[HN Gopher] Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Conver...
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Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Converter and More
Author : zdw
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-10-12 15:55 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nicole.express)
(TXT) w3m dump (nicole.express)
| ndiddy wrote:
| Those region converters were used in the initial production runs
| of every NES launch title from when the system was test marketed
| in New York in 1985. Presumably, Nintendo didn't yet have tooling
| set up for manufacturing NES cartridge PCBs (or wanted to be able
| to reuse the PCBs for sale in Japan if the test launch went
| poorly), so the best solution was to use Famicom PCBs in an
| adapter.
|
| > One frustrating thing here is that this adapter was never
| designed to be used with loose cartridges, but only PCBs. Famicom
| cartridges are a nightmare to open without damaging them due to
| reinforced plastic snap tabs, so people who wanted to use these
| as adapters would just take a rotary tool to it, as this blog
| post from 2006 shows.
|
| You can plug a Famicom cartridge into the Nintendo converter by
| pulling off the gender adapter and plugging it in the other way
| so the tabs that block the cartridge are on the bottom. Note that
| it's tricky to remove the converter from a front-loading NES,
| which is why most aftermarket Famicom-NES converters have a
| ribbon to help with pulling them out of the system.
| Lammy wrote:
| I 'member scouring flea markets for one of these back in the
| 2000s by bringing a non-adapter copy of Gyromite with me and
| weighing them by hand until I found one that was ~25% heavier:
| https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-t...
|
| > NES and Famicom cartridges
|
| They are Game Paks and cassettes, respectively. Of course it's
| obvious what the author is referring to, but I really enjoy
| seeing the term "cassette" used for something that doesn't
| contain magnetic tape, so please pardon my pedantry :)
|
| Peep the Famicom system manual where the cartridge connector is
| straight-up labeled in English as [CASSETTE CONNECTOR] with
| katakana furigana (kasetsuto / kasetto):
| https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_198...
| wk_end wrote:
| TBH even as a native English speaker who grew up with them, I
| never realized that "cassettes" were (only) supposed to contain
| magnetic tape; I just internalized that audio and video tapes
| were "cassettes" and games came on "cartridges" (regardless of
| what Nintendo wanted us to call them). A Japanese audience was
| probably even less inclined to learn yet another loanword to
| preserve that technical distinction.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I think the cassette is the thing that holds the media, as
| opposed to a reel-to-reel tape, which is just on a spool, for
| example. To this reading, it makes sense to call the game
| cartridge a cassette, but I haven't ever heard of carts
| called cassettes in English.
| Lammy wrote:
| > A Japanese audience was probably even less inclined to
| learn yet another loanword to preserve that technical
| distinction.
|
| That's what I mean, though, is that my internalized idea of
| cassette == tape was the one that was wrong. It was one of
| those words I learned incorrectly as a child based on the
| observation that everything adults called "cassettes" had
| magnetic tape in common, not realizing that "cassette" is
| describing the enclosure instead of the contents and
| literally means "little box" (case-ette). Nintendo were using
| it correctly and taught me something in the process and
| that's why I think it's cool and wanted to share.
| pm215 wrote:
| For a counterexample in the other direction, the 8-track
| system uses "cartridge" for its enclosure-with-audio-on-
| magnetic-tape object.
| fair_enough wrote:
| Japanese is full of loanwords precisely because those good
| folks on the other side of the world find so many things
| about Western culture fascinating.
|
| My Japanese father-in-law even played QB and Safety for his
| university's American-style football team in the 80s and
| grew up as a fan of Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.
|
| Many people in Japan are just as much "Americanophiles" as
| some of us are "Japanophiles".
| namibj wrote:
| Their word for (part time) job (as opposed to career
| position) is literally the German word for "work":
| arbeit. Of course transliterated with some minor phonetic
| loss, but that's expected.
| fair_enough wrote:
| I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's
| work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.
|
| It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly
| that:
|
| https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.ht...
|
| "How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse
| engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright
| Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming
| it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen
| could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue
| Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they
| could get away with it."
|
| This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever
| done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love
| every bit of it.
| wk_end wrote:
| The lockout chip isn't related to the converters, per se. The
| converter _has_ a lockout chip, but so does every official NES
| game.
|
| The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so
| unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace; Nintendo added
| the lockout mechanism for the international release precisely
| in response to that. Each cartridge contains a "key" chip that
| unlocks the "lock" chip on the NES main board, which then
| releases the reset line on the CPU allowing it to operate.
|
| Naturally, this means that Famicom carts don't have the lockout
| mechanism, so those signals need to come from the converter.
| toast0 wrote:
| FWIW, the chip on the game and the chip on the system are the
| same (within a region). Pin 4 is used to determine if it
| should be a lock or a key.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > The Famicom didn't have any kind of protection scheme, so
| unlicensed and bootleg games were commonplace
|
| Unlicensed/bootleg Famicom games weren't very common in Japan
| due to the control Nintendo had over game distribution. In
| Japan, Nintendo sold all their Famicom consoles and games
| through a wholesaler organization called Shoshinkai. If you
| wanted to sell Famicom games without a license from Nintendo,
| you needed to deal directly with stores and/or wholesalers
| who both wanted to sell Famicom games and didn't sell any
| Nintendo products. This limited unlicensed games to being
| niche underground products that were mainly sold in back-
| alley shops and through mail order. In the US, this level of
| control over distribution would probably be ruled
| anticompetitive, so the lockout chip was a technical solution
| that accomplished a similar goal.
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