Dirty NES Glitches

Existential Dread is part of the fun

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is notorious for it's unreliability. In fact, half of everyone's nostalgia for it consists of blowing on cartridges. Nobody ever stops to think about why any of this is. Long story short: Nintendo didn't want anyone to know the NES was a video game. This was a reasonable position to take back then. Nintendo had no choice but to redesign the Family Computer (Famicom) if they wanted to release it in North America. Along with a drastic change in aesthetic, they completely redesigned it internally. With composite output and detachable controllers, the NES allowed the Famicom to become what could have been the best version of itself.

These are both the same machine

Unfortunately, the redesign introduced flaws so massive that they fundamentally change the experience. The Famicom, for all of it's problems, is an extremely reliable piece of hardware. The NES? Well, if the title image doesn't give you war flashbacks, you're either tremendously lucky or have never used one of these things.

The NES' cartridge port is fundamentally flawed. Most cartridge ports before and after were effectively self cleaning. Imagine you're inserting a game into a Sega Genesis or Game Boy Advance. You're going to feel resistance. The ports pins are scraping against the pins on the cartridge. This cleans them both and keeps the console from becoming finicky. It's not perfect, but it's far more effective than what the NES tried to do.

The ZIF connector in action

What the NES did is referred to as "Zero insertion Force". By design, the pins don't scrap against anything. You put the game in, press the cartridge down, and thats that. Any filth in your game is going to find its way right into your console. The port is deep inside too, making it tough to clean.

This is a horrible design. Once the problem became apparent, they needed to invent new tools just to clean the thing. Unlike a Genesis or a Super Nintendo, you couldn't just open a flap and clean it with an old toothbrush and some alcohol. In my experience, the cleaning kits didn't work. Nintendo explicitly claimed that rubbing alcohol could harm your game, so we didn't use it. Whatever solvent they included with the kit wasn't as effective.

Furthermore, once Game Genie came around, the problems only got worse. The Game Genie required a thicker than normal board to function. It needed to make contact with the cartridge port without depressing the tray. This thick board would actively destroy the pin connector. The thing would basically stretch the port out. Over time, it became impractical to use the console without a Game Genie.

To this day, people talk about how normal usage of the console would in time, bend the cartridge pins down. I don't think this is true. I've been using the same console since 2009. That's 17 years from the time I'm writing this. I've only ever needed to clean my pin connector. I've never needed to bend them back into shape.

Getting back on track, every last one of the things I mentioned will make your time with the NES a pain in the ass. You end up spending more time preventing games from crashing than actually playing them.

To add insult to injury, the NES also had a primitive form of DRM built in. This wasn't the case for the Famicom. It's almost like they had to screw something up for each improvement they made. You gotta balance things out, you know?

the chip responsible for everything

They called it the 10NES chip, and it’s responsible for everything wrong with your life when you were six. There's one in the game and one in the NES. These two chips must be in perfect sync in order for the game to boot. Since the cartridge port is poorly designed, you’ll often find yourself dealing with a game that works perfectly, but isn't being properly authenticated by the DRM. That one single pin isn't making the connection the 10NES wants. This'll manifest as the legendary blinking light. You'll see the games title screen, you'll hear it's music, but you can't play because the console is constantly resetting itself. Generally, you could solve this problem by wiggling the cartridge a bit and powering the game on. This can easily devolve into a massive point of failure and lead people to think the console is dead. If you were playing one of the few games that had the ability to save, may God have mercy on you because the 10NES won't. The act of power cycling the console in order to fix this had the nasty side effect of wiping out save data.

Sometimes, the 10NES would fail mid game. What? You thought the chips only worked at boot? Nope. They need to communicate continuously. Every single microsecond that your NES is powered on, those chips are talking. The slightest interruption, no matter how minor, will trigger it and kill your game. My grandmother once gently brushed against the wall near my NES and the vibration set it off. It was relentless and excessive. Both SNES and N64 had similar DRM. Those were properly implemented, so you rarely see them trigger. Even if you did, you'd never know it.

gives a whole new meaning to "crash"

Game's weren't easy in the NES days. You couldn't save, you'd constantly be getting your ass kicked, and the looming threat of random uncontrollable crashes hung over you like the Sword of Damocles. We were used to it, and it led to us not taking any of these games too seriously. I didn't beat Super Mario Bros. 3 without warping because I was skilled, I got lucky. Grandma didn't graze any doorways, the dog was outside, and no molecules decided to randomly shift or briefly lose conductivity.

How NES Games store Graphics internally. Look familiar?

