Dirty NES Glitches

Existential Dread is part of the fun

The Original Model NES was/is notorious for its ridiculously bad cartridge port design. That cartridge port was a bottleneck that led to all sorts of strange situations affecting children who just wanted to play video games. The reason it’s terrible is very simple, It’s prone to becoming really dirty. People will try to bullshit you into believing that the ZIF connector is being stretched out with normal use, but it isn't. Don't believe the nonsense.

Because the NES utilized a ZIF connector, there was very little friction between it and the cartridge inserted into it. Because of this, filth builds up on the cartridges, as well as the connector. When you insert/remove a cartridge from an N64 or a Sega Genesis, the cartridge and the connector are scraping against one another, and in doing so, removing any kind of filth build up on both. This contributes to a better connection in the long run. I always suspected this to be the case, but it wasn’t until I read Console5’s Tech Wiki a few years ago where I can solidly state for certain that it’s the case. Whoever wrote that came to almost the same conclusion as I had. If you’re going to repair an NES, use that guide, it’s the best on the internet.

Even without the terrible cartridge port, the NES is weirdly designed by the standards of today. The mechanism within it that detects whether games are authentic or not is straight up tacked on. Essentially, it’s an IC, a “lockout chip”, that’s been hooked up to the reset line that will continuously trigger the reset line until it talks to another identical IC found in the cartridge. This is the 10NES chip, and it’s responsible for everything wrong with your life when you were 6. These two chips must be in perfect sync in order for the game to boot, and stay running. Because the cartridge port sucks so hard, you’d often have situations where you’d boot up a game, and the software would run perfectly fine, but those two lockout chips weren’t talking, so instead of playing Dragon Warrior, you’re watching the games title screen flash at you over and over again. Good luck with your save file, because half the time that happened, I’d lose mine.

Sometimes, the lockout chips would stop communicating mid game. What? You thought it only checked for a handshake at boot? No, it is continuous. Every minute that the console is playing a game, the 10NES is ensuring that there is a proper connection between itself and it’s brother inside the cartridge.

Emulators don’t do the 90’s NES experience justice because they lack a feature where everything suddenly stops working for no reason. Emulator developers should create what I call “90’s Mode”. I was a developing fetus in the 80’s, so I never got the opportunity to enjoy NES games in that era. What I do know, via anecdotal evidence, is that these consoles slowly declined over time. When you had your NES in the 80’s at worst, it’d need to have the cart blown into. They hadn’t spent enough time festering in everyone’s dusty, cigarette smoke ridden homes yet. My childhood NES spent multiple years sitting under my parents TV, near the floor, caked in cigarette smoke 24 hours a day. Your house could be relatively clean, and if you or someone else smokes in it, you’re asking for your electronics to die. 90’s mode would be regular old NES emulation, but it’s prone to crashing suddenly and/or graphically bugging up. I don’t know how they’d implement this, but NES emulation isn’t perfect until it’s added. Half of the fun of playing NES as a child was the fact that it could crash at random at any time. It wasn’t even something that I considered a problem. it’s just how things were.

gives a whole new meaning to "crash"

You’d be playing Super Mario Bros 3, you’re up to the 6th world, you’ve never seen it, there’s ice everywhere, you’re stone cold focused—- suddenly, the screen goes black, and you see those familiar red curtains, then it goes black again –red curtains, black — red curtains. Your soul leaves your body some time between the first and 3rd cycle of this, never to return. What was worse is walking into the kitchen to get something and hearing this happen because your dog had the audacity to walk into the room. Any little vibration would trigger it, Dogs, Grandma, Siblings, didn’t matter. Since it’s resetting in second long intervals,, you’ll hear the first few notes of the game's title screen play repeatedly. DUN DUN DUH DUH DUH—-------------DUN DUN DUH DUH DUH —--------- DUN DUN DUH DUH DUH—------ All of this, because the dogs tail knocked the console. You can’t can’t blame the dog, it’s a dog, it loves you and everyone else. The 10NES doesn’t care, and is the most vicious murderer in history.

