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ArsTechnica: Hackers unlock NES Classic, upload new games via USB cable

Oh...not that knowledgeable about FDS...I thought it brought the ability to save games are those notable games much different?

There were several NES games that had enhanced releases on the FDS. Notably, there's Vs Excitebike, which is much more polished than the original game (and has background music!), but there are other games like Mario Bros. that saw enhanced ports as well.

Not all FDS games are better, though. Castlevania II on the FDS has much worse music, for example.


Also, FDS games have two main differences from regular NES games:
1) FDS games have an extra sound channel for enhanced music and sound effects.
2) FDS games can write to disk (like Zelda 1 and 2). Very useful for Metroid and Kid Icarus, but it also is useful for games with Edit modes like Excitebike.

Time for Japanese Castlevania III in that case. Great! ��

I don't think that will work because the Konami VRC6 chip that the Japanese release uses is very likely not emulated. The game didn't even get released on the Japanese virtual console for that reason. (Or at least not the 3DS virtual console...)
 

TLZ

Banned
Yep, doesn't make a difference.

It's really weird since every step goes perfectly; the games just don't show up on the console. I guess it's better than accidentally bricking it though ;)

Maybe try the steps from this video.

Also, have you tried the latest version, 2.05?
 

King Al B

Member
Worked flawlessly for me. Like 20 more games on it. Only tryed a few so far, Marble Madness is the only only that wont play. Played through the first 2 areas of Blaster Master, played great, but the anti-seizure thing kicks in when you beat a boss, its weird but doesn't both me.

I heard some people mention audio lag??? I played all the way through Castlevania 1 up to Draculas Stage. Every whip noise and candle strike seemed spot on to me. And if there is any input lag im not good enough to notice. Playing on a 60" Sharp Aquos (game mode)
 
has anybody tried with the famicom mini? (japanese version?).

also, can you replace the games that come with the system (like replacing the japanese version with the american version)
 

D.Lo

Member
There were several NES games that had enhanced releases on the FDS. Notably, there's Vs Excitebike, which is much more polished than the original game (and has background music!),
VS Excitebike, despite the name is not an enhanced 'version', it's a full sequel really.

Not all FDS games are better, though. Castlevania II on the FDS has much worse music, for example.
It has technically superior music, but some people prefer the music they grew up with. I prefer the FDS version's music. It is a worse version of the game some ways, most notably load times between sections. But the clues make 900% more sense than the ones in the English version.

I don't think that will work because the Konami VRC6 chip that the Japanese release uses is very likely not emulated. The game didn't even get released on the Japanese virtual console for that reason.
It was released on the Wii Virtual Console.
 

shaneskim

Member
Micro machines seems a bit weird in the menus (game plays well though).

I've noticed the pal games have the bottom chopped off which I'm presuming is due to the difference in line numbers between regions?
 
Anyone got Mario Adventure to work? Zelda Outlands just works fine, but Mario Adventure show alot of artifact / sprite problems and is unplayable :(
 
Anyone got Mario Adventure to work? Zelda Outlands just works fine, but Mario Adventure show alot of artifact / sprite problems and is unplayable :(

The guy that made this tool said that the emulator was a bit shit. It has been optimised and tested for the 30 original games but other games have issues. Battletoads plays fine until you get to the second level, Star Wars looks like it's running well but the first level is all mixed up. So there will be plenty of games that will 'run' but not be perfect, I guess you're shit out of luck.

At some point someone is going to play some game and make it to the final boss through blood, sweat and tears only to find that it glitches up.
 

Feeroper

Member
Might as well just get a Raspberry Pi if you're willing to hack the NES Classic.

Absolutely. I just finished setting my Pi up this past weekend, and it is amazing! I had wanted to for so long but thought it would be too difficult of confusing for me since I don't know anything about scripting and such, but it is extremely simple. Lots of tutorials online to help, and now I have my Pi 3 setup with Retropie and a paired PS3 controller. It was so great playing through a ton of classic games from many different platforms in one place.

NES classic is great for the nostalgia and form factor, as well as presentation and ease of setup, but if you are looking for more I'd highly recommend the Rasberry Pi instead of trying to manipulate the NES classic.
 
When I do this I think I'll replace Castlevania 2 with the bisquit version, assuming that runs (think it will as there are different mapper options).
 

dock

Member
I just finished setting my Pi up this past weekend, and it is amazing! I had wanted to for so long but thought it would be too difficult of confusing for me since I don't know anything about scripting and such, but it is extremely simple. Lots of tutorials online to help, and now I have my Pi 3 setup with Retropie and a paired PS3 controller. It was so great playing through a ton of classic games from many different platforms in one place.

