Gadgetory

welcome to cracking open up Jason Heiner with my colleague bill Detweiler back again to crack open some of your favorite tack we not only do the latest tech sometimes we do a little bit of retro tech and this time we're doing new tech and that's right where does you know when we get a two-for-one here right so what we've got is we have an original into no inner tainment system and NES right here from the 80s if you grew up in the 80s like Jason and I did you probably remember this you help link say Princess Zelda you help defeat King Bowser double dribble that's right double dribble all those fond memories and Nintendo in 2070 2017 came out with a way for all of us folks that remember the original NES who weren't using emulators to relive their glory days with the new original NES classic here yes we're gonna take this apart and we're gonna take the original NES apart and we're gonna compare the two excellent so this is a crazy crazy popular device it has yes far more than Nintendo expected they found that when they put this device out they could not keep them in shelves and it was almost impossible to get a hold of one right bill oh it was definitely so we originally the one that we originally cracked open D sold for $59.99 yeah it was the retail price great price with 30 30 games that's right yeah built into the little emulator here now you could get lucky sometimes and you can still find these I think for about 60 bucks around depending on who has stock left of stock level from the original run but we were talking even before we started this segment with some of our producers and we had people that waited in line for hours in the night people who could not get a hold of wine yeah um somehow miraculously one of the producers got ahold of this one we don't even know how we don't want to know it was such a hit because if you have such fond memories of this device it was one of the first really great devices that you could play games for everybody yeah very easy to use you probably remember the classic controller this is the classic controller it has a newer connecter it's the same kind of connector that you now see on the Nintendo Wii like the nunchuck you would you'd use this and this is the device it's much smaller than the original connector you can see there and I know this also has an HDMI port on it so that you can connect it to a team of modern TV without them come on old converters don't have to use the old you know RCA connectors right yeah to connect it um and so this really is now a modern it is Fox 30 games you can play your classics and your favorites lots of fun or if you watch our Apple home pod episode of cracking open and that was a real chore of take through I think that you know we ended up with an hour of footage on this doesn't screw yeah yeah dozens of screws on this you have four little Phillips screws right in the bottom underneath these rubber feet you pop those out with like a Phillips double zero or triple zero screwdriver here and the thing just separates so nicely just like this it comes right apart AFOL and we get right into the guts please don't go like they don't go like this at all so that's one of the things that makes this cracking opened so much fun we will see if the original is that easy to do now but what we find inside the the NES classic here we found one single large circuit board here you find connectors for the controller ports here yep you find the power button contacts or other way around you find the power button the reset button contacts over here the makino there's there's there yeah I was pointing while holding it down and not being able to see and that's kind of it that's all there is in here so if you great take these little cables yeah we disconnect them from the circuit board we do that and then we take our handy Phillips screwdriver also what's that this all the screws are the same you know three or four different screwdrivers to take this thing apart you don't see that in an iPhone you don't see that in an iPhone you don't see that in many devices these days you'll need three or four different screwdrivers specialized tools here all we need to do is one sort of really small phillips screwdriver we're gonna take the screws out from the inside very standard yeah yeah and we're gonna remove the circuit board what's really interesting when we start to look at the hardware here we're gonna we'll compare the original hardware to what is inside the new NES classic and there's such a you know it's so interesting to see how technology oh my gosh yes in 20 years 30 years years yeah yeah is this honest this is a late and you know mid to late 1980s device right so so it is thirty years ago this device 2017 was such a hot find and we have heard that Nintendo is now gonna make another run of this and so you will be able to find it hopefully much easier than last time you'll be able to find this device again on the shelves for for 60 bucks very funny device and they sold about they sold over 2 million of the first run wow I mean it was I think great exceeded Nintendo's expectations in popularity and since then they have the release the Super NES classic version yeah and that one has also sold really well so it's like the vinyl records of video games that's right so we removed the single board here from NES classic unless see if I can remove the metal railing that's on top of this yeah now when I pried it off a little bit what you do is you have a little bit of thermal sort of a thermal pan here that helps dissipate the heat from the processor on this we'll set this down right here kind of like a giant heat sink and one yes it is it provides a little bit of EMI interference shielding on this RF shielding and it also helps dissipate heat off of them the processor as well