I like how this article does not talk about the anti consumer practices engaged in by Nintendo, that might push some customers away from their consoles. /s Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA. There is already a switch in my household, but the price along with the ability to remotely brick the device, is what made our household pass on the switch 2. We bought a second steam deck instead.
This was not the case for Nintendo consoles in the past. I imported plenty of NES, SNES, GC, GB, GBA, and DS carts that were published in Asia/Europe, but not published in the Americas, and had no issues playing them until the Wii. Those consoles I just mentioned were all region free.
NES, SNES, and GC were definitely region locked.
NES and SNES were region-locked. In addition to an actual lockout chip, they even had different cartridge shapes so you couldn’t physically fit Famicom or Super Famicom games.
Handhelds were not (until DSi and 3DS), but I specifically said home consoles.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t region locking on the NES and SNES largely implemented via the shape of the cartridge? Frank Cifaldi and the VGHF just put out that NES history video, and it had some kind of authentication chip that could only be provided by Nintendo, and it was in the NES but not the Famicom. And on Gamecube, I seem to remember you needed an Action Replay to break the region locking, but I never dabbled in it myself.
I wasn’t importing famicom cartidges, I was importing NES cartidges that were not published in america.
Did you have a modded console? Without modification, the 10NES lockout chip prevents PAL cartridges from running on NTSC or vice versa. But it is possible to disable the chip to get around this.