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Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

> Sadly you can't use your original NES carts with the console - something even the most basic "Famiclone" offers - and there doesn't seem to be any means of getting new games onto it.

Would it really have been that much extra effort to make the console backwards compatible?

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Including a compatible cartridge reader? Of course that's a lot of effort and costs, making the price point untenable.

The beautiful thing about his console is that for the price of a new Nintendo game you're getting the console and 30 games, without any hassle (swapping cartridges etc.).

It's certainly a compromise, but a very enticing one.

The NES cartridge's pin pitch is nonstandard, and making a new slot for it is actually a very expensive endeavor. You can get "close" with standard parts, but the resulting tolerance is extremely low.

Don't you recall how unreliable that media/interface was? I don't think most carts aged well.

The ZIF connector on the original NES was unreliable. The carts are perfectly reliable. The NES 2 does not have the ZIF connector and doesn't have issues.

> The carts are perfectly reliable

Depends on the cartridge. Any of the ones with a battery save (like Zelda or Final Fantasy) need to be opened up, have the welded in battery clipped off the board, have a CR2032 socket soldered on instead, and then put a new battery in and reassemble.

It's a LOT of pain to get a NES cart with a dead battery working again. That's probably why they opted not to put a slot in this thing -- many people's dusty old carts are dead, and not knowing any better, they'd blame the new console.

Replacing the battery takes a couple minutes. Many of those carts are still running. The number of decent NES games that used battery saving can be counted on your hands, so to call it a LOT of pain might be exaggerating a little.

A "couple of minutes" for a confident, competent solderer, which excludes about 99% of the target market for this thing. (Here's how to do it, if anyone's curious: http://www.retronintendoreviews.com/nes-cartridge-battery-re...)

And while overall most NES games didn't use a battery, many of the most popular ones (many of the ones included in this thing, in fact) do need a working battery. Final Fantasy, both zeldas, startropics, tecmo bowl, crystallis, kirby's adventure...

If Crystalis has a battery-backed save system it's news to me. And I've beaten the game on the original hardware.

Crystalis absolutely has a save/continue system. You can see some guy demonstrating the save system in crystalis in this video, complete with save functionality: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=73za3LHWzwk

Are you thinking of some other game?

Incredible. I owned the game for years, played it a lot, beat it once, and never noticed a way to save, so I assumed you couldn't. I even had the manual!

I think it's fair, Remember being 12?

Then again, when I was 12, my elders we're a very different set of folks.

But blowing the cart and hoping it would work was part of the fun.

I hope (and assume) it could be updated somehow though e.g. usb or micro sd

The blowing actually damaged the connectors, though:

http://nerdist.com/we-blow-into-video-game-cartridges-becaus...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/12589/did-blowing-nintendo-ca...

They do pretty well if you keep both the carts and the console clean. I have an original that works as well as it did when it was new. You had to blow on the games then too. :-) (By keep them clean I mean that you have to actively clean them periodically.)

> Would it really have been that much extra effort to make the console backwards compatible?

Depends if it's a NES on a chip type system like most clones, or if it's something like an ARM SoC device running an emulator[1]. If it's the former it would be possible with just space issues for the slot, the latter would be quite hard, certainly more trouble than worth for a cheap novelty device.

[1] It uses Wii controllers and has save states so it seems a bit more than the average clone at least.

Anyone who has cartridges that they would care to play has a console already. What possible business benefit is there to adding that in?

The original consoles won't last forever. It would be nice to have a backup option for when it dies.

I would bet that the people who still have original NES cartridges are people who still have a working NES, or one of many HD-compatible clones. This is not a product for them. This is a product for people who played NES games when they were young and now will buy this to get a gust of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with that, of course.

It would have been much larger. As in, the exact size of the original.

There was a later version of the NES console that was smaller than the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System_...

Considering they'd have to add a physical interface for said games then make sure that whatever emulator they're using can emulate perfectly, yes.

At this point, just rerelease the original?

Yeah, I was hoping this tiny emulator would play SNES and N64 carts as well as GameCube discs. I mean seriously how much extra effort would it have been?

Probably a lot more actually. Tons more hardware for all the interfaces, (including a disk reader). And much beefier hardware to emulate a GameCube.

Yeah, I didn't realize that. Thought it would be super simple to make a product designed to do one thing do something completely different.

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