Dirty NES Glitches

Existential Dread is part of the fun

The Original Model NES was/is notorious for its bizarre design choices. What started as an effort to differentiate itself from its predecessors became the bane of every child's existence. Nintendo didn’t want anyone to think that the NES was a video game console. Reasonable, considering what video game consoles were prior to the NES, I wouldn’t want to be involved with that crowd either. The redesigned console they came up with was more VCR like, and had two major upgrades. With composite output and detachable controllers, the NES allowed the Famicom to become what could have been the best version of itself. Have you every used a Famicom? It's rough, to say the least.

Unfortunately, the redesign also 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 image above doesn't give you war flashbacks, you're either tremendously lucky or have never used the hardware.

The NES’ cartridge port was a severe bottleneck, and that led to all sorts of bizarre situations affecting these poor children who just wanted to play video games.

Because the NES utilized a ZIF connector, there was very little friction between itself and the cartridge inserted into it. Dust and other filth would naturally build up on the cartridge contacts. This is stuff that is imperceptible to people, but problematic when it comes to maintaining electrical signals. When kids put these dirty games into their Nintendo, that filth was then deposited into the machine. What makes this different from any other cartridge based system?

The ZIF connector in action

It’s the ZIF connector. Zero Insertion Force. There’s no friction between the cartridge and the receiving port. That missing friction would have scraped off the gunk and polished both sets of pins. This is what's going on in every other console that uses cartridges. These console pin connectors, which are mostly top loading (Intellivision had it on the side), had tight, rigid grips and as a result, they functioned better. Not because they had the tight grip, but because that particular type of port was self cleaning.

I always suspected this to be the case, but I wasn’t certain until I read Console5’s Tech Wiki a few years ago. They stated the same as I’d suspected, and since they have the best NES repair manual on the entire internet, I’m gonna go ahead and assume they’re right. Though I will say, It’s not unlikely that two people can come to the same wrong conclusions using the exact same logic. People have really latched on to the idea that the pins aren’t making a connection due to lack of grip. In my experience, this isn’t true with a clean NES. Whatever the reason, it sucked back then, and every kid knew it.

Even without the terrible cartridge port, the NES’ tacked on what we’d now call DRM. The Japanese version of the console had no such thing. Both the console and the game had matching “lock" and “key” authenticator chips. The Lock was within the console, and would trip the reset line continuously unless it could detect a signal generated by the key chip, within each game cartridge.

They called it 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. 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. May God have mercy on your save file, because the 10NES won’t. It happened constantly when I was a kid, and I’d lose my save every time.

the asshole responsible for everything, seen here within a game

Sometimes, the 10NES would fail mid game. What’s that?? You thought the lock only needed the key at boot? Absolutely not! This is a continuous process. Every second that the console is playing a game, the 10NES is ensuring that there is a proper connection between itself and its counterpart within the cartridge. Anything, no matter how minor, could screw this up. My grandmother once gently brushed against the wall adjacent to the NES, and the minor, minor vibration triggered the 10NES and it wiped my game of Double Dragon right there. It was absolutely relentless about crashing whenever and however it could for any reason it wanted.

Emulators don’t do the 90’s NES experience justice. 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, you'd need to blow into the cart. 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 a regular old NES emulation, but it’s prone to sudden, unexplainable crashes and 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 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 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. 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, especially when I was 4 and 5, we actively wanted to see graphical glitches. most commonly, you’d get jailbars going down the screen. I still see this sometimes today, under normal use. They would just kind of show up mid game. Sometimes, it’d only be the sprites, other times, the whole screen. Sometimes both the sprites and the background layer would have their own personal set of jailbars each. How adorable. Other times, you’d get what people referred to as “scrambling”

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 floating around, waiting in silence for a chance to ruin your life. 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. Download the Switch App, or use some other method. Playing NES on an NES isn't worth it if you're not already involved with the hardware. You don't need me to tell you that. For me, part of what made the NES so memorable as a kid were these hardware induced glitches. In spite of how annoying they were, I’ll miss them, and I lament the fact that others will never experience them.