The removal of the 10NES chip also allows the system to play games that are unlicensed and/or from different regions such as Europe, something NES-001 systems cannot do without a hardware modification. The 10NES authentication chip was completely removed from the system in an effort to eliminate the blinking red power light problem associated with it in the original NES. The NES-101 returned to the standard top-loading method, used by almost all cartridge systems before and since for its ease and reliability. Wear and tear was another problem with continued use, the precision of the mechanism deteriorated and the user would have to poke and nudge at the cartridge to move it to a position that would be read correctly. The large space inside allowed plenty of room for dust to settle and the contact heads were almost impossible to access and clean without disassembling the system or using the official cleaning kit. In that system, the user had to first open the lid of the case, slide in the cartridge, then press it down. The most obvious change in the redesign was the removal of the front-loading Zero-Insertion-Force (ZIF) mechanism of the cartridge slot in the original NES-001 model. The NES-101 does not have an LED power light to indicate the unit is on, as the original NES-001 and SNS-001 included. The power and reset buttons now matched the curvature of the new look. The case design was by Lance Barr, who also designed the North American versions of the original NES and Super NES, as well as the later redesigned Super NES. The external appearance of the NES was greatly overhauled and restyled to align its looks to the North American version of the Super NES control deck and to address a number of commonly cited ergonomic problems of the original NES-001 model.
The NES-101 control deck came packaged with a redesigned version of the standard NES controller (model number NES-039) shaped very similarly to the Super NES controller. This was at a significantly lower price than the already released Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It retailed in North America for $49.99 USD (equivalent to $89.56 in 2020). Nintendo marketed the New-Style NES model as the NES Control Deck, exactly the same as the original NES-001 model, only with a "new design" mark on the packaging.
The New-Style NES (also known by its model number NES-101, the New NES, the top-loading model, or simply the Top Loader) is a compact cost-reduced redesigned version of the Nintendo Entertainment System released by Nintendo in 1993.