The NES had its own unauthorized software lockout mechanism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES

The more things change, the more things stay the same. (thin electron gun Trinitron CRTs, capacitor plague, lead-free solder etc)

I've had both types: an old one that kept time and sounded the alarm on backup power and my current one that just keeps the time and sounds the alarm as soon as the power comes back. I presume that running the whole radio/buzzer at a decent volume until your lazy ass wakes up would drain the tiny 9V battery in a pinch.

It's just cheap cut-corner design. Your wall powered alarm clock uses the mains frequency (50 or 60 Hz) as its timebase which is very precise because power companies pride themselves on cycle accuracy. When the power goes out, an internal RC oscillator takes the place of the AC timebase. It barely passes for a basic timekeeping source as you have already noticed, since you can't get any real accuracy from such a cheap way of doing things. A quartz crystal instead of the RC crap would keep the clock highly accurate on all conditions but it would cost a few extra cents per unit, a big no-no for our Chinese manufacturing overlords. At least they bias it to get you up earlier instead of later.

Another way to make these really obvious is to use your operating system with any language other than English. Malware writers don't bother with localization, so their fake error messages always display in English regardless of your actual OS language. Even the USB autorun viruses are dead easy to spot, you know something's fishy when there's a lonely English menu option in the Autorun dialog, usually "Open folder to view files" while the rest aren't.

Amazingly, most people still click on the damned things.

Or the oldschool Mac remake known as Dome Wars. Pretty much the same game with slightly better gfx. Back when I was in high school my mates and I used to play the hell out of Dome Wars on my PowerBook 145 (25 MHz 68030, 640x400 1-bit LCD) which I hacked to run off a Tyco R/C car battery. Good times, good times.

IMO if you're putting that kind of work just to cheat on a test, you're already learning a lot of things (programming and/or electronics in case of hardware hacks), things that are arguably worth much more for your personal development than whatever the particular test might cover.

A Dual NAND Flash calculator with a hidden switch for choosing between two identical memory banks would be excellent for getting solver apps into standardized tests. Let the instructor reset your main NAND and see all your apps go poof, then switch to the hidden NAND during the test to get all your solver programs back. A reed switch with a flip-flop style latch would be totally invisible from outside of the calculator. Just carry a small magnet and hover it over the magic spot on your calc to switch memory banks.

You could get a console modding guy to do this to your calculator if you aren't good with electronics and/or fine pitch soldering, since they routinely deal with this sort of thing (installing a Dual NAND into a Wii comes to mind).

Not all microwave ovens have the rotating reflector thing. In fact most of them (especially modern ones) are too cheap to include such a component and they just spin the food around in the hopes of avoiding hot spots. Remove the rotating glass plate on a cheap oven and you'll get perfectly defined hot and cold spots.

2 is 10 in binary.

As Dwedit stated before, it's up to the game what to do with the NMI. Most games simply treated it as a "Halt program execution now!" button.

And don't forget flaky PSUs which caused the console to get trapped in an infinite reset cycle.

Also the Dreamcast optical drive is obnoxiously LOUD!

The real WTF here is having the pause button on the console itself.
It's like returning to the dark ages of TVs without remote controllers!

Also (if I'm not mistaken) the SMS' pause button fires off an NMI instead of being just another joypad input, making it more like a "Freeze" button. Notice how most SMS games pause like if you halted the main processor.

Remember having to put your PS1 on its side (or completely upside-down) or else it wouldn't read your games? The optical pickup mechanism of the early models of the PlayStation used a plastic piece as a guide for the sliding laser assembly, repeated motion degraded the plastic piece over time causing optical drift - turning the PS1 on its side forced the laser back to its correct position (yay gravity!).

Sony replaced that piece with a shiny metal guide in their later models, much like every CD-ROM drive has used for the past two decades or so.

Can you tell me where did you find this picture please?

I've seen this on some website years ago but I didn't bookmark it and I wasn't able to find it ever since.

Better keep special care of that 'treasured' cartridge since one day its internal backup battery will run out, permanently wiping your save file.

You can replace the cartridge's battery without losing your data if you solder another battery in parallel during the whole procedure (thus keeping the SRAM chip energized at all times).