make the console not work at all, though. Lose connection with the game and the system should become unstable and possibly crash. Why would it turn on and off, on and off?

It turns out that Nintendo was worried about bootleggers making their own NES games, so they built a system into the console and into every cartridge to verify that the cartridge was a legitimate Nintendo authorized game. (Nintendo Seal of Quality, as Andrew would say.) So what they did is they put identical chips into the NES and into every cartridge (apparently the chip was $9 per for third party vendors) that would communicate with each other when the power was turned on. If this chip had voltage on its 4th pin and the cartridge didn't properly echo the right response to the chip then it would power off the console. Hence, if you put a bootleg cartridge into the console it would blink on and off, on and off.

But why does my NES blink? Due to a combination of the shoddy connectors and this chip if the connectors lost connection for even an instant the chip in the console would decide you were on a bootleg game and turn the power off. So even if the game itself didn't crash (maybe only the one pin for the DRM chip gave out for that instant) you were screwed.

I pulled out the NES I have here (once owned by Byung) and decided to try it out for the NES' birthday. To no one's surprise, blinky-blinky. It was time to operate! I took some pictures but sadly they didn't turn out well, but I managed to fully disassemble the console and find the DRM chip. I took an exacto-knife to the 4th pin and eventually managed to cut it apart, negating the DRM. I also took out the connector and gave it a quick wipe with windex and a q-tip in the hopes that might do something. I put it all back together and gave it another shot... No blinky-blinky! No game either, though. I definitely managed to turn off the DRM chip but the connector itself must be shot (or I blew something up playing with the motherboard, but the power light did come on). The plan now, if I want to resurrect the machine, is to buy a new connector. I just may do that, especially since I know now how easy it is to open the machine up.

But I wanted to play a game for the NES' birthday, so I downloaded Nesticle and a TMNT rom. Possibly my favourite NES game of all time, and I was surprised that I remembered the end to Shredder's speech on the TV after you save the dam from stupid bombs.