I had the chance to pick up a copy of 8 Bit Music Power Final recently, a NES game released in 2021! Before this, I hadn’t even realized games were still being developed for the NES, let alone receiving commercial releases.

I’m sure Nintendo has nothing to do with this continued support though, so it got me wondering about the CIC lockout chip. Supposedly, it should be in every officially licensed cartridge for the NES, and without it the console will refuse to start and repeatedly reset. Without Nintendo licensing games anymore though, how are these new releases managing to get around this?

I know there were unlicensed cartridges that used a brute-force method to bypass the chip back then, but these new games don’t seem to be doing the same thing as those. Was the lockout chip reverse engineered at some point and that’s how it’s done now? I can’t find too much information on this, but I’d really like to know how it works.