/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9661571
Their guidelines could be quite vague and inconsistent at times, several studios have commented on it. I recall an article about it being a confusing mess to try to get Nintendo to accept their port of Maniac Mansion.

>>9661575
I still to this day wonder just why EA had that weird yellow tab on their carts. Everyone back then when they saw it assumed it was something you were supposed to be able to remove to plug in some kind of upgrade or additional accessory, and having a completely separate piece of the cart that is even a different color must have made the manufacturing of the carts more much expensive than if it was just two black plastic shells.

>>9663206
>always heard that other unlicensed games tend to shoot extra voltage into the NES, and 'daze' the NES10 lockout chip. They can damage the console, and even causes a burning plastic smell. The TENGEN carts use some sort of reverse lockout that doesn't do any damage.

There was other unlicensed games that did indeed do that. It was found that if you sent a voltage spike to the chip it disables it until you power cycle the console. The NES10 basically does the equivalent of pressing the reset button if the other chip on the cart ever fails it's security check (Hence why the NES keeps resetting if there is no cart inserted), so disabling it works for bypassing the DRM. The Famicom never had it, so it could not be integrated that well into the console unlike later Nintendo systems, which is why just simply removing the pin from the chip that sends the reset signal disables the DRM completely instead of prevents the console from working at all.

No idea if it could cause damage, but it likely was not good for it. I think Codemasters was one who did that, there was a switch on their earlier carts that adjusted this behavior because it was not perfected. I think later ones removed the switch because they revised the method so it worked on every model successfully.