there yeah what's really interesting what we found is really cool about the new NES classic beyond it's just small size right is it this is basically a single board computer that runs a Linux operating system yeah you didn't necessarily expect to find that inside of the device but that was really interesting it has a quad core ARM based it's a cortex a7 processor it has five hundred and twelve Meg's of storage on this it has 256 Meg's of RAM and you can see some of the chips here you can see the storage tips the memory chip the RAM chips you see the video processor up here and then you can also see the arm a7 processor there no build there's also a micro USB port on here what's that is that for power what is that for can you look can you hack that and load okay so because it is a Linux based operating system that yes you can actually interface with the device using the USB port and people have figured out ways to load say up to 200 or so games on more than just a 30 this is just the 30 now another thing that's really interesting as we start to take the controller apart to remember is there's 30 games on here now yeah there's a lot more games that were recently released for the NES for those people that we were talking about that put to 200 games on there you know they're actually you know they've been around for years as roms on a PC or in other types of you know if you wanted to play the games that way you could download you can download them and use them and then you know there's some gray area depending on your jurisdiction that's like I view it but yes owned the game some people with what I would argue whether Nintendo or the Adler sure or the vel you know the developer would agree with you is that's what a great ear yeah that's where you'll hear is like I owned double dribble and so you know maybe I would download the ROM yeah maybe I would feel within my rights to download the ROM and use if I did pay for with you is another matter but what it's a legal gray area has not been decided by the court yeah um so what one of the interesting things is that we read on the internet when we were originally doing our cracking over I'm trying to remove just a little circuit board here for the the contact for the reset and the power button up front we can see that was that some people have claimed as they look at the roms that are on the games that didn't but Nintendo actually did is they actually went out to the Internet and they download this little circuit board you don't say ported Li and reportedly that they actually use the hacked roms that were available on the internet for the games that are on the single portal in his computer and now that is not illegal for Nintendo to do that right even if they are the hack Ross because Nintendo has a licensing deal and owns you know has the rights it's do this very little property yeah and you're like legit right yeah so where's you and I we don't have that same kind of deal we certainly couldn't download them and sell them yes we all didn't use that same deal if we owned the copy of the original that's the great that's a great so that's it that's all there is to taking the NES we throw in pieces all over the place that's all there is to taking the NES classic apart it really is just a plastic housing some ports and a single board Linux computer Super Mario Brothers and Zelda of course one of the most popular games for this console like it's some of my favorites double dribble technical baseball weren't on there Tecmo Bowl though the football game was on there and we are in America after all so soccer so this this device though now you're digging into the original what do you find in our still standard screws oh yeah so what we thought it would be really cool to do like we were talking about is doing old and new here yeah and so luckily even on the original NES here they do have a Phillips head screws here so we're gonna use I'm taking these apart I mean they're a little larger a lot larger you can kind of see I don't know the difference in size right this is really kind of small but you can kind of see the difference in size of the screws for the old NES and then the screws for the new one which is pretty typical since you get since you think that this is about a tenth of the volume and the mass the the new one of the originals right it's a it is much much smaller it shows the miniaturization of the technology in that how far it's come in 30 years also this didn't have any games if I remember I built into the console story you had to use a cartridge that was where the actual storage was so it is kind of fun well anything a lot of them I mean the games were stored on the cartridge yeah and there was no you know until really like math or like Zelda came out right there was no actual way to save a game right you know Zelda those cartridges had a battery in the audience today Howard powered the the the storage the memory inside the cartridge this device was um was quite a breakthrough at the time this was multiple hundred dollar device at the time right so it is also and these games were you know twenty bucks typically fifteen twenty bucks at least so you're also talking about you know the the economies of scale of this you know since then so not only is the device but you're talking probably you know hundreds of dollars maybe even a thousand dollars worth of you know games and console that from this to that there goes all this there goes all the screws so just like the you know just like the original one this one the are just like the classic the NES classic the original NES comes apart you know its clamshell a few pieces there I took it apart upside down because of the screws will set this cartridge right most of it is the room for the cartridge yeah these old 72 pin cartridges here