It’s a video from YouTube Channel The Retro Future with the title “Nintendo didn’t want us to know this…” which I hate. Why not just mention it’s about the difference between the Kiosk Units and retail ones? I’ve seen a hundred clickbait titles like this that have completely disappointed me.
This time though, it actually was interesting content, even if I can’t see why Nintendo would care if we knew it.
The kiosk units that were displayed in stores to demonstrate software differed from the ones you could buy in one important respect: they have a resistor in a different place on the motherboard. Without this resistor, the kiosk units will only turn on if they’re connected to power. They still have a battery, but it doesn’t appear to be used! If the resistor is removed and soldered into the location it’s at on a production unit, it seems, it’ll function normally.
Here is the video:
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That is probably a zero-ohm resistor, whose primary purpose is configuring devices to adopt different behaviors using the same basic hardware. A zero-ohm resistor is really a “jumper” or “shunt” and doesn’t have any electrical function beyond just closing a circuit. They are also sometimes used to enable test circuits or to simplify circuit layouts. If you ever built a PC in the olden days, you may have configured jumpers on a hard drive or used a jumper to reset your BIOS settings. They usually resembled tiny plastic boxes with holes that mate with pins on the hardware. This is the same thing, just using surface mount technology and not meant to change in the field.
Interesting examples of this sort of configuration method are those little “keychain” arcade machines. You’ll find different versions that play different games, such as Space Invaders, Galaga, or Pac-Man. However, for economic reasons, they are all the same internally. Any of them can be made to play the other games by changing the internal jumpers (or better, replacing them with a switch).