In February 1993 Super Play told British Super Nintendo owners that “the vast bulk of titles are only available on import”, and spent two pages testing the adaptors they would need to play them. Each adaptor was a piece of plastic and metal that sat in the cartridge slot with a British game plugged into the back and the imported one on top. The British cartridge was there for one reason: it carried the right security chip, and without it the console would not start. Region locking was rarely a single wall. Depending on the machine it was a cartridge cut to the wrong shape, a pair of chips that had to recognise each other, or a few instructions inside the game that checked where it was running. Each was beaten in its own way.
Fast facts
- The first lock: Nintendo’s NES (1985) carried a lockout chip, the 10NES, which every licensed cartridge had to answer. The Famicom had none.
- Three methods: cartridge shape (Super Famicom and Mega Drive), security chips (NES and SNES) and software checks (Mega Drive games, later SNES games, PlayStation discs).
- The answer: adaptors at about £15 each by 1993, modified consoles, and “chipped” PlayStations and “switched” Saturns.
- The end of it: Nintendo’s Switch (2017) plays games from any region, “a reversal of Nintendo’s policy on prior game hardware”.
A lock built for something else
The NES lockout chip was not built mainly to keep imports out. Its first job was to control who could make games for the machine. David Sheff’s history of Nintendo describes a “security chip” that the industry called a “lock-out” chip: a matching chip in every cartridge had to talk to the one in the console, and only Nintendo made them. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president, admitted that it was meant “to censor games as well as to stop counterfeiters”, and it earned Nintendo money on every game other companies sold for the machine (see the Nintendo Seal). The Famicom had shipped in Japan without one, and Retro Gamer noted that this let Japanese publishers such as Capcom and Konami put extra hardware in their cartridges, improvements which, it said, “the 10NES lockout system in our machines prevented” from working.
Region locking came with the chip. Whenever the cartridge failed to give the right answers, the chip in the console pulsed the reset line about once a second, so the game never started and the power light blinked. Nintendo made the chip in regional versions, NTSC for North America, two PAL types for Europe and Australia, and one for Asia, so an American cartridge failed on a European NES and the reverse. Retro Gamer’s hardware handbook calls this one of the precedents the NES set, “the region lockout that stopped US games being played on a European NES and vice versa”. Not everyone accepted it. Sheff and Retro Gamer both describe cartridges that fired a voltage spike into the console’s chip to knock it out, which, as a technician told Sheff, left its program lost “in the weeds”.
The Super Nintendo: shape and chip
Nintendo used both barriers on the Super Nintendo. Japanese Super Famicom slots were too narrow for American cartridges, and American machines had “little knobs” in the slot that stopped Japanese cartridges going in; owners snapped them off with pliers. Behind the plastic sat the chips. Super Play explained in its first issue, in November 1992, that the Japanese and American machines used the same chip, which looked for its “sister chip (D411)” in the cartridge, while British machines used “a completely different chip (F413, which responds to a D413 chip)”. Once the shape problem was solved, Japanese and American games were interchangeable. Super Play described the Super Famicom as “the same shape as the UK machine”, and the British console took cartridges of the Japanese shape, so for British owners the obstacle to Japanese games was the chip rather than the slot.
In July 1996 the magazine explained the mechanism. The two chips spoke through four pins on the cartridge edge, sending a complex series of codes back and forth at switch-on; if the codes did not match, the chip in the console shut the machine down, “resulting in a blank screen”. Super Play gave Nintendo three reasons for the system: it stopped unlicensed publishers making cartridges, it hampered piracy, “and thirdly, it makes importing games much more difficult”. The Game Boy had no such chip.
Adaptors and the arms race
An adaptor answered the security chip with a second cartridge. “Adaptors are a grey importer’s lifeline,” Super Play wrote in 1992, and by February 1993 it could test five of them, among them Datel’s Universal Adaptor at £14.99, Q Systems’ The Adaptor! at £15 and TDS Trading’s Honey Bee Super-Magic Converter at “approx. £15” (the Import Gaming entry tells that story). New games kept breaking them. Star Fox used pins on the edge connector that no game had used before, so for a while no adaptor could run an imported copy until manufacturers added the extra connections.
Nintendo’s next move was software. Some games timed the console to find out “whether it is running on a 50Hz (UK) machine, or a 60Hz (Japanese/American) machine”, and refused to run on the wrong one with a message “along the lines of ‘This game is not intended for use on your Super Famicom/Super NES’”. “Intelligent” adaptors answered by spotting the check as the game’s instructions passed through and changing them. Speed could stop a game on its own: Super Play found it impossible to run a British copy of Star Fox on a Japanese or American machine “due to the speed difference”.
The Mega Drive: a check in every game
Sega left the decision to each game. The console told the program what kind of machine it was running on. Sega’s Genesis Software Manual describes a version register at address $A10001 whose top bits say whether the console is a domestic (Japanese) or overseas model and whether it runs at the NTSC or PAL clock speed. A game could read it and refuse to start. A later Sega technical bulletin, which also covered the 32X, made developers declare the result in the cartridge header: a code at address $1F0 listing which kinds of hardware the game would run on, so that a game meant only for the American Genesis carried the code “4”.
The cartridges differed too. A Mean Machines reader in 1991 noticed that his Japanese cartridge was oblong at the bottom while his British and American ones were “mushroom shaped”. A Japanese Mega Drive had a lock that stopped a cartridge being pulled out while the power was on, and it engaged in a slot cut into the side of Japanese cartridges; an American cartridge fitted the slot, but the machine would not switch on. An ACE reader’s tip in April 1990 was to file a matching notch into the American cartridge, “carefully”, a modification the magazine printed with a warning about warranties. Mean Machines told another reader that British games would run on a Japanese machine once “the plastic cartridge lock” was removed. Going the other way, its reviews of Japanese-only games carried a “grey import warning”: the game would not work on an official British Mega Drive without “a Japanese games adaptor (available from mail order import companies)” or a modification, “which we do not recommend you do as this invalidates your warranty”.
