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[Alchemist]

Spot on pretty much, they realised that solid state media distribution was too expensive a medium for the Chinese market (and too easily duplicated), so devised a hardcore encryption scheme and distributed the games as data.

[goodie]

If someone had a N64 cartridge pinout and the iQue's CPU pinout, you could probably wire the cart slot directly to the CPU, thereby bypassing the whole encryption thing.

[Alchemist]

Um, no. Carts aren't wired direct to the CPU in the N64, for starters, and the hardware inside the iQue is certainly going to be layed out differently to N64 anyway (my bet, 1 chip with all the decryption logic inside it, making it impossible to do what you propose). There's no guarantee that the hardware is directly compatible with the N64 either, and the chances that the carts are, even if you could wire it after decryption/whatever, is extremely low.

[goodie]

There's no guarantee that the hardware is directly compatible with the N64 either

I bet it is. The games look and play exactly like their N64 counterparts. It's highly unlikely they would reprogram the games specifically for the iQue.

[KJoshJ]

i bet they would have to, it doesnt use the exact same hardware and when it was orginally coded, it was for the specific nintendo 64 hardware, running at standard specs. With less chips and different frequecnies it would have to be re-coded or ported to the new hardware. Josh.

Edit, also the online play was definitely not coded into the original nintendo 64 games.

[SgtBowhack]

I'm betting that goodie's half-right and Alchemist is half-right. It's possible that all of the decryption takes place on the N64OAC and therefore impossible to play unencrypted N64 carts on it. I do believe that it is probably just a standard N64 as far as most of the hardware goes though. That is to say, like the NES, all of the pins don't go to the CPU (some go to the PPU and other places) but on the NOAC they pretty much all do. It does claim to have hardware-assisted SNES emulation though, so it's probably gonna need some sort of information telling it what sort of game it is regardless. iQue games obviously have some sort of headers too, so they show up in the menu properly. And the iQue cannot boot at all without the card, since the OS is on the cards. Nintendo was pretty tricky, let me tell you.
I can't imagine that the hardware would be that different from the N64, with the whole point being that they can use pre-existing games from the N64 library on it.

Edit, also the online play was definitely not coded into the original nintendo 64 games.

This is true, but that's not proof that the games still aren't N64 titles. The original N64 only had 4MB of RAM, hence the expansion pak. Games had to be programmed specifically to take advantage of new hardware. Also, miniaturizing the hardware has little to do with compatibility. There was obviously something done to the games to make them difficult to copy and use, but that has little bearing on the executable code within.

[vb_master]

iQue Insides 1

[SgtBowhack]

Which tells us approx. nothing, sadly. There are other, more detailed photos elsewhere, but they also don't really lead to any breakthroughs about the iQue's architecture. The only good news is that the iQue seems to be using semi-off-the-shelf parts, so modifying it to do other stuff might work with some work.

[Alchemist]

Edit, also the online play was definitely not coded into the original nintendo 64 games.

This is true, but that's not proof that the games still aren't N64 titles. The original N64 only had 4MB of RAM, hence the expansion pak. Games had to be programmed specifically to take advantage of new hardware. Also, miniaturizing the hardware has little to do with compatibility. There was obviously something done to the games to make them difficult to copy and use, but that has little bearing on the executable code within.

You're mostly right, except that all of the games have plainly be recompiled so Nintendo could pretty much do what they wanted - and implementing non-compatibility with the N64 would be quick, painless, and potentially worthwhile (it would effectively prohibit hackers releasing any other games than Nintendo already have, for instance, if they had managed to crack the boot level security - surely a consideration).

EDIT: good luck wiring anything onto that board.

[SgtBowhack]

There's no real evidence that the games have been recompiled. Just because they've been translated into Chinese and there's some sort of wrapper over the ROM doesn't necessarily mean much of anything. Translation requires no recompilation. I know, because I have (well in the past) translated ROMs for various cartridge-based consoles, and I didn't recompile any of them. Even to get added space for text and all that, simply hacking the pointer tables to point to empty places in the ROM works.

Though I am forced to admit that I think recompilation is likely, all we really actually know is that the ROMs were not padded like they would be when put onto a ROM to some number of megabytes (because the flash card works in blocks that are < 1MB). This can be done simply by a decompilation and recompilation of code though. I seriously doubt that Nintendo/iQue went far enough to make the two platforms incompatible, because of statements by the head of iQue that said that piracy protection was less of a goal than allowing the Chinese public to enjoy games affordably and legitimately. I'd say the recompilation is likely trivial, if it exists, and might simply be something like remapping of opcodes, which is basically the same as encrypting the games. Anything beyond that would be too much work to make the thing worthwhile.

Honestly, I think the entire thing is too much work to take into consideration. The N64 is big, yes, but it's also like $20 or less for a used N64, and it can play N64 carts by virtue of... being an N64.

In short, we haven't seen any progress on this thing, it's been out for over a year... it's probably not gonna happen. It's all but forgotten.

[Alchemist]

There's no real evidence that the games have been recompiled.

Online play cannot just be hacked into a ROM.

I seriously doubt that Nintendo/iQue went far enough to make the two platforms incompatible

Far enough? We're talking about changing a few parameters in the ROM format to stop the iQue booting N64 games and vice versa. I'd be surprised if they hadn't - they would have to have gone out of their way to preserve it, really.

[KJoshJ]

ok here is a question, all the discussion has been about hacking games to work, would the extra controllers for the ique multiplayer work on a nintendo 64? Just wondering Josh.

[SgtBowhack]

Like I said, that might as well be considered encryption though, and speaks nothing of the compatibility of the two platforms. And online play was added as a feature of the OS, not into the ROMs themselves. It sounds like (from descriptions I've read) all games "support online play" in some fashion. All it really probably does is send controller signals from one console to all of the online consoles in the game (if this is synched from the start of play, and signal loss is properly accounted for, the game will show the same on all consoles). And even if they don't do this, online play can be added by simply reading RAM and sending parts to the other consoles. It depends on how long they've been planning it as far as how precise and robust it can be implemented. Again, you're jumping to conclusions that cannot be jumped to.

As for the controllers, Josh, I haven't seen anything about them other than Lik-Sang's website but they look like N64 controller ports on them, so it seems likely (It makes sense that they wouldn't bother changing them other than casing.)

[Alchemist]

Doesn't use N64 controller ports.

You're right about the online play, although I still think that when changing all the characters from Japanese->Chinese would make far more sense just to recompile. Why bother ROM hacking when you've got the original code base to hand? It doesn't make sense.

[SgtBowhack]

Ah, never seen it that close. That kinda pisses me off though that they'd bother changing it like that, since they're the same controllers :/
As for having the code at hand, believe it or not, back in the old days of cartridge RPGs, they wouldn't recompile... dunno why. It's possible that for some reason or another they don't still have the source code handy. In this day and age, with backups aplenty and most of the coding taking place on normal PCs, they probably do have the source code and may well have used it.
I think you make some good points, but when looking at this objectively, all of this could really have been done by you or me, without any of Nintendo's help (though admittedly the system itself would be much larger...) Other than the size, there is absolutely nothing remarkable about iQue, so we need to look at it that way.