It's only for the BC5 bypass, they probably also included the BC4 bypass which worked on those 13% failures. They probably try the BC5 first, then switch to BC4 with some programming or circuitry on the cartridge.
The digital re-release of Super 3-D Noah's Ark is actually pretty cool. They contacted the developers of ECWolf, the best Wolfenstein 3D source port, and had them update it to have full support for Noah's Ark. They then released the game onto a few digital storefronts, including Steam, and the ECWolf developers get a share of the profits. It even comes with the DOS version and the original SNES ROM.
3:27 - fun fact, "Ultra" (the company behind TMNT, Skate Or Die, and a few others) was really just Konami operating under a shell company so they could release more than 5 games a year. I don't think this same restriction existed in Japan, but I could be wrong there.
It also allowed them to "offload" games they were making but didn't feel as strongly about so that the "Konami" brand would be associated with only what they considered their best work.
Similarly, Atari Games had to use a different brand name from Atari since a different company, Atari Corporation, a maker of home computer systems, held the rights to the Atari name on console games. They opted for Tengen
The lockout chip was only actually cracked in 2006 and it was only possible thanks to the shady practice of atari/tengen. The same thing that got them caught is what allowed the reverse engineering to happen. Tengen's chip was based on an early version of the chip that had extra pins and code that were removed from the retail version. The extra pins allowed for the contents of the chip to be dumped and now there are new 3rd party lockout chips. It's especially good for people who make reproduction carts and even the everdrive folks as it means that they don't have to remove the chips from donor cartridges. Edit: had the year wrong. 2015 was the n64 lockout chip. The NES one was in 2006.
If you're going to mention CIC clones and Everdrive you ought to give credit to Krikzz who has made both available. You can burn his CIC clone program to an ATTINY13 microcontroller to make as many CIC compatible chips as you desire.
@@WolfCoder Krikzz wasn't the first to implement the CIClone or to introduce an FPGA NES flash cart. Those honors belong to Brian 'bunnyboy' Parker, the RetroUSB guy. Everdrive is better known because there are so many of them now that they're synonymous with flash carts.
Honestly it's wasted effort. Snip a single pin on the CIC chip in the console and you can eliminate half of the issues with games starting and effectively turn it back into a (72 pin) Famicom.
Their choices for the cartridge were designed specifically to be so inherently obvious it has nothing to do with the original patented design by Nintendo. That's why they used obnoxious bright blue. They didn't even want Nintendo knocking on their doors at all, because even starting a lawsuit they could inevitably win could have been crippling, so they did literally anything and everything to prevent having to spend a dollar on legal fees.
@@thezipcreator did you know that Pokémon is named after a species of beetle native to Spain? This is because the original concept for Pokémon was of catching moreso bug-like creatures rather than the wide variety of monsters we have today
I always assumed unlicensed games only came from foreign copycats and pirates, but I guess Color Dreams were actually the _good guys?_ I love that they kept trying to fight against Nintendo's draconian rules and still followed the law
Color Dreams, not so much. Their games were utter crap trying to shift copies off the religious themes that Nintendo wouldn't allow in their games to households that wouldn't allow traditional video games because they were the devil. Camerica, Galoob and Codemasters, a little more so. Codemasters in particular had a long history producing cheap but relatively high quality software on the 8-bit computers, but it wasn't really a business model that they could reproduce on console so long as licence lockouts remained in place.
Pretty crazy story. I was sure the answer was just gonna be a slow loading screen, not the cartridge fighting a war against the console that it might not even win.
@@D0Samp Alot of Nintendo's most successful games were originally Disk system games. Ever hear of the Legend of Zelda? It was a DISK game on the famicon and the removed some content for the American version to save space. By the time of the American release cartridges were nearly as much memory as the disk. There has always been a war of size between cartridges and disks. Now they cartridges have fully beaten disks except for HD vs SSD which are both an extention of that war. Flash drives are basically cartidges. But, streaming and the clopud surpasse them both for sitribution if not actual play.
No loading screens on a NES cartridge since you never have to load anything, every bit of program memory is right there on the physical chips, ready to access at any time. The most you would ever have to do is bank switch, which is when you switch from accessing one bank of ROM chips to another bank so you can reuse the same address lines to double the amount of space your game can take up. It's not like a modern console where you need to load code from a disk into the system's memory before it can be executed; with an NES / SNES, the cartridge IS the system memory, it's a physical extension of the console.
@@D0Samp Yeah that was my initial guess. I am familiar with the story of color dreams, later wisdom tree, but had never actually seen the "loading screen" before.
just want to add that when Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan back in 1983 they did not consider adding a lock-out chip to the system up until the Famicom became a huge success which ironically nearly resulted in a similar video game crash happening in Japan so I would probably imagine Nintendo did not want to repeat those same mistakes when it came time to bring over the Famicom to the rest of the world as the NES so that might explain why they wanted so much control over third parties
@@GoldenSun3DS Not even a cool motive. Just a lie they could tell their customers so the customers would think that the US consoles not being locked out at the time was the cause of the video game crash. Were there some bad games on US consoles before and during that crash? Yes. But you know what, there are even worse games today. Just look at Battlefield 2042 or Diablo Immortal. If I'm being totally honest, I'd rather go back and play ANY of the crappy pre-crash games. Because of Nintendo and Microsoft, the industry is a joke today. But, speaking of Microsoft, back in the pre-xbox days if you had a windows pc (yea, windows 1.0 came out the same year as the NES in the US, and like today, a windows pc could game) any developer could release games. Windows 1.0 and even 2.0 were neither very popular, but as time went on and consoles still kept locking 3rd party devs out, windows never did. There are so many companies around today that make decent games, that would have probably went bankrupt had it not been for Windows. That said, even today, windows don't lock 3rd party devs out, and while Microsoft as a whole (including XBox) is as bad of a company as Nintendo, the fact that Windows hasn't locked devs out and we haven't went into another industry crash just goes to show how bad Nintendo did lie. Another gem of me being honest, I'm surprised there HASN'T been a crash in the last couple of years, with everything EA has said and done, and the fact that only 3% of gamers make up the bulk of a companies revenue anymore because of shit like MTXs and paid DLCs in paid games...
@@GioSerpo Very few games ever were worse than 2600 indian maiden. Which had a cowboy raping indian maidens. Even ET and Pac Man(2600) were better. YThough some of the android games come very close.
