Hardware hacker Tom7 uses an unmodded NES to do some awesome tricks

There are the thing we do because we have to, and the things we do because we can. Climbing Mount Everest. Installing Doom on everything. Programmer Tom Murphy, who goes by Tom7, wants to see just what the original NES is capable of. Over the course of the below video, he gets it to do some amazing stuff, from running some very lo-fi full-motion video to running software it definitely shouldn’t be able to run.

A lot of this goes a little bit over my head, but here’s the short version: While games these days are simple executable files stored on discs and drives, games back then were on cartridges with microchips inside them. Game developers were able to add extra chips and circuitry into these cartridges to do things like add extra sound channels and even improve animation, squeezing more power out of the system than it shipped with. Konami’s VRC6 chip made Castlevania III sound completely different to Japanese gamers; the American version of the system didn’t support this particular chip.