you know took up a lot of space because like you know again it's 1980s technology or even earlier you know there were several iterations of of the original NES it was released in different configurations in the u.s. in Japan sure and so you know it was kind of a an evolution there were even you know if anyone who had one of these remembers the old uh blowing on the cartridge technique oh yeah the pins would get the contacts would get warm would get dirty or they get warm out or you take a cotton swab and alcohol or something to try to clean them off forgot about that you put the card shopping in real hard and you get a bunch of like the motor loves yeah you pushing it down to make it go so they do pull it out so then pop it back so as people started to actually you know sort of as they became more popular in retro gaming there were actually modification kits that you can buy for these to fix those how many to pin you know cartridge yeah problems right really yeah yeah yeah usually you could hack this device yeah they came out with this there were repairs okay say you know ways to fix the problems with the original design you offer these massive capacitors these caps that are over here yeah we around the power suppliers around the the video outputs don't see any of that in the new devices right a lot of single board computer in the new one yep there's a lot of wires in here wire one of our producers actually brought this in and let us graciously take it apart we're gonna put it back together in working order for it you must have an immaculately clean house because there's this very little puzzle nest in there so he said this device still works unlike his Nintendo Wii for example that it doesn't um is it fully functional so it is interesting to see how some of the old tech you know was built with a little bit more sense of sort of ruggedness and meant to last we see that over and over again you know very much the technology today and of the last few years there's more so far far more disposable the Wii U that is is now malfunctioning we just heard not the Wii so even newer technology so this 30 year old device though still working so pretty impressive you know what I want to do is we're gonna try and take the cartridge the cartridge holder here off of the connector here off of the motherboard so we can see the main circuit board underneath and we can see the size of some of the chips underneath that's really what we want to do and then hold that up and compare that to the single board computer that runs the new NES classic this one will try to get back together so Stephen Beecham actually has a working Nintendo at the end of this Thank You Stephen for letting us crack this thing open sometimes these devices have technology in them that isn't enabled yet but it tells you something about future features that might be in the devices as well as you know maybe future iterative iterations of the device that might have new features so we learn a lot of interesting things we've been doing these bill for over a dozen years as a matter of fact 2006 you cracked open the Xbox 360 mm-hmm and so we found a lot of interesting things from that and far more people were interested than we expected and so because of that we also cracked open an iPod and then since then we've done you know almost all the biggest technologies if you want to look back at some of that tech that's been cracked open in the past you can go to tech republic calm and you can see the galleries you can go to see Netcom where we have a lot of the videos all right so we got the circuit board out of the original Nintendo Entertainment System here you know we have the all the the video output and the power input and everything over here and then you can see the size of the silicon on the board right compared to yeah this amazing I mean it's amazing that you don't even have a single game on here right it just runs the operating system the video video epic oh that's it everything all the game code is on there now compared to this so from what we've been able you know the getting details on this is a little circumspect but what we found is it has a 1.7 megahertz processor what you would call a processor on it and then it has I think 16 kilobits or 2 kilobytes of video memory on this Wow and the same in what we would call Ram like yeah 16 kilobytes of RAM and or 2 kilo or 16 kilobytes 2 kilobytes of RAM on this thing compared to this right that has 512 megabytes amazing of storage and a quad core processor and I think 256 Meg's of RAM so it's a lot more power in a much smaller package because yeah that's what you get 30 years of tests are you and so you think about this basically like a 1 to 2 megahertz processor yeah that's it at one point seven miles long now at the time old 8-bit video games so at the time this is a pretty breakthrough device that they can sell this this cheaply and have what was really great graphics at the time to we look back and laugh at it now it's 8-bit and its well you look in but people still enjoy it today was it was a little bit better than my old Commodore 64 or Tiger 8600 you know still this was fantastic you know tons of fond memories so there you have it the old and the new um this device will be coming back again for 60 bucks 30 games and a lot of retro memories that's 30 cheap for retro man that really is it really is lots of great stuff there so you can go to TechRepublic comm for more cracking opens more photos of cracking opens you can go to see net for more video of all the cracking opens that we've done in the past and what would you like to see us crack open next leave us a note in the comments and we'll take a look because we're always looking for the best old and new stuff to crack open so thanks for watching we'll see you next time you