@@0011peace Like I said, there were some terrible games back then that led to that crash. I made that comment almost a month ago, and if I knew then what I know now, well... Let's just say I said in that comment that I was surprised that there hadn't been an industry wide crash yet, and now it seems like we're heading into one. Tons of mid-year reports from a few different studios have come out, showing a turn-around in sales. There've been a few people talking about this, and blaming it on the economy, saying it'll bounce back, but, I think people are finally starting to give up on the worse ones. Ubisoft jumped itself to the top of the hated list, and they've been hit hard. And lets not forget about Diablo Immortal. The MTXs in that game make the game you described look okay. Other gamers are doing what I've been begging everyone to do for years. They're starting to see how one companies bad choices can affect the whole economy. They're getting tired of these studios ruining games, good series, and even movies and TV shows. That... got unnecessarily ranty, but... whatever.
SNA on Steam is actually VERY superior to the DOSBox and SNES emulation versions! They did put a lot of effort in remastering the game. I actually gave it a try and was quite surprised.
That's because it's running on ECWolf, a Wolfenstein 3D source port. Wisdom Tree had them update ECWolf to support SNA and they share the profits on sales of the game.
For the ColorDreams/Wisdom Tree lockout defeat circuit, there are parts of it which are controlled from software. So the "Starting Machine" screen is probably controlling the lockout defeat circuitry.
Man, the start of home gaming gets wilder the more I learn about it. Crazy to think 3rd party devs came to the conclusion that electrocuting a security chip to the point it stuns it long enough to pass the check and nobody thought of a better method is super interesting to me.
I miss those days, nowadays hacking a console is less "fry it till it gives up" and more "35 version specific hacks that allow you to (maybe) get access to officially produced games from another continent and that's it"
@ What timecode? He talks about implementing a lockout, then talks about the Famicom, then goes on to talk about the NES, not mentioning that the Famicom didn't have the lockout, or that the Lockout was first engineered for the overseas version.
2 года назад+7
@@Nukle0n Around 1:10. He doesn't use exact words, but he says they wanted to ensure the success of the console of America while stopping it from spiraling out of control. It's implied that this is achieved with the lockout mechanism.
Now I'm wondering how Camerica/Code Masters games were able to bypass that NES lockout chip. Their method involved using a switch on the back of the cartridge to bypass it
well, given you can lift one of the pins on the CIC inside the machines to permanently bypass the whole mess, they may just entirely interrupt the signal path with that switch. if i had any of those games i'd poke around at the circuit in the cart to find out.
It's a more refined version of the method Color Dreams used (the switch I believe is for different NES hardware revisions). Being based in the UK and Canada also made it harder for Nintendo to shut them down (Nintendo of America try to sue Camerica in a Canadian court and I'm pretty sure they lost).
4:27 It wouldn't be accurate to say that Tengen got a copy of Nintendo's "patent" since patent publications are by definition publicly available. But exactly why the U.S. Copyright Office would have "secret" copies of the source code seems to be something glossed over by most articles on the subject. Also, I seem to recall that Camerica/Codemasters actively suggested that people open up their consoles and snip that pin in order to make their games run properly.
Could voltage spikes like the ones mentioned also be the reason for Action 52 starting to smell like burning plastic after an hour or so (according to the AVGN)?
That seems unrelated to the lockout prevention. Action 52 uses the same method of zapping the lockout chip with a small negative voltage (there were only a few revisions of that, or a plugin donor cartridge, or the Tengen chip) until it gives up, which you only needed on startup. Things like their own mapper built in programmable array logic and the cheap plastic case are more likely causes.
Huh, I should ask my uncle about all of the stuff ColorDreams was up to. I know he worked for them, but I don't know the exact years he worked there. The only game I know for sure that he worked on was Crystal Mines II for the Atari Lynx in '92, he did the music for it.
It's funny how Color Dreams clearly had some reasonably talented electrical engineers working for them, but _fuck all_ for decent game designers. It seems to me like their goal was to demonstrate that they could manufacture cartridge hardware for cheaper than Nintendo and then publish other studios' games and really only made their in-house games as a demonstration that they had the technical ability to do so. The little advertisement video you showed seems to confirm this theory, as it feels like it's a B2B-type advertisement rather than one meant for the public. I do think that my Bible Adventures box looks really nice on my game shelf, though.
That's what I think, given that Color Dreams licensed their tech out to other companies (like American Game Cartridges, who used the voltage spike circuit to publish ports of Exidy games like Chiller and Death Race)
I'm fascinated by what people do to hack stuff. Putting a negative voltage onto the lockout chip to freeze the chip is ingenious. It's a shame it didn't work consistently.
The technical term for the hack they were executing on the chip is called "glitching"; varying the voltages to a protector chip, and spiking its voltage, and restarting it over and over in the hopes to be able to get it to destabilize so it can be bypassed, or gained entry to. Similar approaches were used to hack satellite TV cards.
The Super Noah's Ark 3d on Steam is actually done by the developer of ECWolf, a heavily enhanced Wolfenstein 3D port. It's pretty well done! ... I mean it's still a weird Wolf3d total conversion where you are shooting seeds at goats until they fall asleep, but it's stable and runs well.
I love the idea of releasing a game for NES, it becomes a smash hit, and then Nintendo asks you to make a SNES version and you say, "Sorry, it has to stay exclusive to the NES."
Actually, by the time of the SNES Nintendo was sued by the US government to drop the exclusivity clause. This is one reason why the Sega Genesis was able to get a foothold in the US market.
That vhs tape looks so much like an analoge horror video. Everything from the overly friendly company name to a male narrorator trying to cover up legal problems.
I remember watching a documentary how hungarians developed nes games without proper devkits by reverse engineering them. (Documentary is named Moleman 4 - Longplay) Those copies were sold overseas in america. I even remember reading a hungarian newspaper about american stores sweeping their shelfs to make space for those hungarian games. It was an interesting time thats for sure. For example : Echo the dolphin
Fun fact - the Lexmark DMCA lawsuit for cloning the printer cartridge auth chip actually did establish a precedent for reverse-engineering / cloning for the sake of compatibility
I first heard about Color Dreams within my first year with the internet. How did I hear about them? When researching Galoob’s Game Genie cheat devices, I saw a list of games not compatible with each system’s version and part of the NES’s list was “all games published by Color Dreams”! THIS must be why these games are NOT compatible with the NES Game Genie! Dracula’s Curse is no doubt incompatible due to using extra power, having extra chips and all, I have no idea why Fester’s Quest could be incompatible…
This blew my mind and introduced me to a ton of new stuff. Watching AVGN I always wondered what was up with those different unlicensed cartridges and why there were so many religious ones. This answered a lot of my questions.
