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by sparkling 1617 days ago
Something similar: for the original Playstation 2 that was sold in the EU, Sony included a DVD with a BASIC interpreter to classify the console as a personal computer. This little hack avoided some EU import taxes back in the day.

https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/07/sony_adds_basic_to_pl...

2 comments

Same with 29.59 min video recording limit on tons of cameras. https://www.borrowlenses.com/blog/video-recording-limits-in-...

"In 2006, the European Union created a law that added an import duty of 5-12% to any video camera. What determined whether a camera was a video camera? In short, the ability to record longer than 30 minutes. Thus, companies like Canon and Nikon decided to cap their video clip lengths, preventing their enthusiast and prosumer cameras from being considered video cameras."

I always wondered about that limit. There were many stories going around about hardware, memory limits, but this sounds much more believable.
Still seems like a win as it made the console more useful.