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I still don’t have any time, but last year I bought an Analogue NT Mini Noir, which is a high quality (and expensive) way to play games that are decades old from their original cartridges.

It’s great. Like, amazing. It looks and feels great. Like, really, really great.

Despite throwing away nearly everything a decade ago, I kept a NES and a small collection of games.

And look, I know it’s the equivalent of listening to vinyl records on an expensive hi-fi system and then talking about how great and different it is but, whatever. It is great.

You may have thought I would want to play The Legend of Zelda but I really wanted to play Kid Icarus.

How to play Kid Icarus in 2022

The right answer –

1. Get a Nintendo Switch
2. Subscribe to Nintendo Online
3. Play Kid Icarus

This is really the right answer, but not the fun answer. Not the feels right answer.

Historically there have been two general ways to play NES games:

• original hardware (consoles) and software (cartridges full of printed circuite boards and read only memory (ROMS)
• platform shifted hardware – emulation of the console on a general purpose computer – and platform shifted software – the ROMs digitized into files readable on a general purpose computer

Simplified: “original” vs. “emulation.”

I spent my formative early years doing the former, but NES emulation became pretty common and viable in the 90’s, so I’ve spent more time playing them that way at this point in my life.

The first is the only one that was historically unambiguously legal until relatively recently. (Let’s leave the fair use arguments for another day.) This lead to all sorts of strange things in my brain: perfectly square pixels look right to me while the soft glow scanlines and CRT are a hazy dreamscape.

What does authenticity really mean after that?

· · ·

Platform shifting enables re-contextualizing the games, which after decades is often helpful due to extreme difficulty. You can dump the state of the virtualized hardware’s memory and restore it later - voila - every single game now has infinite save games. Switch allows you to do this too.

You can write to arbitrary memory as you please – voila, you’ve reinvented the Game Genie and can cheat.

And I’m leaving out many more complex options and they offer, see the gear appendix.

Bitrot is real

Somehow every cartridge I saved worked flawlessly except Kid Icarus.

I put in Tetris, connected real NES controllers, and played. It feels good to play these on a TV, with hardware and timing and low latency and scaled pixels that look impeccable.

Nerds who care about this stuff (ie, me) measure latency. Older video games were designed with precision timing and low latency that doesn’t exist in modern systems. Computers and video games used to respond faster, and then, they got worse.

Sometimes as we expand in complexity we lose track of the fundamentals.

(Also, it matters. It really matters.)

I took apart the Kid Icarus cartridge – the first time I’ve done so with a NES cart in my life. It was oddly humbling to open up a magical piece of platstic I’ve had since I was a child and realize, oh, it’s a printed circuit board. It plugs in over there.

Computers are simultaneously magical and mundane.

I cleaned the connector with alcohol and q-tips but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

Authentically Digital

I gave up and replaced the firmware on the NT Mini Noir with the official unofficial “jailbreak”.

This enables it to run software not just from a cartridge but from an SD cart of platform shifted software.

Cheats

Kid Icarus isn’t impossibly difficult, but there are parts that are hard. I beat it as a small child.

Every death you’re given a passcode, so you can continue on at the start of the level you left off at. This was something of a rarity back then – battery backed saves being even rarer.

When playing with the firmware, you can enter cheats easily.

VVOVSI and now I’m invincible for the tougher parts if I want.

The most iconic enemy in the game is the Eggplant Wizard who – literally – throws eggplants at you that turn you into an eggplant.

And then you need to find a hospital to remove the curse.

Games are great.

Also, terribly annoying.

AAUEVAPA and the wizards are powerless.

But I found I didn’t need that one, they’re not as tough as I remember.

Secret Wisdom

A bunch of things I would never have figured out as a child are now revealed on web sites that never existed when the game was released. The formula for how powerups are doled out – it’s mostly based on score but subtracts every arrow you shoot.

But shooting arrows is fun! So it was harder to get the powerup when I was younger than it should have been had I known.

Eventually I beat the game. When I got annoyed I looked at a map online for the labyrinths rather than drawing it out myself.

I didn’t in any way feel bad about this. I felt good about it.

New Game Plus

I remembered loving the visuals of the game, but this time around something about the sound seemed wonderful.

Something I didn’t remember or realize from my previous plays of the game are that at the end, you begin again, with all of your powerups.

And, so, like this site, I started again. The game is a lot more fun that way.

What better reward is there than being given another chance, with everything you know and learned, and gained along the way?

It’s a gift.

I didn’t really expect to have a message hit me so viscerally from 1987.

Postscript

I don’t know if there’s any examples of pre-1986 games with new game plus? There probably are, but the term isn’t used much until the 90’s.

I started putting back a few older entries that I wanted to link to for this article, I suppose I’ll do that every time I post. If I ever post again. Posting is hard. Look, I even took some photos!

Appendix: NES Gear

Original hardware is challenging in the modern era because it’s generally incompatible with modern televisions. So you want something that has HDMI output (unless you have room in your life for a CRT television, which, if you do, that’s great. I do not.)

You can’t actually buy an Analogue NT Mini Noir anymore, and apparently they are pretty expensive on ebay. See? They are that good. You could buy one of Analogue’s other products, like the Pocket, although it’s designed for Gameboy games, it will run NES roms with some coaxing. When you get it after waiting months/years – I’m still waiting for mine.

Part of the “magic” of the NT Mini Noir is that rather than a normal general purpose computer and software emulating old hardware, it uses a Field-programmable gate array, which is sort of like software-defined hardware. Also, there’s no general purpose operating system mediating your games or changing your input polling or popping up a window to update your software because you are playing games from decades ago, ok?

Ok.

Other FPGA options –

• RetroUSB AVS FPGA NES is highly recommended by people who care
• DIY FPGA using a DE10-Nano board – MiSTer FPGA this seems like another rabbit hole I will eventually go down

Other more reasonable options –

• Hyperkin consoles like the RetroN
• Even cheaper options like Old Skool CLASSIQ N HD
• The NES classic - actually Nintendo hardware, but also no longer sold. Weird that I didn’t buy this thing?
• retropie on cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Seems like a good idea in theory but in practice never got this to feel nice
• Retrogaming Linux distributions like batocera work on like everything.
• There’s probably a NES emulator for whatever you’re reading this on now

Addendum

Carts were fine – turns out it was a bug in the firmware. V1.3: “Fixed Vertical Green Lines in games using CHR-RAM (Castlevania, Legend of Zelda, Mega Man 1 & 2, Rygar, many others)”