Because Nintendo is Satanic and doesn't like God and Christianity. Playing Nintendo games will make you a Satanist. My brother played Nintendo when we were young and now he is a sinner who backs the satanic democrats, evil BLM and terrorist Antifa who are burning down cities and killing children. All this because he chose playing Nintendo instead of reading the bible. Japanese people in general do not believe in god, It's no wonder why their island is hit by earthquakes and tsunamis. It is God's wrath.
My guess would’ve been decompressing files into memory, which some cartridge games had to do especially on later consoles. But apparently not, it’s the lockout. Did you know some later pirate carts has a switch between A and B which you would have to switch between if it didn’t work on one mode? It’s very unique. I wonder why they didn’t try to just deliver one massive shock that would fry the chip and kill the thing completely, that way it couldn’t cause any trouble, and the consumer wouldn’t necessarily know anything had happened, just that their NES could run import games.
late but itd probably end up frying the entire system or at least causing massive damage, and i feel like if your game made peoples consoles blow up thatd be Bad
90’s NES: Had a lockout chip that took forever to fool along with Nintendo trying desperately to get bootlegs off shelves 2017 Switch: Has an unpatchable boot exploit and shovelware on every corner of the eshop.
Lol you could buy fully compatible hardware NES clones in the early 90s, I grew up with one. You could even slide the top cover to change between Japanese Famicom cartridge and American NES cartridges
It didn't need to defeat the lockout chip to run any code, it just needed to defeat the lockout chip to run code for longer than a second at a time before the console refreshes.
It allows code to be run only for a few seconds. It resets the console if the autorization failed (thats why super mario bros was flashing at 4:48, the cartridge autenthication chip was broken)
Very interesting. I also remember some unlicensed cartridges that had a switch in a recessed slot on the back - it had like an A & B mode. I wonder if that was a different voltage spike tactic. It might be interesting to cover.
I assume the person who gave LJN a license was the person in charge of selling strategy guides lol, given how necessary a guide was for Laughin' Jokin' Numbnuts games
To be fair LJN wasn't yet famous for games when they got that license. As for why most LJN games sucked has it's own history. In short LJN was an good toy manufacturer but in video game era they started slipping in that area. As for games itself well... let's just say LJN was almost like EA in that area. Trusting IP popularity alone, giving tight time limit to hired studios and sometimes not even crediting studio, overall a bad management from LJN executives.
@@Mikael404 yeah, in all fairness it was likely some executive saying "we have 3 programmers, here's 2 months and a 400 page studio guide on using their IP, make us a game" because of course, buying the license to use a popular property is going to both be expensive and have many, many strings attached
To be fair, their games were still somewhat *functional*, just often poorly designed with various developers being extremely confused about the licensed properties. NONE of them would be as broken and unpleasant as Little Red Hood, and LJN's contracted devs like Rare, Software Creations and Atlus still made good 8-bit music.
I've read somewhere that Dan Lawton's decision to turn to Christian video games was simply a pragmatic one, and he and a number of other staffers were atheists or simply irreligious (though there were indeed born-again employees in their ranks so there's that). They saw both an untapped market and a safe refuge from Nintendo's wrath, especially as the Big N wouldn't have the balls to sue Wisdom Tree considering it would have sparked outrage from religious groups. Dan Lawton basically did quite a chad move.
2 года назад
Most “Christian” content creators (be it for games/movies/what have you) are atheists themselves and are there just for the quick buck.
Hey, it's a MattKC video... Anyway I'm glad that you explained how the lockout bypass works. I knew Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree figured out how to circumvent it but I didn't know what they were actually doing to beat it.
"Our 'non-infringing Nintendo-compatible game cartridges' spiel has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the spiel." -Color Dreams, probably.
I mean yeah you don't need to pay for cartridges anymore to sell it so if it's not anything inappropriate for the age guidelines nintendo will just give the green light for it
They didn't particularly care in the NES era either, as long as your game would pass for a modern E/PEGI 7/etc. rating and didn't have ANY religious imagery. And of course, your ability to pay the fees.
The big difference here is Nintendo doesn't have to undergo the risk of producing X amount of cartridges for third parties. This is part of the reason why LJN games got made as they had the money and they had licenses that were considered safe bets to sell.
7:09 the black chunk behind the Color Dreams logo reminds me of the way that the US distributors of BBC show The Good Life replaced the title cards at the end of every episode so they'd have the new name "Good Neighbors".
ah, because "starting machine" sounds nicer than "we are literally sending high-current electricity into your system to disable a feature which the manufacturer specifically put in there"
Nice. Yeah, my first ever NES game was Exodus and I still have it. I thought that was normal, and was surprised when I got Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt and it didn't do that.
It looks like they weren't using "high" voltages, just low negative voltage spikes on pins that wouldn't normally experience that in normal operation. I don't know for sure since you didn't provide a link to that tech data.
I used to always think that, as a child, the NES is a computer-like device and that's why this message kept appearing on almost all of the games I had. I never knew it was because they were all bootlegs/fakes. Very informative video, Matt.
@@aprofondir Indeed. Computer, actually. Ironically, booted and worked, with all the "loading" included, WAY faster, more responsively and efficiently than today's fully solid-state computer systems, be it a desktop PC or a smartphone, even if/when you don't want or use ANY more sophisticated actual functionality than back then with the NES. Or Famicom - Family COMPUTER, how you ever call it.
@@TheSimoc Modern computers are not only many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the 1980s could do, but also use many orders of magnitude more RAM. Old computers had to use clever methods to minimize how many instructions they processed and how much data they stored at a time, or they wouldn't work at all. *Because* they had to work responsively on such simple systems, it's only natural that the boot time would be short, since there wasn't much that it could be *doing* during that boot. Boot times are longer on modern computers because there are so many programs that need to run at startup, and in many cases those programs have to run in sequence, unable to take advantage of the parallel processing of multiple cores.
@@toshineon LOL! I responded that way because I have a lot of experience with them… even the ones specifically discussed in the video. Heck, I even found drugs inside two of them from the flea market (have you seen the viral video?). ;) I actually had a few Wisdom Tree games as a kid in the early ‘90s. Got them new from The Ark Christian Bookstore including Bible Adventures, King of Kings, and Spiritual Warfare. Even after losing most of my NES collection (650 titles), I still have those and more Wisdom Tree/Color Dreams games. Still, I never saw “Starting Game Please Wait…” so it seems weird that the video puts so much emphasis on that.
@@emmettturner9452 I gotta see that video now lol. I am kinda curious to try their games out, gotta download an NES emulator and see if I can play some of them.
makes it feel like there could be a new game crash regarding the distribution of content. the digital distribution age has allowed for some fine indi games to thrive but there is a lot of trash out there too. not only that but it also has allowed companies to become complacent on even AAA titles releasing buggy unplayable games at full retail (indi games do that but you are generally paying a very discounted price, rust for example was 10 bucks when i bought it in alpha it's like 30 today)
One of the few RUclipsrs that can manage to see a sinister motive in a company reassuring consumers that don't want to get in trouble with new (at the time) laws.
My "Nintendo hasn't sued me" t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered on the shirt
can i have one
Yeah I wouldn’t mind a “Nintendo hasn’t sued me yet”
T shirt in Nintendo logo font and every thing
When a Nintendo employee looks in your direction... "Uh oh."
13% seems like a really high failure rate. More than 1/10 customers just won’t be able to use the product at all. And cartridges were expensive!
It's only for the BC5 bypass, they probably also included the BC4 bypass which worked on those 13% failures. They probably try the BC5 first, then switch to BC4 with some programming or circuitry on the cartridge.
hi jehtt
NES-001 had problems even with licensed games
perhaps the wisdom tree/color dream games were cheaper...
@@twistedsim
I’ve seen third-party cartridges with switches on the back.
"Hello, we sell unlicensed but non patent infringing tickets to events. They're tasers to temporarily disable the ticket checker at the gate"
Well, if the gate would let you pass then you are technically not breaking any law
Fr💀
I think this is the best way to describe how these games worked
Lol
0:49 as opposed to the video game Crash of 1996, who was, a Bandicoot.
Nice.
Woah...
No Punintendo! -Credit to TerminalMontage for the pun
Ba dum tss
Woah!
The digital re-release of Super 3-D Noah's Ark is actually pretty cool. They contacted the developers of ECWolf, the best Wolfenstein 3D source port, and had them update it to have full support for Noah's Ark. They then released the game onto a few digital storefronts, including Steam, and the ECWolf developers get a share of the profits. It even comes with the DOS version and the original SNES ROM.
including a copy of the SNES ROM is really cool -- it's the sort of move that shows they're genuinely interested in the preservation of the game.
@@avrilsegoli Same thing with Sega classics on PC. You can use Sega's emulator, or you can take the ROM and use it in your preferred emulator.
Damn, never knew that Wisdom Tree of all companies would be awesome with videogame preservation.
3:27 - fun fact, "Ultra" (the company behind TMNT, Skate Or Die, and a few others) was really just Konami operating under a shell company so they could release more than 5 games a year. I don't think this same restriction existed in Japan, but I could be wrong there.
thats interesting
It also allowed them to "offload" games they were making but didn't feel as strongly about so that the "Konami" brand would be associated with only what they considered their best work.
@@TyphinHoofbun how the turntables.
Similarly, Atari Games had to use a different brand name from Atari since a different company, Atari Corporation, a maker of home computer systems, held the rights to the Atari name on console games. They opted for Tengen
So, Motocross Maniacs was made by Konami?
The lockout chip was only actually cracked in 2006 and it was only possible thanks to the shady practice of atari/tengen. The same thing that got them caught is what allowed the reverse engineering to happen. Tengen's chip was based on an early version of the chip that had extra pins and code that were removed from the retail version. The extra pins allowed for the contents of the chip to be dumped and now there are new 3rd party lockout chips. It's especially good for people who make reproduction carts and even the everdrive folks as it means that they don't have to remove the chips from donor cartridges.
Edit: had the year wrong. 2015 was the n64 lockout chip. The NES one was in 2006.
If you're going to mention CIC clones and Everdrive you ought to give credit to Krikzz who has made both available. You can burn his CIC clone program to an ATTINY13 microcontroller to make as many CIC compatible chips as you desire.
Back then people used to lift a pin from CIC chip that forced reset loop
@@WolfCoder Krikzz wasn't the first to implement the CIClone or to introduce an FPGA NES flash cart. Those honors belong to Brian 'bunnyboy' Parker, the RetroUSB guy. Everdrive is better known because there are so many of them now that they're synonymous with flash carts.
@@WolfCoder 9
Honestly it's wasted effort. Snip a single pin on the CIC chip in the console and you can eliminate half of the issues with games starting and effectively turn it back into a (72 pin) Famicom.
Their choices for the cartridge were designed specifically to be so inherently obvious it has nothing to do with the original patented design by Nintendo. That's why they used obnoxious bright blue. They didn't even want Nintendo knocking on their doors at all, because even starting a lawsuit they could inevitably win could have been crippling, so they did literally anything and everything to prevent having to spend a dollar on legal fees.
@@vlc-cosplayer That sounds like bullshit
@@vlc-cosplayer I also like to spread rumors on the internet
@@thezipcreator did you know that Pokémon is named after a species of beetle native to Spain? This is because the original concept for Pokémon was of catching moreso bug-like creatures rather than the wide variety of monsters we have today
@@vlc-cosplayer Proof? Looking it up on the internet yields no articles or anything.
@@KennyAtom do you have proof it's not real
I'd always wondered how they did it with out destroying stuff. Something tells me much hardware was destroyed during development.
Employee 1 “This is the RnD lab”
Employee 2 “Why is it on fire”
@@loganbaileysfunwithtrains606Research and Destruction
So glad I have MattKC to answer the most useless questions that no one’s asked. Great video as always.
i asked it…as soon as i saw the title
Never seen that
Hey that’s DougDoug’s thing lmao
I asked explicitly thank you
"What would Jesus do? He would fry your Nintendo you fucking heathen" is the best quote I've ever heard.
