On September twenty nine, two thousand seventeen, Nintendo launched the Super in NES Classic gaming console for fans of retro gaming. It shipped with twenty one games. Some hackers felt that just wasn't enough. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this is tech Stuff Daily. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was a beloved piece of hardware that originally launched in the United States in the early nineteen nineties. Gamers spent hours on titles like The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past,
Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong Country, among countless others. When Nintendo announced it would follow up the successful launch of the NES Classic retro gaming system with an s NES version, millions of nostalgic gamers got excited, but there was some worry mixed in with that excitement. The NES Classic proved to be incredibly popular, so much so that many fans
found it impossible to order a system from retailers. That meant the only option left open to you was the aftermarket, where sellers were marking up the price dramatically in the hopes of making a killer profit. There were fears that Nintendo would repeat this strategy with the S and E. S Classic. Those fears proved well founded, as the console is in scarce supply and high demand across the world.
If you were lucky enough to order one before they sold out, you have in your possession a small device that looks like a miniature version of the nineteen nineties video game console. Rather than inserting game cartridges into this mini console, you'll find all the games are programmed directly into the hardware. Those games include twenty one titles, including Super Mario World Final, Fantasy Three, Super Metroid, and the
previously unreleased sequel to star Fox. Many of the top selling games for the system can be found on the S and E S Classic, but some people seem to feel that it's just not quite enough. One of those people as a Russian hacker who goes by the handle cluster M. This hacker found out that the S and E S Classic is surprisingly easy to hack. He built a Windows application that allows users to access the S
and E S Classics system and alter it. One alteration you can make is to add more games onto the console. Those games aren't just lying dormant inside the game system. You have to put those new titles onto the S and E. S Classic. You do this by taking the game files called ROMs. ROM is an acronym, and it stands for read only memory. That means it's a type of memory you can access, but not change. The old S and E S cartridges are an example of ROM games.
The games themselves were hard coded onto the cartridges. If you want to take a cartridge apart, you'll see what looks like a complicated circuit board, complete with microchips. This represents the actual game you're playing. Over the years, hackers have created digital files that represent those hard coded games. We call these files ROMs. There are large databases of ROMs online, not just for the S and E S, but also for other console systems as well as arcade machines.
To play ROMs, you need an emulator. An emulator is a piece of software that replicates the functionality of another technology. It emulates or copies that technology. With an arcade emulator, for example, the software attempts to replicate the circuitry found in a particular arcade machine. This allows you to run the software on another device, such as a computer, and access those ROM files. The S and E S Classic system is really an S and E S emulator running
game ROMs. By hacking the console cluster, m created the opportunity to add other ROMs to the devices storage. Some of those games work without a problem. Others have compatibility issues, likely because those games had specific microchips that the S and E s Classic Emulator wasn't designed to replicate. You might wonder if this is at all legal. Technically it's not. ROMs are a type of intellectual property. Someone somewhere likely holds the rights to those ROMs. Downloading a ROM without
compensating the IP owner is a type of theft. That being said, many of these games are unavailable today. They weren't ported to any other systems, and the hardware that can run them, as well as the cartridges themselves, grows more delicate every year. Some hackers argue that by pulling ROMs from cartridges, they're preserving the files that otherwise would be lost to time. If you own a game, you could probably rip a ROM or download one from another
source and you'd be just fine. It's similar to making a backup copy of a music album. Copies for backup or archival purposes tend to be viewed as harmless by court systems, but if you are creating a file with the intent to distribute it, and you don't own the rights to the information on the file. That's another story. There's a popular rumor in the ROM space that you can download a RAM and use it for twenty four hours and that's perfectly legal. Turns out that's a myth.
Are you likely to get into trouble if you download ROMs, whether it's for the Nintendo or some other system. The answer is probably not, but it's still murky legal territory legality aside. ROMs do present people a chance to get their hands on game titles that have otherwise been forgotten. It's possible that Nintendo may release future s and e s and nes classic editions with a different library of games on them, fueling discussion and frustration among gamers who
object to such marketing approaches. In the meantime, hackers will continue tweaking the hardware and expanding its capabilities. To learn more about emulators, hackers, and video games, subscribe to The Tech Stuff podcast, a show that publishes on Wednesdays and Fridays and is a much longer in depth exploration of technology, how it works, and what it all means. That's all for today. I'll see you again soon. E