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So they made their own clone, the “Rabbit”, which actually communicates with the console side, and tricks it into thinking it’s just a regular Nintendo chip. Plus, a negative charge shock could in theory risk damaging the console and leaving Tengen and its parent, Atari Games, liable to significant damages. Prior to this, Nintendo would make other adjustments to the NES to try to prevent methods like this specifically, diodes were placed to break earlier Color Dreams attempts at frying the lockout chip’s data lines.įar back in 1988, Tengen seems to have recognized this option existed, but was too much of a hack. And in 1993, Nintendo would release a variant of the console that had no lockout chip. Why is there a switch? Because the way this circuit is designed, if there is no lockout chip present, it will just draw large amounts of power from the console until something fails. When the console turns on, a negative voltage spike is sent down the reset line of the lockout chip, frying it long enough to break its program and cause it not to reset the console. You might notice some circuitry in the corner what this is is actually something we’ve covered on this blog before, a charge pump that produces a negative voltage from the console’s 5V input. Here’s Camerica’s 1992 release Micro Machines. The chip is configured so the program can’t be dumped easily, and if you do dump it, the program is protected by copyright law. The microcontroller in the console compares with one in the cartridge, and if their numbers don’t match the expected pattern, it resets the console every second, preventing gameplay. So instead, Nintendo developed a small microcontroller, which implements a program of sending random numbers back and forth. Plus, cryptographic locks had no legal force at the time this wouldn’t be the case in the US until the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But in the 1980’s, that would get your console classified as a munition, and the NES’ 1.7MHz CPU would struggle to implement anything regardless.
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Modern consoles maintain their lockout using cryptography. The other thing that makes Tengen stand out is how they broke the Nintendo’s lockout chip. This was a serious attempt by big names in the business to break Nintendo’s licensing. That’s what makes Tengen stand out from other companies that would make unlicensed games like Color Dreams. They had Atari Games’ library of arcade hits (like Gauntlet), as well as NES games from their sometimes-parent company Namco, and rights to arcade titles from other companies that had opted out of Nintendo’s licensing world, like Sega. Of course, Tengen wasn’t intending to sell low-quality games like those that had plagued the 2600. Since Tramiel’s Atari Corporation owned the right to the name for home products, Atari Games, arguably the more direct descendant of old Atari, had to come up with a new brand. The arcade division, which was doing better (though the American arcade market was already beginning its decline with the end of the Golden Age) remained in Warner’s ownership and kept its staff, but adopted the name Atari Games. Avoiding that fate is the reason Nintendo put the licensing regime in place. (As Atari didn’t expect anyone to try to become a third-party developer the concept didn’t even exist yet) As a result, Atari collapsed in a flood of red ink its home consumer division was sold to Jack Tramiel, who mostly wanted the brand to promote his ST computer and replaced most of the staff. The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games. Baseball, came out in April 1988, and in December 1988, Tengen announced that they would break with Nintendo and manufacture games themselves, with a classy black trade dress with larger art. Tengen’s licensed period, however, only seems to have lasted less than a year. Baseball using the DxROM family of circuitboards, which used a Namco-made mapper chip. We saw Tengen in the NES blog post, where they released the games Gauntlet and R.B.I. And the company that had previously killed the American game industry decided to break those rules. But these rules were enforced by technology, not by law. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo, and so they generally met certain standards set by Nintendo.
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Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards.