Piracy in 8-Bits, Part 3

This is Part 3 of a 4 Part series of Blog Posts related to Unlicensed Third Parties.

Part 3: Rise of the pirates

Several other companies wanted a piece of the proverbial pie, but for whatever reason were pushed back by Nintendo. As Nintendo was very strict about what could and couldn’t be in on of their games (for example, Religion was a no-no, as was sex, course language and blood), some companies would never be approved by Nintendo and earn the coveted “Seal of Approval”.

This lead to companies reverse engineering Nintendo’s Lock Out Chip, the NES10.

The NES10 was a groundbreaking piece of technologly that really helped Nintendo distinguish themselves from the past failures of the Video Game Industry. A NES10 chip would be queried whenever the NES console was powered on, and if the console could return a number from the NES10, and it matched the number that the console had, then it would allow the game to load. If it didnt, it would restart the machine and try again.

There were several ways that companies got around the NES10. The most common was a voltage spike. A cartridge would save up current coming from the NES in a series of capacitors on the pirate cart. After several “flashes” of the screen, the cart would send a spike to the NES10 chip, knocking it offline and allowing the cartridge to play. Cartridges of this nature had huge warnings on them telling players to not turn off a cart until it had loaded, to wait 7 flashes but no more than 10 flashes, etc. You can imagine why!

Another way employed by some pirate companies (such as HES) was to use a sort of dongle cart. The cart was long and had a connector at the top and bottom. A licensed cart was needed to be placed at the top of the pirate cart, and the NES would use that lockout chip for its validation.

There was one company that employed a different strategy, TENGEN. After the video game crash of 1983, Atari needed to split into 2 separate entities: Atari Corporation and Atari Games. Atari Games was responsible for its Arcade games, but also agreed to distribute games for Namco (now Namco Bandai) on the NES. To do this, Atari Games created the TENGEN brand. TENGEN used a very interesting way of getting details about the NES10 lockout chip. Originally, TENGEN did not want to agree to the restrictive terms of the Nintendo Third Party Agreement, specifically the exclusive agreement, and the limit of games per year. TENGEN agreed eventually, and released 3 games officially. However, while this was going on, TENGEN was also, in secret, trying to circumvent the NES10 chip. With the list of games ready to sell piling up, and time to their deadlines running out, TENGEN’s lawyers approached the US Patent and Copyright Office, asking for information about the NES10 program, under the ruse that they were in a litigation against Nintendo. Using this information, TENGEN made its Rabbit chip, the first NES10 clone ever.