Seems legit
I always assumed unlicensed games only came from foreign copycats and pirates, but I guess Color Dreams were actually the _good guys?_ I love that they kept trying to fight against Nintendo's draconian rules and still followed the law
If this happened today, there would be lawsuits up the ass and at least one person behind bars
@@pmchad not really, since this was all legal.
@@DanielFerreira-ez8qd I don't think Nintendo cares if its legal or not
@@DanielFerreira-ez8qdIt was more of a case of "It's not illegal if there's laws about it."
Color Dreams, not so much. Their games were utter crap trying to shift copies off the religious themes that Nintendo wouldn't allow in their games to households that wouldn't allow traditional video games because they were the devil. Camerica, Galoob and Codemasters, a little more so.
Codemasters in particular had a long history producing cheap but relatively high quality software on the 8-bit computers, but it wasn't really a business model that they could reproduce on console so long as licence lockouts remained in place.
Pretty crazy story. I was sure the answer was just gonna be a slow loading screen, not the cartridge fighting a war against the console that it might not even win.
I had a bit of a bet on shoddy Famicon Disk System titles shoved onto a cartridge.
Hey there! :D
@@D0Samp
Alot of Nintendo's most successful games were originally Disk system games. Ever hear of the Legend of Zelda? It was a DISK game on the famicon and the removed some content for the American version to save space. By the time of the American release cartridges were nearly as much memory as the disk. There has always been a war of size between cartridges and disks. Now they cartridges have fully beaten disks except for HD vs SSD which are both an extention of that war. Flash drives are basically cartidges. But, streaming and the clopud surpasse them both for sitribution if not actual play.
No loading screens on a NES cartridge since you never have to load anything, every bit of program memory is right there on the physical chips, ready to access at any time. The most you would ever have to do is bank switch, which is when you switch from accessing one bank of ROM chips to another bank so you can reuse the same address lines to double the amount of space your game can take up.
It's not like a modern console where you need to load code from a disk into the system's memory before it can be executed; with an NES / SNES, the cartridge IS the system memory, it's a physical extension of the console.
@@D0Samp Yeah that was my initial guess. I am familiar with the story of color dreams, later wisdom tree, but had never actually seen the "loading screen" before.
just want to add that when Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan back in 1983 they did not consider adding a lock-out chip to the system up until the Famicom became a huge success
which ironically nearly resulted in a similar video game crash happening in Japan so I would probably imagine Nintendo did not want to repeat those same mistakes when it came time to bring over the Famicom to the rest of the world as the NES so that might explain why they wanted so much control over third parties
And then the Wii happened.
Cool motive, still oppressively anticompetitive and pure evil business practice.
@@GoldenSun3DS Not even a cool motive. Just a lie they could tell their customers so the customers would think that the US consoles not being locked out at the time was the cause of the video game crash. Were there some bad games on US consoles before and during that crash? Yes. But you know what, there are even worse games today. Just look at Battlefield 2042 or Diablo Immortal. If I'm being totally honest, I'd rather go back and play ANY of the crappy pre-crash games. Because of Nintendo and Microsoft, the industry is a joke today. But, speaking of Microsoft, back in the pre-xbox days if you had a windows pc (yea, windows 1.0 came out the same year as the NES in the US, and like today, a windows pc could game) any developer could release games. Windows 1.0 and even 2.0 were neither very popular, but as time went on and consoles still kept locking 3rd party devs out, windows never did. There are so many companies around today that make decent games, that would have probably went bankrupt had it not been for Windows. That said, even today, windows don't lock 3rd party devs out, and while Microsoft as a whole (including XBox) is as bad of a company as Nintendo, the fact that Windows hasn't locked devs out and we haven't went into another industry crash just goes to show how bad Nintendo did lie. Another gem of me being honest, I'm surprised there HASN'T been a crash in the last couple of years, with everything EA has said and done, and the fact that only 3% of gamers make up the bulk of a companies revenue anymore because of shit like MTXs and paid DLCs in paid games...
@@GioSerpo
Very few games ever were worse than 2600 indian maiden. Which had a cowboy raping indian maidens. Even ET and Pac Man(2600) were better. YThough some of the android games come very close.
@@0011peace Like I said, there were some terrible games back then that led to that crash. I made that comment almost a month ago, and if I knew then what I know now, well... Let's just say I said in that comment that I was surprised that there hadn't been an industry wide crash yet, and now it seems like we're heading into one. Tons of mid-year reports from a few different studios have come out, showing a turn-around in sales. There've been a few people talking about this, and blaming it on the economy, saying it'll bounce back, but, I think people are finally starting to give up on the worse ones. Ubisoft jumped itself to the top of the hated list, and they've been hit hard. And lets not forget about Diablo Immortal. The MTXs in that game make the game you described look okay. Other gamers are doing what I've been begging everyone to do for years. They're starting to see how one companies bad choices can affect the whole economy. They're getting tired of these studios ruining games, good series, and even movies and TV shows. That... got unnecessarily ranty, but... whatever.
SNA on Steam is actually VERY superior to the DOSBox and SNES emulation versions! They did put a lot of effort in remastering the game. I actually gave it a try and was quite surprised.
That's because it's running on ECWolf, a Wolfenstein 3D source port. Wisdom Tree had them update ECWolf to support SNA and they share the profits on sales of the game.
@@SuperfieldCrUn epic
I am now exclusively going to introduce myself with "Hi, I am not a murderer" everywhere I go
unfortunately i cant use it
@@swaree hol' up
ruclips.net/video/qBE9TZP26FI/видео.html
@@redsus3866 among us pfp and name
@@swaree I have a nifty trick for you! It's called not telling the truth!
For the ColorDreams/Wisdom Tree lockout defeat circuit, there are parts of it which are controlled from software. So the "Starting Machine" screen is probably controlling the lockout defeat circuitry.
Man, the start of home gaming gets wilder the more I learn about it. Crazy to think 3rd party devs came to the conclusion that electrocuting a security chip to the point it stuns it long enough to pass the check and nobody thought of a better method is super interesting to me.
I miss those days, nowadays hacking a console is less "fry it till it gives up" and more "35 version specific hacks that allow you to (maybe) get access to officially produced games from another continent and that's it"
When I've heard about Voltage Spiking for the first time, I initially thought they were just frying the CIC chip.
more like glitching it .....
The Famicom did not have any lockouts at all, so it was a lot easier to make unlicensed games in Japan.
Even then it took three whole years for the first one to be made, Maruo.
@@craigtheduck well ya this was back in the Yamaguchi days and he had mob connections, they would've probably have retaliated 🤠
That's implied in this video. It says the lockout mechanism was developed for America.
@ What timecode? He talks about implementing a lockout, then talks about the Famicom, then goes on to talk about the NES, not mentioning that the Famicom didn't have the lockout, or that the Lockout was first engineered for the overseas version.
@@Nukle0n Around 1:10. He doesn't use exact words, but he says they wanted to ensure the success of the console of America while stopping it from spiraling out of control. It's implied that this is achieved with the lockout mechanism.
Now I'm wondering how Camerica/Code Masters games were able to bypass that NES lockout chip. Their method involved using a switch on the back of the cartridge to bypass it
well, given you can lift one of the pins on the CIC inside the machines to permanently bypass the whole mess, they may just entirely interrupt the signal path with that switch. if i had any of those games i'd poke around at the circuit in the cart to find out.
It's a more refined version of the method Color Dreams used (the switch I believe is for different NES hardware revisions). Being based in the UK and Canada also made it harder for Nintendo to shut them down (Nintendo of America try to sue Camerica in a Canadian court and I'm pretty sure they lost).
Camerica chip makes the lockout chip confused rather than sending the right data so it couldn't be sued on the same basis as tengens chip was.
4:27 It wouldn't be accurate to say that Tengen got a copy of Nintendo's "patent" since patent publications are by definition publicly available. But exactly why the U.S. Copyright Office would have "secret" copies of the source code seems to be something glossed over by most articles on the subject.
Also, I seem to recall that Camerica/Codemasters actively suggested that people open up their consoles and snip that pin in order to make their games run properly.
I have never seen that screen. So neat to learn about it.
Could voltage spikes like the ones mentioned also be the reason for Action 52 starting to smell like burning plastic after an hour or so (according to the AVGN)?
That seems unrelated to the lockout prevention. Action 52 uses the same method of zapping the lockout chip with a small negative voltage (there were only a few revisions of that, or a plugin donor cartridge, or the Tengen chip) until it gives up, which you only needed on startup. Things like their own mapper built in programmable array logic and the cheap plastic case are more likely causes.
I think the lockout prevention only happens when booting up the cart, not throughout gameplay
Huh, I should ask my uncle about all of the stuff ColorDreams was up to. I know he worked for them, but I don't know the exact years he worked there. The only game I know for sure that he worked on was Crystal Mines II for the Atari Lynx in '92, he did the music for it.
Did you?
@@dizzydaisy909 No, I haven't had the opportunity to visit him yet. He lives several hours away.
have you asked him now?
It's funny how Color Dreams clearly had some reasonably talented electrical engineers working for them, but _fuck all_ for decent game designers. It seems to me like their goal was to demonstrate that they could manufacture cartridge hardware for cheaper than Nintendo and then publish other studios' games and really only made their in-house games as a demonstration that they had the technical ability to do so. The little advertisement video you showed seems to confirm this theory, as it feels like it's a B2B-type advertisement rather than one meant for the public.
I do think that my Bible Adventures box looks really nice on my game shelf, though.
That's what I think, given that Color Dreams licensed their tech out to other companies (like American Game Cartridges, who used the voltage spike circuit to publish ports of Exidy games like Chiller and Death Race)
7:55 Blue cartridge thing? That looks like an amazing color on a NES cartidge looking thing. I want to buy one already.
So they're deadass just charging a capacitor on the cart and spiking it down the pins to the lockout chip. My god.
Also known as a “pro gamer move”
I'm fascinated by what people do to hack stuff. Putting a negative voltage onto the lockout chip to freeze the chip is ingenious. It's a shame it didn't work consistently.
The technical term for the hack they were executing on the chip is called "glitching"; varying the voltages to a protector chip, and spiking its voltage, and restarting it over and over in the hopes to be able to get it to destabilize so it can be bypassed, or gained entry to. Similar approaches were used to hack satellite TV cards.
The Super Noah's Ark 3d on Steam is actually done by the developer of ECWolf, a heavily enhanced Wolfenstein 3D port. It's pretty well done! ... I mean it's still a weird Wolf3d total conversion where you are shooting seeds at goats until they fall asleep, but it's stable and runs well.
but why are the seeds like that
How does one man make a 7 second question and answer into a 12 minute masterpiece of cinema video
I love the idea of releasing a game for NES, it becomes a smash hit, and then Nintendo asks you to make a SNES version and you say, "Sorry, it has to stay exclusive to the NES."
Actually, by the time of the SNES Nintendo was sued by the US government to drop the exclusivity clause. This is one reason why the Sega Genesis was able to get a foothold in the US market.
That vhs tape looks so much like an analoge horror video. Everything from the overly friendly company name to a male narrorator trying to cover up legal problems.
“Prevent the game library from becoming out of control” the Nintendo switch store would like to have a word with you
8:05 "I'm not a murderer, the police haven't caught me yet."
I remember watching a documentary how hungarians developed nes games without proper devkits by reverse engineering them. (Documentary is named Moleman 4 - Longplay) Those copies were sold overseas in america. I even remember reading a hungarian newspaper about american stores sweeping their shelfs to make space for those hungarian games. It was an interesting time thats for sure.
For example : Echo the dolphin
Fun fact - the Lexmark DMCA lawsuit for cloning the printer cartridge auth chip actually did establish a precedent for reverse-engineering / cloning for the sake of compatibility
I first heard about Color Dreams within my first year with the internet. How did I hear about them? When researching Galoob’s Game Genie cheat devices, I saw a list of games not compatible with each system’s version and part of the NES’s list was “all games published by Color Dreams”! THIS must be why these games are NOT compatible with the NES Game Genie! Dracula’s Curse is no doubt incompatible due to using extra power, having extra chips and all, I have no idea why Fester’s Quest could be incompatible…
This blew my mind and introduced me to a ton of new stuff. Watching AVGN I always wondered what was up with those different unlicensed cartridges and why there were so many religious ones. This answered a lot of my questions.
Because Nintendo is Satanic and doesn't like God and Christianity. Playing Nintendo games will make you a Satanist. My brother played Nintendo when we were young and now he is a sinner who backs the satanic democrats, evil BLM and terrorist Antifa who are burning down cities and killing children. All this because he chose playing Nintendo instead of reading the bible.