Unlike most video game consoles, the NES had a tendency to keep running despite severe graphical glitching. Traditionally, an NES cartridge consists of a PRG-ROM - which contains game code, and a CHR-ROM for graphics. These two chips communicate with the the CPU and the PPU respectively. The CPU is self explanatory. PPU is short for Picture Processing unit, and is more or less isolated.

The PPU has little interest in talking to the CPU. Allow me to explain as simply as I can: the PPU loads an abstract pattern table from the cartridge (see above). The CPU will give it instructions on how to arrange everything to make it look like something. It'll tell the PPU "Hey! Put Tile $A5 over here!" but it doesn't know or care what tile $A5 actually looks like. the PPU will simply reference whatever it sees and place it.

Now, Let's say the cartridge connector is making perfect contact with the CPU, but poor contact with the PPU. what'll happen?

this

You could boot up Duck Hunt, and end up with something that sounds and plays like Duck Hunt, but visually is a scrambled abomination. This was always a treat because it was infrequent. often the connection would be so tenuous that you could actively see it struggling. Lines would flicker back and forth, Mario’s face and legs would be swapped, The Duck Hunt Dog would have two faces – weird stuff.

My copy of Quattro Adventure was always dirty. I don’t think that I ever saw what Linus Spacehead was supposed to look like. His entire body would always be a garbled mess. We never played Quattro Adventure because it sucks, but If I wanted to see this in action, that’s where I knew I needed to go. Sometimes we actively wanted to see graphical glitches. We'd screw with the cart with varying results. Often we'd only get jail-bars. Occasionally we'd stumble upon something wild though.

I love it when NES games boot into the wrong thing. Imagine putting in Mega Man 5 and seeing a random glitched up stage instead of the title screen. This happened to me more than once, with multiple different games.

Dragon Warrior used to boot to something like this sometimes

When I first tried to play Dragon Warrior, all I could get it to show was the above. It would loop that animation over and over again. Of all the strange things I've seen an NES do, this is the top. I still can't explain it.

Other instances of this include:

• Tetris booting into the rocket sequence and launching a glitch rocket


• Double Dragon booting to a garbled screen while the Game Over music plays repeatedly


• Super Mario Bros./ Duck Hunt booting straight to Duck Hunt.

That last one doesn't sound so bad but listen: I was afraid of Duck Hunt growing up. I don't even remember when it happened. I remember being afraid it would happen again. When I was in my mid 20's, I repaired an NES. While testing it, I triggered this one. I felt quite vindicated when I saw it, actually.

what my child brain probably saw

There was once an instance where every single glitch imaginable happened all at once. Upon booting Mega Man 5 the lockout chip was blasting that reset circuit, and it was booting into a garbled Gravity Man’s stage. Another time, Mega Man rode his jetski clean through the opening cutscene. It was ridiculous.

I truly wish I could recreate these on command but I can't. Inducing them in an emulator just isn't the same, either. Being caught off guard by one of these is one of the weirdest experiences you can have with any game console.

my favorite air fortress level

You've got to understand, this isn't the norm anymore for me. In fact, I had to induce the examples seen in this article. Keeping your NES clean and treating your games with respect makes a world of difference.

During the winter months of 2022, I played through all of Final Fantasy III on my newly repaired childhood NES. The same exact NES that gave me the issues I've been bitching about this whole article. I used an Everdrive, and plugged multiple weeks of play into it. It’s completely unmodded, so the lockout chip could have started its shit, but never did. I don’t recall it crashing once, even after hours and hours of play.

Unless you're someone like me that grew up with this stuff, there's no good reason to play an actual NES anymore. Even if you can repair it, just use an emulator. The official Nintendo one is fine, and you can even buy proper controllers for it. The emulation doesn't have any issues and the controller is as close to the original as you're going to get. There's some input lag, but it's only bad for games like Punch Out. Furthermore, it's on hardware you almost certainly have already and is bundled with a bunch of other crap you'll probably want. I'd be surprised if anyone reading this didn't already have access to these. Of course, you can emulate however you want. All I'm saying is that it's the quickest, simplest way to play NES games on a TV with an authentic controller.

I find it amusing that people have been emulating NES longer than it was ever on the market. NESTICLE popped up nearly 30 years ago and while it had issues, they were nothing when compared to the kind of crap the real thing was doing. As time passes, the things I experienced as a child will cease to be common knowledge. One thing from this era will always persist though. You'll never see a NES clone that doesn't have a pin connector so tight you'll need pliers to remove your games. That's the legacy of Nintendo's first time to bat in America. That is of course, if you look past the fact that Nintendo went on to legitimize and subsequently dominate* an industry for the next 40+ years because of it.