Before the Japan-only Nintendo 64 Disk Drive was quietly discontinued and forgotten, Nintendo was working on a port of Super Mario 64 to the new disk technology. Presumably a tech demo, it never saw the light of day, however, an early development disk was found and dumped online, preserving it. This version of Super Mario 64 doesn't change much from the original release, though it does feature improved textures and music changes.

A romhacker by the name of Zoinkity decided to take those slight changes, patch a major bug, and release it as a romhack of the original N64 version of the game, available as an xdelta patch on Romhacking.net.

The disk build of Super Mario 64 was a hastily-made promotional piece that was little more than a sliced up cartridge ROM (see readme). This patch reassembles the original ROM and switches disk read requests with cart requests. Disk saves are replaced with EEPROM saves, thereby eliminating the two things that made this version at all interesting.

As a bonus, the Wiggler health bug was also corrected so it should be possible to collect all 120 stars.

To distinguish the patched file from other cartridge versions, the internal name reads “SUPER MARIO 64DD”, the version is -1, and a timestamp was applied.

Source

 

[Chrisssj2]

I'm not sure you get what "illegal" means
It means the governement can punish you, either with fine or time in jail.
In the case of hacking a console, the company who made it will punish you, either by voiding your warranty (by modding it) or by banning you from their server (when they actually detect you)

From what I know, hacking a console is totally legal. The console is yours, you do whatever you want with it. However, using copyrighted content on it such as roms, THAT is illegal
Dumping rom IS illegal, but creating a way to dump them (the homebrew) ISNT illegal,

It's all about WHAT you will do with it
Here's a thread about the common myths of the emulation world :
https://gbatemp.net/threads/piracy-common-myths.344858/

Who cares about what is illegal or not in their eyes, is my point. When we the people even don't care for it in this instance and still do it anyways. The government is illegitimate idea anyway. And we should be afraid of them putting us in cages for doing what??? Copying infinite digital content space? And then be coerced by goons to do their will. What kind of world do we allow ourselves to create with this behaviour. it is appalling and disgusting. Where we are ruled by fear and violence.

 

[RandomUser]

Any one whom owns a working GameShark Pro v3.3, an N64 console, and a computer with an LPT port, have been able to dump their own cartridges. Yes, you have read correctly, GameShark Pro v3.3 have the capability to dump your cartridges.

 

[TraderPatTX]

So everyone does it, but we deciding it to keep it not public, cuz were scared of what?? just a bunch of bullies really. so sick and tired of this mentality and humans.

You are forgetting that the bullies you speak of have billions of dollars and armies of lawyers who have ruined people's finances and put people in jail for circumventing their IP's. If you wish to stand toe to toe with them, create your own site and run it however you want. I'd be interested to see how that works out for you.

 

[EpikJimmer]

I just tried this version out and it's different enough to make it feel like I'm playing it in a fever dream or something. Case in point: the sound engine is way different, for example the violins in peach's castle are too echoey. And the game lags constantly while loading a course (makes sense; it was on the DISK drive).

Really cool though that I actually got to play it normally instead of downloading a seperate emulator just to run the disk drive version. Kinda dope ngl.