Japanese people in general do not believe in god, It's no wonder why their island is hit by earthquakes and tsunamis. It is God's wrath.
My guess would’ve been decompressing files into memory, which some cartridge games had to do especially on later consoles. But apparently not, it’s the lockout. Did you know some later pirate carts has a switch between A and B which you would have to switch between if it didn’t work on one mode? It’s very unique. I wonder why they didn’t try to just deliver one massive shock that would fry the chip and kill the thing completely, that way it couldn’t cause any trouble, and the consumer wouldn’t necessarily know anything had happened, just that their NES could run import games.
late but itd probably end up frying the entire system or at least causing massive damage, and i feel like if your game made peoples consoles blow up thatd be Bad
@@kellymountain Pretty much that.
90’s NES: Had a lockout chip that took forever to fool along with Nintendo trying desperately to get bootlegs off shelves
2017 Switch: Has an unpatchable boot exploit and shovelware on every corner of the eshop.
80s NES*
The NES was released in the 1980's. It was discovered pretty early on that cutting a certain pin on the chip disabled it.
I mean to be fair the nes was full of shovelware too -LJN-
@@dustinm2717 you're lucky James rolfe isn't here, he doesn't take too kindly to that name
Lol you could buy fully compatible hardware NES clones in the early 90s, I grew up with one. You could even slide the top cover to change between Japanese Famicom cartridge and American NES cartridges
Question: how did it run the code to display "STARTING MACHINE" if it needed to defeat the lockout chip to run code?
It didn't need to defeat the lockout chip to run any code, it just needed to defeat the lockout chip to run code for longer than a second at a time before the console refreshes.
The same reason that the title screen of super Mario bros was flashing when Matt kc repaired an nes
It allows code to be run only for a few seconds. It resets the console if the autorization failed (thats why super mario bros was flashing at 4:48, the cartridge autenthication chip was broken)
Very interesting. I also remember some unlicensed cartridges that had a switch in a recessed slot on the back - it had like an A & B mode. I wonder if that was a different voltage spike tactic. It might be interesting to cover.
Nintendo: *implements quality control *
Also Nintendo: *gives LJN Toys a license *
I assume the person who gave LJN a license was the person in charge of selling strategy guides lol, given how necessary a guide was for Laughin' Jokin' Numbnuts games
To be fair LJN wasn't yet famous for games when they got that license. As for why most LJN games sucked has it's own history.
In short LJN was an good toy manufacturer but in video game era they started slipping in that area.
As for games itself well... let's just say LJN was almost like EA in that area.
Trusting IP popularity alone, giving tight time limit to hired studios and sometimes not even crediting studio, overall a bad management from LJN executives.
@@Mikael404 yeah, in all fairness it was likely some executive saying "we have 3 programmers, here's 2 months and a 400 page studio guide on using their IP, make us a game" because of course, buying the license to use a popular property is going to both be expensive and have many, many strings attached
Laughing Joking Numbnuts
To be fair, their games were still somewhat *functional*, just often poorly designed with various developers being extremely confused about the licensed properties. NONE of them would be as broken and unpleasant as Little Red Hood, and LJN's contracted devs like Rare, Software Creations and Atlus still made good 8-bit music.
I was somewhat familiar with what was going on, but zhe biggest shocker for me in this video was that color dream and wisdom tree are one and the same
I was expecting 10:48 to be followed by "So here's Super 3D Noah's Ark on my computer..."
"I'm not a murderer, I've never once been taken to court for murder!"
I've read somewhere that Dan Lawton's decision to turn to Christian video games was simply a pragmatic one, and he and a number of other staffers were atheists or simply irreligious (though there were indeed born-again employees in their ranks so there's that). They saw both an untapped market and a safe refuge from Nintendo's wrath, especially as the Big N wouldn't have the balls to sue Wisdom Tree considering it would have sparked outrage from religious groups.
Dan Lawton basically did quite a chad move.
Most “Christian” content creators (be it for games/movies/what have you) are atheists themselves and are there just for the quick buck.
Smart business move.
"atheist or irreligous" sweetie that's the same thing klsjfhglkjsdfhgkjdhfgklsjdhfg
Same reason with PETA parodies?
@@bitelaserkhalif no, peta are just dumbasses
i'm gonna add the fact that nintendo hasn't sued me yet to my resume so potential employers know i'm trustworthy
And don't forget, you were Time Magazine's Person Of The Year 2006.
Hey, it's a MattKC video...
Anyway I'm glad that you explained how the lockout bypass works. I knew Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree figured out how to circumvent it but I didn't know what they were actually doing to beat it.
"Our 'non-infringing Nintendo-compatible game cartridges' spiel has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the spiel." -Color Dreams, probably.
Things make so much more sense now. A lot of those unlicensed games had a toggle switch, which I now know changed the voltage.
lol that commercial is beautiful. Also what do you mean I can't play Beat Em and Eat Em on my NES?! I want my remaster
how did you comment before the video was uploaded?
@@thekeyboard11 the video just got unlisted, they had access to it from being a Patreon.
@@imaxvi oooh, alright
It means, “Machine, turn back now. The layers of this palace are not for your kind, turn back or you will be crossing the will of god.”
Why does that Color Dreams advertisement look like it'd fit in at the beginning of an analog horror??
You're the only one who's sponsor segments I go back and unskip. Take all my e-money!
10NES chip: “Don’t tase me, bro!”
And now Nintendo has completely stopped caring about any sort of limits on the amount of junk that devs sling around in the Switch eShop.
I mean yeah you don't need to pay for cartridges anymore to sell it so if it's not anything inappropriate for the age guidelines nintendo will just give the green light for it
They didn't particularly care in the NES era either, as long as your game would pass for a modern E/PEGI 7/etc. rating and didn't have ANY religious imagery.
And of course, your ability to pay the fees.
The big difference here is Nintendo doesn't have to undergo the risk of producing X amount of cartridges for third parties. This is part of the reason why LJN games got made as they had the money and they had licenses that were considered safe bets to sell.
Have you perused the NES catalog? It has a shitload of shovelware, even more jarring considering somebody paid up the ass for those carts
the fact that they are bad is not even the problem of the unlicensed games, the problem is that they couldn't give Nintendo the money
7:09 the black chunk behind the Color Dreams logo reminds me of the way that the US distributors of BBC show The Good Life replaced the title cards at the end of every episode so they'd have the new name "Good Neighbors".
