Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Converter and More

Summary

This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered! Gyromite, or if it’s on the ceiling, Gyrotite Gyromite, or in Japan, Robot Gyro, is the best game that supports the R.O.B. toy robot sold with certain models of the Nintendo Entertainment System. This isn’t really that impressive, though, considering there were only two, and the other, Stack-Up, is barely even a game. R.O.B. only works on CRTs. This actually confused me at first, since there's no real reason it shouldn't be able to respond to light from an LCD just as well; it doesn't rely on single-frame timing like the Zapper, after all. But in fact it is an issue I talked about in the lightguns on LCDs post-- the photodiode used only responds to 15 kHz signals, as Anne Barela at Adafruit learned. In fact, it seems to be the very same photodiode as a Zapper; it's possible that modding R.O.B. with a photodiode from a modern clone Zapper that works on an LCD might make it work on LCDs too, but I don't have a working R.O.B. to test. It's a 1980s toy with fiddly plastic parts and consumer-grade motors, after all. Here’s the title screen of Gyromite. Notice something? Yep, even though on paper Nintendo renamed the game from Robot Gyro (or possibly just Gyro, judging from the cartridge art), they didn’t actually make any changes in the ROM from the Japanese release. Why bother? The game doesn’t actually contain any Japanese-language text. Now, you can play Gyromite without R.O.B. pretty easily, by just having someone press buttons on controller 2. In fact, pressing buttons on controller 2 is how R.O.B. works as well; but cheating in Gyromite i...