31st March 2012, 6:35 AM
Actually the SNES one has been defeated too. Reproduction carts and "Power pak" carts simply copied the 10NES chip.
Here's how the 10NES was defeated on the NES, in various forms. Not one of them bought 10NES chips from Nintendo, I certainly never suggested that. If they could do that, they'd be licensed. The honeybee adapter used one of these methods. Tengen's method was the most famous/infamous. They actually made a counterfeit chip that perfectly copied the 10NES. Unfortunately, they got some patent information from the patent office that showed exactly how it was done, so Nintendo sued them and won for copyright infringement. Tengen's defense is that they actually developed it on their own completely independently of that slip up, but that seems unlikely to me.
Other games, such as some "gold" carts like this Egger's game I found, used a voltage spike sent along the 10NES cart pins which confused and locked up the 10NES. There were two kinds of timed spikes, one for the US and the other for the differently timed European one. Last is the one that one unlicensed SNES game used, games that used a pass through to hook up a licensed NES game and simply use it's 10NES. This is how the Game Genie worked, though in it's case it needed to do that anyway to cheat so it worked out seamlessly there.
Since Famicom games and systems never had any 10NES, the Honeybee adapter had to have some method of doing that, and the "pass through" method obviously wouldn't work. Mind you, I have no idea how that Honeybee model worked, how many were made, or how it was constructed. In shoddier sketchier cases for products that won't hit the mass market, people would just harvest a number of NES games, remove the 10NES from the game board and solder it onto whatever thing they were hawking. It's possible the Honeybee was constructed in a similar way.
Here's how the 10NES was defeated on the NES, in various forms. Not one of them bought 10NES chips from Nintendo, I certainly never suggested that. If they could do that, they'd be licensed. The honeybee adapter used one of these methods. Tengen's method was the most famous/infamous. They actually made a counterfeit chip that perfectly copied the 10NES. Unfortunately, they got some patent information from the patent office that showed exactly how it was done, so Nintendo sued them and won for copyright infringement. Tengen's defense is that they actually developed it on their own completely independently of that slip up, but that seems unlikely to me.
Other games, such as some "gold" carts like this Egger's game I found, used a voltage spike sent along the 10NES cart pins which confused and locked up the 10NES. There were two kinds of timed spikes, one for the US and the other for the differently timed European one. Last is the one that one unlicensed SNES game used, games that used a pass through to hook up a licensed NES game and simply use it's 10NES. This is how the Game Genie worked, though in it's case it needed to do that anyway to cheat so it worked out seamlessly there.
Since Famicom games and systems never had any 10NES, the Honeybee adapter had to have some method of doing that, and the "pass through" method obviously wouldn't work. Mind you, I have no idea how that Honeybee model worked, how many were made, or how it was constructed. In shoddier sketchier cases for products that won't hit the mass market, people would just harvest a number of NES games, remove the 10NES from the game board and solder it onto whatever thing they were hawking. It's possible the Honeybee was constructed in a similar way.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)