[HN Gopher] Nintendo wasn't the first to introduce region lockin...
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Nintendo wasn't the first to introduce region locking, after all
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-06-14 15:26 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nintendolife.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nintendolife.com)
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| This is an interesting story about Turkish region locking with a
| strange "Nintendo isn't actually the worst" message tacked on.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| I was going to say, it's an historically interesting tidbit but
| as a consumer I'm so constantly baffled by Nintendo's bad
| business decisions and anti-consumer practices that I kind of
| don't care.
| MBCook wrote:
| Nintendo is smart. They saw a near crash in Japan on the
| Famicom (no lockout) and what happened to Atari/etc in the US
| (also no lockout).
|
| They wanted to be very sure they didn't run into that. So
| with the US launch they controlled publishing, licensing,
| lockout chips, the "Nintendo Seal of Quality", etc.
|
| They were trying to avoid another disaster. And it worked. So
| they stuck to it. Combined with being very conservative and
| opinionated (for better or worse) it continues to this day.
|
| Yes, they've loosened compared to the NES days, but that's
| why.
|
| Sony and MS came along MUCH later to a very different
| industry. By that generation consoles were normal and gaming
| was there to stay. The risks were different.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Nintendo's bad business decisions
|
| Do you mean bad like you think they're bad people, or do you
| mean bad like you think they left money on the table?
| Root_Denied wrote:
| I do indeed mean bad as in "left money on the table" - or
| possibly "pissed off their fanbase" which tends to lead to
| reduced revenue and loss of respect. The former they don't
| see to care about as much as the latter.
|
| I probably should have used a word like poor instead of
| bad.
| tinco wrote:
| It's posted on a Nintendo fansite. Amongst Nintendo fans it is
| known that amongst all the awesome creative products Nintendo
| has created and enabled, it has also always been ruthlessly
| controlling of its ecosystem. It basically invented the walled-
| garden strategy that was later copied by all other capital
| intensive hardware manufacturers like Apple. And even amongst
| those Nintendo is known to be particularly strict.
|
| You should read this article as being tongue in cheek seen in
| that context. It allows a Nintendo fan to go "Well
| technically.." as a joke, because obviously some minor Atari
| reseller in Turkey is not really relevant on the global scale.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Oh, look. A prior first time event precludes anything wrong with
| my follow-up controversial practices that everyone accused me or
| implementing and pioneering. Nintendo will keep doing what
| they've always done until it doesn't work anymore. Selling
| nostalgia.
| jaywalk wrote:
| This is a textbook strawman argument. Literally no one is
| saying the thing you're arguing against.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not a strawman argument when you argue against a claim
| that no one is making. It's a strawman argument when you
| create a bad argument for a claim that someone actually is
| making, in order to knock it down.
|
| edit: this is a "cynically muttering to oneself."
| xeromal wrote:
| LOL at your edit
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Zenst wrote:
| Thinking about regional restrictions in history, I'm thinking
| there may well be older examples. Though those would be standards
| driven in many ways. As from a manufacturers driven aspect, I
| feel there may well be earlier examples given how some companies
| would sell sales rights for other regions to control, then limits
| to prevent grey-market products would certainly of been something
| addressed in the past. That said, I'm pondering if IBM had some
| level of restrictions if only to compartmentalise their sales
| regions.
|
| As an aside in respect of regional restrictions in history, then
| the era prior to railway time -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time would certainly see
| some regional locking in a way as local time varied. Then the
| whole utility market, surely beyond country variations has some
| aspect of restrictions.
| bombcar wrote:
| Railways had some "region locking" themselves, as the gauges
| could vary - there's still a few places in the world where the
| trains change gauge when crossing a border.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEvt2lSPLc
| Melatonic wrote:
| Some of the older examples though are not region locking just
| for region locking reasons - it is just different standards
| that are not compatible. Intentional locking (without another
| technical justification) seems like a totally different
| ballgame.
| pvaldes wrote:
| There is a really, accessible, very low hanging fruit technique
| for stopping weapons working inside areas marked as schools. And
| it will never happen, it seems.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Not sure what this is supposed to mean, really. Atari didn't
| region lock their consoles, this weird Turkish retailer changed
| the consoles to get a monopoly on games in Turkey. Nintendo
| actually designed and built the devices for all markets.
|
| In my opinion, the Turkish "Atari" is a sabotaged fork of the
| original Atari rather than a region locked console. I can yank
| open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins around in the
| console and in the cartridge but that doesn't mean the Oddyssey
| suddenly becomes region locked.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Videogame companies would often license their consoles for sale
| in countries in which they either couldn't or didn't want to
| sell directly. For example the Sega Master system in Brazil and
| the NES and SNES in South Korea.
|
| So this was an attempt by the company who was the legal
| distributor of Atari 2600 in Turkey to prevent 2500 games from
| elsewhere to work on their system. That sounds like a region
| lock to me even if it was easy to circumvent.
