Reincarnating the NES

IGN has a piece on a modern NES clone, the NEX. Well constructed and designed to recapture a gamer's enthusiasm for the 80's gaming juggernaut, they have a rundown on the deck's features and extras. From the article: "Though there have been some rather weak attempts to remake the NES/Famicom prior to the NEX, Messiah really put some work into the production to make the NEX feel deserving of the love its users no doubt feel for the original. The device itself is small, cute, and very reminiscent of its forefathers with a front-loading NES cartridge slot and a top loading Famicom slot. The controller jacks are the same as the original NES, meaning you are welcome to use your original controllers if you still have some. Even the packaging is attractive, and the Generation NEX kit includes a cartridge-shaped manual in a slip case, packed with instructions written and illustrated in action-comic-book style and a mini rarity guide developed by Digital Press."

Comments

A cheaper option.

[Rowan_u]

One of the greatest gaming uses I've discovered for my laptop is a couple of emulators and this device from lik-sang.com. It allows you to use one of the best controllers of all time to play your favorite NES SNES and MAME games. It works flawlessly, is cheap (if you have the PC already), and doesn't require the complicated process of blowing/erasing the connections on aging game carts.

Re:Legal?

[badasscat]

I read this article the other day and still wonder how it's possible to release this system without any flak from Nintendo. This is considered legal?

It's not only *considered* legal, it is legal.

The NES was reverse-engineered years ago. And all of their important patents have expired as well. Anyone has free reign to build a famiclone these days, and in fact nearly all of the retro-consoles on the market right now (with some notable exceptions like the Flashback 2 and the C64 joystick thing) are famicoms-on-a-chip running emulated software.

Nintendo doesn't like it but there's not a thing they can do about it. What they do do every once in a while is find a manufacturer that's including game ROMs with their famiclones and bust them for that. Then they word their press release such that it looks like the real issue was "unauthorized consoles" and the headlines end up saying things like "Nintendo busts NES clone manufacturer!" But it's always the ROMs that are the real issue - obviously the copyright on actual content still applies.

If you just sell the hardware, though, anybody is free to do so.

Re:Talk to me when....

[Yst]

The biggest problem for most would-be NES gamers though, I think, isn't scarcity or loss of carts. Most popular NES games, like popular Atari carts, are fairly abundant, so even if you've lost them, you can acquire them very cheaply.

A more insurmountable problem for many games is battery death. We're reaching the outside of the lifespan of most NES cart batteries, at this point. We're well past the time period most were speced for, but some have survived 18 or 19 years inside their plastic shells anyway, backing up save data much longer than they were ever expected to. Only they can't survive much longer.

This isn't a problem for games that don't use cart batteries, but it's a hell of a problem for those that do, unless you can play a whole game in one sitting. And it's all well and good to say that one may simply replace the cart battery, but that takes a proprietary Gamebit screwdriver (or an ersatz equivalent, like a melted pen tip) and a soldering iron, which isn't really something you can expect of a large, semi-mainstream playerbase.

My Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Zelda II carts are still going strong, but at some point, those batteries are going to need replacing. All well and good for me, who can be bothered with it, but for most people, when Dragon Warrior carts die, they're going to go in the trash. And scarcity will inevitably increase.