Defeating NES lockouts

[Azathoth]

The story of Tengen's team going about defeating the NES lockout chip is well documented, and I've ran across a tidbit or two about Color Dream's efforts. I'm assuming whatever chip Color Dreams designed was used in the Sachen/Bunch Games titles that were produced for the NES. Seems like I ran across some info about Codemasters also.

What about other NES pirates? I don't own any to personally inspect them, so I'm curious how some of the these operate. Although the companies I mentioned above are about the only unlicensed NES cart manufacturers with legit games I've seen quite a few single game and multi-game cartridges in NES shells.

Surely these companies didn't use 60-72 pin converters in each cartridge, did they?

[Pepper-98]

I remember Gyromite using a converter to run the game, but the only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is HES' pass-through technology.  It doesn't work on its own, but it's pretty clever since it works no matter what revisions Nintendo makes to its NES system, and it defeats any risk of accidentally screwing something up, which I believe was a concern with cracking lockout technology.

As for Color Dreams, they apparently did their own cracking, and had to make different lockout chip revisions to keep their games running on the system.  There's an interview with Jim Meuer and other staffers from the company on this page.  (It goes more into it later in the article)

[Azathoth]

I just realized that it wasn't Color Dreams that distributed Sachen games but AVE.

I don't seem to remember reading anything about AVE's lockout chip programming, is there any information available about it?

[Pepper-98]

Azathoth

Dec 11 2011, 11:16:17 PM

I just realized that it wasn't Color Dreams that distributed Sachen games but AVE.

I don't seem to remember reading anything about AVE's lockout chip programming, is there any information available about it? [/quote]Actually, they both distributed Sachen games.  Color Dreams published Metal Fighter, Silent Assault, and Master Chu & the Drunkard Hu, while their Bunch Games branch released Galactic Crusader, Colorful Dragon (as Tagin Dragon), and Mission Cobra.  AVE published Pyramid (Non-adult version, of course) and Twin Eagle (as Double Strike).

As for AVE's attempts, there's this page that lists the attempts by Color Dreams, Camerica, AVE, and Tengen.  Aside from their own(?) lockout chips, AVE eventually included instructions on opening up the NES system and disabling it yourself.  There's also this forum page that talks about their lockout chips, which are apparently developed by Macronix.