| fredoralive wrote:
| It looks like the Meta was the official distributor / licensee
| for Turkey, and the ads warning about the region lock certainly
| have Atari logos on them. So I'd say it's fairly official, if
| not Atari directly then an affiliate.
|
| I was personally wondering if main reason for the the region
| lock was Meta wanting to lock out European games, or Atari
| wanting to lock out (cheaper?) Turkish games from the European
| market. Either side has reasons to want it.
|
| I'd also kinda note that although not a direct region lock,
| AFAIK the way the 2600 handles video timing (generated by the
| game programme, not the video chip) would have basically
| mutually locked out 50Hz and 60Hz regions at the time, as 1980s
| TV usually didn't "multisync" (plus there are palette
| differences between PAL/NTSC/SECAM systems as well).
| willcipriano wrote:
| Zuckerberg strikes again.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > I can yank open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins
| around in the console and in the cartridge but that doesn't
| mean the Oddyssey suddenly becomes region locked.
|
| Are you an official Magnavox licensed distributor?
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| >> for every one of its consoles except the Nintendo Switch
|
| This made me laugh because when I was a kid living in Europe, my
| dad would often travel to the US and bring back unreleased in
| Europe and/or NES games from the US because they were much
| cheaper. To get them to work with PAL/Secam NES, we took our NES
| to this (shady?) electronics shop that installed this silver
| mechanical switch. You would insert the US cartridge and if
| memory serves, the screen would blink and when the image was on,
| you flipped this switch and the blinking would stop, permitting
| you to play the US cartridge in the European console. That was my
| 'Nintendo Switch'
| Melatonic wrote:
| Not sure when Nintendo started implementing this more but I
| fondly remember buying Pokemon Silver (for gameboy) in my
| teenage years LONG before it was released in the US. I was too
| young to get a credit card or an eBay account but my friend and
| I realized we could buy a one time use Visa gift card with cash
| from a local store. Each of us saved up for god knows how long
| and then I bought Silver while he bought Gold. All in
| (including shipping) I think we paid close to 70$ each which
| seemed like a HUGE amount of money at the time (almost 123$
| today!). I don't think either of us even considered that the
| Japanese cartridge might not play in our US gameboys.
|
| What we did not realize was that there of course was no way to
| switch the game to English as it had not been translated yet.
| Playing the game entirely in Japanese was for sure a challenge
| but I think I still vaguely remember the symbols for Poke Ball
| and the Health restore items. This was of course still fairly
| early internet days so there was not a ton of online help and
| translators were much less accurate.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Back in the day, I received a copy of Pokemon Gold from a
| japanese friend of my parents, months before the euro
| release. I was extremely excited but then i saw that it was
| completely in japanese! It ended up collecting dust, since I
| didnt understand a word and never played it. Maybe I should
| have powered through anyway like you though!
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I had a similar experience with one of my friends, except
| instead of buying physical carts we just downloaded the rom
| and used a gameboy emulator. This was just a little while
| before gold/silver came out in the US and we brute forced our
| way through as much as we could, ultimately getting stuck on
| the Sudowoodo blocking a path. We tried everything we could
| think of but without knowing japanese we just couldn't figure
| out that we needed that squirt bottle or whatever it was.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| 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
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe I can finally beat Pac-Man!
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| With the NES speedrunning scene being so popular, I
| wonder if any one has ever made use of this.
| 0des wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you're going to be hearing from Billy
| Mitchell's lawyers over this comment.
| ishjoh wrote:
| 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
|
| As a developer I find Speed running extremely
| interesting. The creativity used to eek out performance
| gains is incredible.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > use a region platform where the text loads faster
|
| Using a GBA (and later, a DS) emulator on a PC to
| (re)play Pokemon, 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| 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?
| rcfox wrote:
| As I recall, you could also disable the lockout chip by just
| desoldering/cutting one of the leads.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| 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...
| fguerraz wrote:
| It's Turkiye by the way :rolleyes:
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| A decent overview of how the pair of 10NES chips in the NES and
| in the inserted cartridge worked together to authenticate
| licensed games, for those that are interested:
|
| https://www.retronintendoreviews.com/retro/10nes-lockout-chi...
|
| (It's not exactly a technical deep-dive but it's a good enough
| overview. I was surprised that something as studied and reverse-
| engineered as the 10NES didn't seem to come up with a "golden
| standard reference" article as the first google hit, not even on
| hackaday or eeevblog).
| sircastor wrote:
| My manager built a Gameboy emulator last year for a side
| project, and he was explaining to me the genius authorization
| mechanism that the Gameboy used: Every gameboy game starts up
| by showing the Nintendo(r) logo. The system checks the
| displayed value against a known checksum (or hash or something)
| that has to be perfect or the software won't go to the next
| instruction. So in order to make an unauthorized game for
| Gameboy, you have you put Nintendo's Registered Trademark as
| the very first thing that appears on your game, without
| permission. So instead of a technical limitation which can be
| broken with enough effort and engineering, you have to simply
| violate well-established Trademark law. Pretty smart.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Except the US courts rejected this concept (on appeal); see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade .
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