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

Ashler

Member
How long until hackers reverse engineer the UI to show/load more than 60 games in the UI?

Will be interesting to follow this.
 

Harlock

Member
If Nintendo hard block this in the next wave of hardware you can pay your medical bills selling the current version.
 

VARIA

Member
If Nintendo hard block this in the next wave of hardware you can pay your medical bills selling the current version.

Would not be surprised if Nintendo removes the micro USB port and replaces it with just a power plug like the 3DS for the next revision.
 

Koren

Member
It's not as if you could buy one :/

I hope they don't postpone the next batches because of this, and also they don't remove the power-over-USB part, because that's far more convenient than a dedicated power port, especially if your TV or A/V receiver can power it...

why "lol"? You can already do this in good PCs with good screens. Also, before someone says "lol @ thinking casuals will learn how to emulate", you really think they're going to take the time to learn how to hack a NES Classic (assuming it's not braindead easy)?
From what I understand, it could be done "braindead easy", I can see people distributing ready-to-use software that just require to plug the Nes Mini into a PC and replace the original 30 with a batch of 60.

Edit: well, apparently, it's already done...
 

hemo memo

Gold Member
Chû Totoro;227824531 said:
Agree. And with a Mac tutorial please ^^
else I'll have to do this at work :p

img_160230b6q.jpg
 
Sadly by license problem we will never get Star Fox, Stunt Race, Yoshi's Island and Super Mario RPG into it.

Argonaut's license on Super FX ran out a long time ago. Also Super Mario RPG used SA-1, not SuperFX.


So what happens if you play a Famicom game that has a special audio chip, like VRC6 and VRC7?

Automatic verification of supported mappers

Sounds like there are a lot of games it is incompatible with. Why program for mappers/special hardware that they weren't using.
 

jett

D-Member
Argonaut's license on Super FX ran out a long time ago. Also Super Mario RPG used SA-1, not SuperFX.






Sounds like there are a lot of games it is incompatible with. Why program for mappers/special hardware that they weren't using.

Figures, thanks.
 

Chucker

Member
The lightning in the Ninja Gaiden II intro throws the seizure protection, I wonder how it's going to handle stage 3.
Hrm.

Edit: a LITTLE of the effect on some of the lightning.
Edit: AUGH, when you move its ramped up. The lightning that is supposed to help you is now a hindrance.
 

MooMilk2929

Junior Member
I guess just the method used before had a max of 60 games. In that thread the guy said he flashed 64 plus the included 30. I don't know if he really means 64 + 30 or just 64. Either way it's still more than 60.

Warning tho, some people are getting virus warnings using that program.
 

bl4ck_b4rt

Neo Member
Interesting to hear the anti seizure stuff is built in (judging form Castlevania 3 impressions)

You probably know it already but this is interesting reading regarding emulators and latency:
https://byuu.org/articles/latency/

Great page, thanks for the link! This caught my interest:

Input Polling

Most games are going to poll input once per frame. But pathological cases can and do exist. Especially prominent is that there are certain devs that like to troll emulator authors and will do things like put out a mini-game that hammers the input polling thousands of times a second if we leave an opening there.​

Pretty funny if that was the intent. I could read about countermeasures like this all day...some of the most unique ideas in gaming are never seen by the gamer.
 
Went from "I'll get one some day" to "Better setup an alert and stand in line". This is cool. Im not sure why people come in the thread just to say "there are other options". Everyone on gaf knows there are other option. I have a pi3 right next to me. But the mini is simplicity. I can give it to my grandma and not worry about a thing kind of simplicity. Pi doesn't give that.
 

13ruce

Banned
Now i need one more, sadly it's still sold out c'mon Nintendo why make the stock so low lmao. It could have sold millions if they prepared it right with a good amount of stock, ofcourse everyone that loves retro gaming wants one.
 
I have one Nintendo CLassic that I bought launch day still in its box, I didn't open it because I put together a Pi 3 with retropie.

Will watch the development of this project with great interest and then will decide what to do, installing SNES Emulators or N64 Emulators might not be out of the realm of possibilities now, the problem will be the controllers for those emulators I guess.
 

Koren

Member
Pretty funny if that was the intent. I could read about countermeasures like this all day...some of the most unique ideas in gaming are never seen by the gamer.
I don't think that was the intent. In older hardware, reading input was not that much more complicated than reading an hardware register, so it was basically free. So it was perfectly fine reading it 1000s of times per second. Why avoid it if you can?

You can quite easily avoid the issue in emulators if you think about it with some caching (if a input is read and the last input read is e.g. less than 0.5ms old, just give back the last reading instead of polling the gamepad). Granted, that would add a 0.5ms input lag, but it's quite small (usually people are complaining about 30-100ms) and you could set it as a parameter.

But that indeed may be an insidious bug that produce lower performances for emulators in some games.
 

Koren

Member
I'm glad i saw this thread, now i have a reason to power my nes classic that i bought on impulse. Coolio!
Curious to know which NES game(s) unavailable in the original device makes such a difference?

(I wish I could buy one, I would enjoy the thing just for Bubble Bobble, even it there wasn't a couple other interesting games)
 

xrnzaaas

Member
I wonder how Nintendo will respond to this, especially if they have NES Classic 2 with another 30 games planned.
 
Curious to know which NES game(s) unavailable in the original device makes such a difference?

It's not necessarily to play more/certain games for some, people enjoy tinkering with stuff because they can. There are many people in the 3DS Homebrew thread going through the trouble of hacking their system then only to go like "What do I with this now?", or just put some custom themes on it and call it a day. Sometimes the appeal is the journey and not the destination :p
 

linkboy

Member
I have one Nintendo CLassic that I bought launch day still in its box, I didn't open it because I put together a Pi 3 with retropie.

Will watch the development of this project with great interest and then will decide what to do, installing SNES Emulators or N64 Emulators might not be out of the realm of possibilities now, the problem will be the controllers for those emulators I guess.

Not a problem at all with 8bitdo's adapter.
 
I'm actually kind of surprised they were dumb enough to leave a dev mode in. Then again Nintendo seems incapable of shipping anything truly secure.

I had assumed this used a masked ROM, too, but maybe masked ROMs are more expensive than flash now because economies of scale.
 
Just as an FYI, here's a list of mappers the emulator supports. It's pretty limited so no weird-ass chips:

0 (NROM), 1 (MMC1), 2 (UxROM), 3 (CNROM), 4 (MMC3), 5 (MMC5), 7 (AxROM), 9 (MMC2), 10 (MMC4)
 

kswiston

Member
I'm actually kind of surprised they were dumb enough to leave a dev mode in. Then again Nintendo seems incapable of shipping anything truly secure.

I had assumed this used a masked ROM, too, but maybe masked ROMs are more expensive than flash now because economies of scale.

I don't think they care. ROMs for all of these games have been in the wild for well over 20 years. 10s of millions of people have pirated NES/SNES stuff. What will no doubt be a single digit percentage of NES Classic owners hacking their console makes zero difference.
 
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