Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator

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2024-12-28 22:30:05

While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it was possible to load new NES games from the memory card. I was also able to find a way to exploit this ROM loader to patch custom code and data into the game, allowing for code execution via the memory card.

The normal NES games that you could obtain in Animal Crossing each came as an individual furniture piece that appeared as an NES console with a single game box on top of it. When you placed the item in your house and interacted with it, it would only play that one game. Pictured below are the Excitebike and Golf items.

There was also a generic “NES Console” item that did not feature any of the built-in games. You could buy this item from Redd, or sometimes obtain it through random events such as town bulletin-board message stating that one has been buried in a random location in town.