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