The NES is also weird because the CPU and the Graphics Processor, or Picture Processing Unit as it’s referred to, act more or less independently from each other. There’s definitely some synchronization there, but you won't see the program crash because the contacts that send graphical information from the cart to the console are dirty. They’re on separate buses, and only communicate via a very specific route. You could boot up Mega Man 5, and end up with something that sounds and plays like Mega Man 5, but visually is a scrambled abomination. This was always a treat when it happened because it was infrequent. Sometimes the contacts between the cartridge and the console would be so tenuously connected that you could see it struggling to maintain whatever picture it was drawing. Lines would flicker back and forth, Mario’s face and legs would be swapped, Stone Man’s eyes would be missing – weird stuff. Whenever we played Quattro Adventure, the NES was constantly in a state like this. I don’t think that I ever saw what Linus Spacehead was supposed to look like as a child, because 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.

My favorites were always when games would boot into the wrong thing. This “feature” of the NES is bizarre. For reasons I don’t completely understand, two different NES games I owned would boot into a random scenario on occasion. Mega Man 5 comes to mind, where my cartridge was so dirty it would sometimes boot straight to Gravity Man’s stage. The other scenario was with Dragon Warrior.

I would often get this instead of a title screen while booting Dragon Warrior

My copy of Dragon Warrior was dirty, and would power on straight into the animation that plays when the DragonLord assumes his final form. Imagine a black screen, with a blue fire breathing dragon phasing into existence over and over again. The GIF above isn't of the glitch, I had to recreate it from memory because I couldn't recreate it. Of all the problems caused by the NES hardware, this is the most fascinating to me by a wide margin. I had no context for what this was back then, so it was creepy and confusing. It made the game seen even more mysterious then it already was.

I can easily explain the other two problems, but I still don’t fully understand this one. In the case of Dragon Warrior, this happened the very first time I ever tried to play it. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and gave up on it for a time because that’s all I could get it to show. I know this sounds insane, but believe me, it was very real.

Super Mario Bros./ Duck Hunt was a weird case, I don’t know if it could be categorized with the other two mentioned examples. Rather than boot into a random level, this one would occasionally just boot straight to Duck Hunt. When I was 4 or 5, I was deathly afraid of Duck Hunt because of its title music and the way the dog would pop up out of the grass. While I don’t remember when this happened the first time, I remember being afraid of it happening again. It wouldn’t be until I was in my mid 20’s messing around with an NES I’d just repaired that I’d see this happen again. I’m glad I saw it, cause it meant I wasn’t crazy.

what my child brain probably saw

my favorite air fortress level

NES glitches like these haven’t happened to me in years because when I do play NES, I usually use an AVS or some kind of Famicom variant. I had to induce the examples used in this article, so forgive me for that. During the winter months of 2022, I played through all of Final Fantasy III on my newly repaired childhood NES. 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. Having a clean NES makes a world of difference. I don’t recall it crashing once, even after hours and hours of play.

Young people these days have no interest in the NES. They see it at best as a novelty and at worst as something completely unworthy of the time required to master. I’m not surprised, but it does sadden me until I remember I viewed Atari stuff in the same way growing up I never bothered attempting to emulate the 2600. I bought one and used the real hardware. Imagine if someone were to do what I did today with the NES. It’d put them off of it forever. That’s ignoring the fact that the television they’d be using would be fundamentally incompatible with the console. What about controllers? There’s so many garbage bootleg controllers being released these days. The days of using NES hardware to play NES games are long over, and I’m fully aware of that. The barrier to entry for new users is way, way too high. Emulation is the way to go and that’s fine. Part of what makes the NES so memorable as a kid were these hardware induced glitches though. In spite of how annoying they were, I’ll miss them, and I lament the fact that others will never experience them.