Jolt Country

One of the magazines I write for sent me one of these units to review.



I haven't had a chance to run it through the paces yet, but here's the highlights -- plays NES, SNES, and Genesis carts, and has ports to use NES, SNES, and Genesis controllers. Also comes with some apparently pretty crappy wireless controllers.

Niiiice! My NES and Genesis solution is a similar machine.

I totally do not get how the patents "expired" on these things and now it's OK to make generic ones. People say that. I don't get it.

Are we coming up on a time where the patent has "expired" on the Playstation? On the circuit boards for Pac-Man? It sounds like that's how tech ought to work, but I have doubts. Internet doubts!

Depending on the type of patent, patents are good for 14-20 years. The specific NES patents that expired were patented in 1985 and expired in 2005. I agree with you, it seems crazy. I just asked Google "can I renew my patent?" and the answer appears to be "no".

One thing I do know is that the software is copyrighted, which is different than a patent of course. Technically you can make a Famiclone, but you can't make one that included ROMs on it. (They do make those, but technically they are illegal.) I guess by that reasoning, you could technically make a PCB that would run Pac-Man, even though you could not legally include the code to Pac-Man.

Well, there's software in the NES to make it run. I doubt that these guys reverse-engineered it. I mean, did they? They didn't. Did they? Did they? While you are driving back to Oklahoma, I'll check and see what these people do. Did. Are doing. Did 35 minutes ago.

I may be wrong, but I assumed the software was reverse engineered, which would explain the less-than-%100 accurate emulation. That could be a hardware limitation too, I'm not sure. I just assumed that.