Loved that show! Margo Leadbetter was one of TV's first "Karens" :)
the entire fbi sequence with hotel mario music is so stupid it is extremely funny
Bestie please post more repair / restoration videos they’re my comfort videos
Was it a bad approach? Well, they are still in business so maybe 87% was the magic number. Great video!
Me yesterday: "Wonder what MattKC's up to?"
RUclips today: "New MattKC video!" 😲
Shut up nerd
We're just going going to gloss over the name of the bookstore at 8:18 ? Okay then.
It's stands for "Christelike Uitgewersmaatskappy" which is in Afrikaans.
Joke ruiner, you.
@@amshermansen even funnier, that translates to Christian Publishing Company
@@amshermansenyou were making a joke? couldn't even tell
Oh wow. A year late snarky comment. Good on ya.
*_"Porn._*
So anyway, this video's sponsored by Skillshare--"
butt first, add thyme
-youtub
ah, because "starting machine" sounds nicer than "we are literally sending high-current electricity into your system to disable a feature which the manufacturer specifically put in there"
Nice. Yeah, my first ever NES game was Exodus and I still have it. I thought that was normal, and was surprised when I got Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt and it didn't do that.
I also had SWAT-ninja's entering my house while playing a unlicensed game.
Me too! They seemed more interested in the cocaine though...
3:51 some lucky bastard is gonna have a good Christmas.
I have never seen that screen, because I'm not a criminal.
Christian bookstores don't sell anything fun? Speak for yourself...
It looks like they weren't using "high" voltages, just low negative voltage spikes on pins that wouldn't normally experience that in normal operation. I don't know for sure since you didn't provide a link to that tech data.
yeah, those were negative voltages, eg. -7V, -2.25V etc
So was it essentially just applying a large enough load on the lockout chip to prevent it from actually working?
ngl you gotta respect the hustle
Wow! I would never have guessed that voltage glitching was used in a retail product!
I used to always think that, as a child, the NES is a computer-like device and that's why this message kept appearing on almost all of the games I had. I never knew it was because they were all bootlegs/fakes.
Very informative video, Matt.
Well it is a computer like device, it has the same CPU as an Apple II or Commodore VIC
the mos 6502
@@aprofondir Indeed. Computer, actually. Ironically, booted and worked, with all the "loading" included, WAY faster, more responsively and efficiently than today's fully solid-state computer systems, be it a desktop PC or a smartphone, even if/when you don't want or use ANY more sophisticated actual functionality than back then with the NES. Or Famicom - Family COMPUTER, how you ever call it.
@@TheSimoc Modern computers are not only many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the 1980s could do, but also use many orders of magnitude more RAM. Old computers had to use clever methods to minimize how many instructions they processed and how much data they stored at a time, or they wouldn't work at all. *Because* they had to work responsively on such simple systems, it's only natural that the boot time would be short, since there wasn't much that it could be *doing* during that boot. Boot times are longer on modern computers because there are so many programs that need to run at startup, and in many cases those programs have to run in sequence, unable to take advantage of the parallel processing of multiple cores.
@@TheSimoc This has nothing to do with computers. It's the operating system that takes so long. Try Alpine Linux from SSD.
I actually own Super 3-D Noah's Ark on Steam. I have no idea HOW I came to own that game, but I do.
Sir, how will we get our games to run on the NES?
"Give it a lil bitty zapzap."
imagine being hired by wisdom tree to port a game from the 80s to sell on steam
“Have you ever seen an NES game do this?”
Yes
I love educational videos like this one because you gain wisdom, which you can then plant to grow a tree.
I played the heck out of the Moses game lmao
I understood the first part but the rest of the video I was distracted by the sheer width of the sofa
00:40 I thought sega tried it first unsucessfully. I think with the SG-1000?
“Have you ever seen an NES game do this?”
No.
I've never seen an NES game. That's it. I mean, not a physical one anyways.
@@toshineon LOL! I responded that way because I have a lot of experience with them… even the ones specifically discussed in the video.
Heck, I even found drugs inside two of them from the flea market (have you seen the viral video?). ;)
I actually had a few Wisdom Tree games as a kid in the early ‘90s. Got them new from The Ark Christian Bookstore including Bible Adventures, King of Kings, and Spiritual Warfare. Even after losing most of my NES collection (650 titles), I still have those and more Wisdom Tree/Color Dreams games. Still, I never saw “Starting Game Please Wait…” so it seems weird that the video puts so much emphasis on that.
@@emmettturner9452 I gotta see that video now lol. I am kinda curious to try their games out, gotta download an NES emulator and see if I can play some of them.
7:46
It's a nice colour, I wouldn't complain if my Xbox disc case was orange, it's a nice colour.
Captain Comic was fun when most DOS games were... even simpler and rougher at the time.
You know i've had Bible adventures for the NES for years and I had no idea this was going on at all. Great video!
makes it feel like there could be a new game crash regarding the distribution of content. the digital distribution age has allowed for some fine indi games to thrive but there is a lot of trash out there too. not only that but it also has allowed companies to become complacent on even AAA titles releasing buggy unplayable games at full retail (indi games do that but you are generally paying a very discounted price, rust for example was 10 bucks when i bought it in alpha it's like 30 today)
This rules, I love how wild the gaming world was back then
Why do some NES game say "starting machine"? More like: Why Wisdom Tree NES games say "starting machine"?
This video was actually really interesting to watch
Anything to bring more MattKC into my life ill take! Great video and I learned stuff!
*I waited 30 years of my life to finally get my answers from this video* ... I am at awe beyond words of thank you.
5:17 this silly meme makes me want to go back 10-15 years. so much cool shit
i stg this meme is no older than 3 years old
You know, I was thinking that the game at 3:48 looked a lot like Exodus. Now I know why.
Super Noah's Ark 3D is shockingly fun. If you like doom clones then the game is right up your alley.
One of the few RUclipsrs that can manage to see a sinister motive in a company reassuring consumers that don't want to get in trouble with new (at the time) laws.
To be fair it does seem a bit like "try our new asbestos free cereal!"
"he would fry your Nintendo, you fu..." earned a sub.
I used to wonder why my Exodus cartridge was different than every other game.
So...what can I do? Just hope yours doesn't fail? SICK!
Ok does somebody else recognize Tetris CD-i music at 7:51 or am i the only one?
Me