HN Reader

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 (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_198...

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.

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.