I bought a Pi and was disappointed at how difficult it was to setup. I gave up with it after many hours drowning in conflicting tutorials and never getting a good solution to simple things such as 'auto-mounting USB sticks'. I regret wasting my money on the Pi, and take umbrage anyone suggesting the Pi is cheap and easy.

Everyone has different technical experience and some people run into fewer pitfalls with Pi setup, but the number of hours to get started if you know nothing about Linux or Pi is considerable.

The NES Mini 'hack' is a completely different story to fighting with getting Pi to behave sensibly, and the UX for save slots etc is pretty fantastic.
 
I bought a Pi and was disappointed at how difficult it was to setup. I gave up with it after many hours drowning in conflicting tutorials and never getting a good solution to simple things such as 'auto-mounting USB sticks'. I regret wasting my money on the Pi, and take umbrage anyone suggesting the Pi is cheap and easy.

Everyone has different technical experience and some people run into fewer pitfalls with Pi setup, but the number of hours to get started if you know nothing about Linux or Pi is considerable.

The NES Mini 'hack' is a completely different story to fighting with getting Pi to behave sensibly, and the UX for save slots etc is pretty fantastic.
Agree completely with this.
 

ZeroCoin

Member
I bought a Pi and was disappointed at how difficult it was to setup. I gave up with it after many hours drowning in conflicting tutorials and never getting a good solution to simple things such as 'auto-mounting USB sticks'. I regret wasting my money on the Pi, and take umbrage anyone suggesting the Pi is cheap and easy.

Everyone has different technical experience and some people run into fewer pitfalls with Pi setup, but the number of hours to get started if you know nothing about Linux or Pi is considerable.

The NES Mini 'hack' is a completely different story to fighting with getting Pi to behave sensibly, and the UX for save slots etc is pretty fantastic.

Before you start to go on the defense with my reply, please take note of how I've posted in this thread. I didn't come in here to evangelize about the raspberry pi, but to correct some things that were being stated incorrectly.

That being said, I really think you need to looks at recalbox. Here's the install instructions.

Download a zip file
Unzip to a micro SD card
Insert into raspberry pi
Boot the pi
Copy roms over your network using a file browser
Map the directions on a controller

There's literally nothing to it and definitely nothing even as complicated as what people are doing to the classic in this thread.

There's even a helpful thread on GAF where people are more than willing to give advice and discuss things.

I get the frustration at seeing people seemingly invade a thread with this talk, but a good portion of this thread seems to be people wanting more options, more systems, better rom support, etc. I'm sorry that you couldn't get external drives to mount on a pi properly, but you're complaining about that in a thread where people are limited to around 60 NES games total.
 
Hakchi2 2.05 now includes FDS support. Cluster says the NES Mini already has the bios necessary to run it.

Loaded Metroid FDS, ran perfectly, even had the extra synth.

Whats FDS, I probably know, but can't think of what this stands for

Edit- sorry answered a few posts ago
 

Chucker

Member
The Pi is super versatile, and I love mine for what it can do, but in order to get it as pretty as the Mini is out of the box took me several hours of scraping and setups.

Two groups here really, enthusiast and plug and play, both are good but you need to know what you're trying to do.

My kids and wife look at the Pi and say nothankyou.gif
They turn on the NES and start knocking out Bubble Bobble.
 

jmizzal

Member
Any other good modded games to add to the NES Classic thats .nes, meaning stuff like Super Tecmo Bowl with 2017 rosters.
 
I don't see the point in hacking something like this. I mean if you're capable of doing it, then you're capable of setting up a Rasberry Pi or similar device to give you all the games so why even buy the Classic to begin with?
 

chubigans

y'all should be ashamed
I don't see the point in hacking something like this. I mean if you're capable of doing it, then you're capable of setting up a Rasberry Pi or similar device to give you all the games so why even buy the Classic to begin with?

Ok, time to repost this:

Cross posting this and consider it a final warning.



1) We get it, the Raspberry Pi is a cool solution. It's not the same thing and there are reasons to want the NES Classic.
2) Accusing everyone of piracy when you don't know their situation is irritating noise and is something that is explicitly against the rules in any sort of discussion about console hacking for this reason.

Stop spamming this thread and the other one with the same stuff over and over again. We heard you the first hundred times.
 