Discs: chipped and switched consoles
The CD consoles moved the check onto the disc. A PlayStation bought in Britain was “designed to only play PAL (the UK TV standard) games”, Arcade explained in April 1999, and imported games were “frequently released earlier on the NTSC format in territories like the USA and Japan”. Its answer was the “disc swap”: hold down the lid switch with Blu-Tack, start a British disc, then swap in the import at the moment the motor changed speed. The last resort was to have the machine “chipped”, fitted with a chip “that enables your machine to play games of any nationality”, which voided the warranty. The incentive was real. GamesMaster suggested in August 1998 that Metal Gear Solid, which Konami might not release in Britain that year, “might be the game to get your PlayStation chipped for”. By the summer of 1999 a mail-order dealer was warning in Computer and Video Games that “ALL NEW GAMES WILL NOW NOT WORK ON A CHIPPED PLAYSTATION”.
Saturn owners had their machines “switched”. Sega Saturn Magazine told readers in August 1998 that “you must have a switched Saturn to run ANY import games”, and recommended two switches, one for the region and one for 50/60Hz, at anything from £25 in small shops to “an unfeasibly high £48”. A converter cartridge was the cheaper route, but imported games then ran “bordered and running at a slightly slower speed”.
PAL and NTSC
That last complaint was the other half of the problem. Japanese and American games ran at 60Hz. On a British 50Hz television an import ran slower and with black borders, unless the console was switched to 60Hz and the television could show it. Poor PAL conversions had the same faults even on official machines; Sega Saturn Magazine named Marvel Super Heroes and Sonic R. The PAL vs NTSC entry covers the conversions.
Region-free
The Game Boy had no security chip, and its cartridges played on machines from any region. In January 2017 Nintendo confirmed that Switch software would “in general” be region-free, so that games bought anywhere would work on any Switch, “a reversal of Nintendo’s policy on prior game hardware”, as Game Developer put it.
Sources
- Super Play issue 1, November 1992: “Grey imports: the price of fame” and “Adapted for addicts” (adaptors as “a grey importer’s lifeline”; the F411/D411 and F413/D413 chips; bridge adaptors and the slot tabs).
- Super Play issue 4, February 1993, pp. 20–21: “Complete Super Nintendo universal adaptor test” (the vast bulk of titles only on import; how adaptors fool the security chip; the slot knobs and pliers; the Datel, Q Systems and TDS Trading prices).
- Super Play issue 19, May 1994, letters: a US cartridge “won’t physically fit in a Japanese machine’s slot”. Super Play Gold, 1993, buyer’s guide: the Japanese Super Famicom is “the same shape as the UK machine”.
- Super Play issue 45, July 1996, pp. 31–32: adaptor feature (the four security pins and the code exchange; the blank screen; Nintendo’s three reasons; the Game Boy without a chip; Star Fox’s extra pins and the speed difference; software checks for 50Hz and 60Hz, the on-screen message and “intelligent” adaptors).
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 8, “Enter the Dragon” (the security chip and its name in the industry); chapter 10, “Game Masters” (Yamauchi on censoring games and stopping counterfeiters); the “zapping” chips.
- Retro Gamer issue 38, 2007, pp. 66–67: NES retrospective (the Famicom without a lockout system and the cartridge improvements the 10NES prevented from working; cartridges that “fired a voltage spike through the irksome 10NES chip”).
- Retro Gamer, Videogames Hardware Handbook volume 1 (second edition, 2016), p. 102: “the region lockout that stopped US games being played on a European NES and vice versa”.
- NESdev Wiki, “CIC lockout chip” (community reference, web, secondary): the reset pulsed at 1Hz; the NTSC, PAL-A, PAL-B and Asia regions. The blinking power light is also described in the NES entry. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/CIC_lockout_chip
- Sega of America, Genesis Software Manual (revision of 20 February 1992), p. 72: the version register at $A10001.
- Sega, Mega Drive Technical Info #9 (document MD-TECH-09-100694): the hardware code at $1F0 in the cartridge header and the example of a Genesis-only game.
- Mean Machines issue 2, November 1990: Rainbow Islands review, “Grey import warning”. Issue 3, December 1990, letters: British games on a Japanese machine once the cartridge lock is removed. Issue 8, May 1991, p. 21, letters: the shapes of Japanese and Western cartridges.
- ACE issue 31, April 1990, p. 14, letters: the Japanese Mega Drive’s cartridge lock and the notch in Japanese cartridges.
- Arcade issue 5, April 1999, p. 73: the PlayStation disc swap and chipping.
- GamesMaster issue 71, August 1998, p. 60: Metal Gear Solid as “the game to get your PlayStation chipped for”.
- Computer and Video Games issue 212, July 1999, p. 100: mail-order advertisement warning that new games would not work on chipped PlayStations.
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 34, August 1998, p. 71: switched Saturns, converter cartridges, 50/60Hz switches and their cost.
- Kris Graft, “Nintendo Switch goes region-free”, Game Developer, 12 January 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/nintendo-switch-goes-region-free
- Wikipedia, “Regional lockout” (web, secondary): the Switch and the Game Boy as region-free, and the shapes of Super NES, Super Famicom and PAL Super NES cartridges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_lockout