I don't see the point in hacking something like this. I mean if you're capable of doing it, then you're capable of setting up a Rasberry Pi or similar device to give you all the games so why even buy the Classic to begin with?

The reasoning has been explained repeatedly in this thread.
 
Ok, time to repost this:

The reasoning has been explained repeatedly in this thread.

Oops sorry.

Not really, no.

Keep in mind that I'm talking about the people who created the hack to begin with. Not the people trying to use the hack. The hackers are more than capable of building their own emulation station. However I see the appeal of having the Nintendo shell on your shelf even though it's not a real NES. Anyway I won't bring it up again.
 

v0yce

Member
I don't see the point in hacking something like this. I mean if you're capable of doing it, then you're capable of setting up a Rasberry Pi or similar device to give you all the games so why even buy the Classic to begin with?

Interesting.
 
That's good stuff. Map for Metroid and for Zelda is super helpful. I remember playing Metroid as a kid and using graph paper to map out things. PITA but worth it. LOL

My foster-dad was going through a closet before Christmas and found my hand drawn Zelda 2 dungeon maps. Super nostalgic. I did that for so many games.
 

sibarraz

Banned
There were several NES games that had enhanced releases on the FDS. Notably, there's Vs Excitebike, which is much more polished than the original game (and has background music!), but there are other games like Mario Bros. that saw enhanced ports as well.

Not all FDS games are better, though. Castlevania II on the FDS has much worse music, for example.


Also, FDS games have two main differences from regular NES games:
1) FDS games have an extra sound channel for enhanced music and sound effects.
2) FDS games can write to disk (like Zelda 1 and 2). Very useful for Metroid and Kid Icarus, but it also is useful for games with Edit modes like Excitebike.



I don't think that will work because the Konami VRC6 chip that the Japanese release uses is very likely not emulated. The game didn't even get released on the Japanese virtual console for that reason. (Or at least not the 3DS virtual console...)

Castlevania 3 has a different version on Japan?
 
The guy that made this tool said that the emulator was a bit shit. It has been optimised and tested for the 30 original games but other games have issues. Battletoads plays fine until you get to the second level, Star Wars looks like it's running well but the first level is all mixed up. So there will be plenty of games that will 'run' but not be perfect, I guess you're shit out of luck.

At some point someone is going to play some game and make it to the final boss through blood, sweat and tears only to find that it glitches up.
Oh wow... thanks for your reply. So good luck for me finding games that do work.
 
I couldn't get this to work. :(

Followed the instructions that came up when clicking upload games to NES, and it would begin the process, but then instantly gave me a prompt that The Specified File Couldn't Be Found.

When I tried to load the original kernel back onto it, it kept getting hung up half way through saying that it was waiting on the NES to respond. Had to restart the process 4 times before it would finally upload the original kernel again.

Tested to make sure that it was still functional and it is, but I was worried for a minute that I might have bricked it.
 

F34R

Member
I was able to find one today by accident lol, at my local WalMart. Woot. I already have Pi, and the Analogue NT Mini on the way, but this was icing on the cake; so to speak of course.
 
Hakchi 2.02 released

Just from looking at it, it seems this release allows you to set the number of players as well as whether or not they're simultaneous - I think this is just for the UI to change the color of the "2P" icon.

It appears a lot of fixes were made to the process of actually flashing the custom kernel file, so those that had errors with the previous version might find this version useful.

Is this the most recent version? I was told there was a version out that does NOT require a save file of Mario Bros not sure if this is it..also am really confused about the whole 1-2 player thing I have 16 games that I want to add, I havent done this yet but really not sure how this works dont want to brick the console
 
Is this the most recent version? I was told there was a version out that does NOT require a save file of Mario Bros not sure if this is it..also am really confused about the whole 1-2 player thing I have 16 games that I want to add, I havent done this yet but really not sure how this works dont want to brick the console

This is all you need, including the latest files and exes:

http://clusterrr.com/soft/hakchi2.zip

(Currently 2.0.5)

Doesn't require any sort of Mario Bros save file.

However, due to the false positive virus notifications in the previous package, you will need to download Zadig Util for the driver.

Edit: And it's pretty simple, I don't think anyone has bricked their console yet. The tool itself is super straightforward once you launch it. Dump your kernel (as a backup), and then click add game to add each game you want, selecting 1P/2P/2P Simultaneous, release date, and choosing the box art (can google search from directly in the tool). Once you are done, make sure everything that you want game-wise is checked and then click the button to send them all to your system. That's all there is to it.
 
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