A former game developer from Sierra, and avid game collector, Jason Lindsey, has made an interesting find this week. He claims to have purchased an American prototype of the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, an N64 add-on that never made it's way out of Japan. Apparently, only 50 of the units still exist in the wild, and were used at Nintendo of America (in Redmond Washington, a short drive from Seattle where they were found) during a 1997 Developer's Conference. It seems these systems were not dev consoles, but actual retail prototypes, meaning sadly they cannot play developer software. Which leads us to the most important discovery: There was a blue disc inside the unit, and these blue discs are only used for in-development N64DD games. Lindsey says he's currently trying to find a way to see just what mystery game is on that disc, and will make a video when he unearths more information.

Interesting changes from the Japanese N64DD units:

Instead of kanji characters asking to players to insert a disc, this system's boot up screen is entirely in English.

The sticker on the underside reads "Nintendo 64 Disk Drive", instead of the final build's DD64.

It also is dated 1997, (which matches up with the aforementioned conference) while the Japanese consoles are dated from 1999.

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Source

 

[kingraa777]

The English bios is cool

 

[HaloEffect17]

*Watches thread*

 

[mashers]

This is weird. I could aalmost understand a 3.5" floppy add-on as that would allow software to be distributed on cheap, plentiful and standardised media. But why create an add-on which just replaces one non-standard medium (the N64 cart) with another?

 

[Mikemk]

This is weird. I could aalmost understand a 3.5" floppy add-on as that would allow software to be distributed on cheap, plentiful and standardised media. But why create an add-on which just replaces one non-standard medium (the N64 cart) with another?

The 64 cartridge was 32MB max. The 64DD disk was 64MB max.

 

[mashers]

The 64 cartridge was 32MB max. The 64DD disk was 64MB max.

Ahh, that makes sense. Why was it slower than the cart? Could they not have just made it a secondary cart slot which took a cart with a larger capacity? Better yet, carts for the N64 cart slot which had a larger capacity. Even if it couldn't be addressed directly through the port, they should be able to incorporate a controller into the cart which would direct requests to one storage area or another. These kinds of things aren't unprecedented - just look at special chips in SNES carts.

Edit - just to clarify, I understand why magnetic media are slower... I really meant, why did they choose to use a slower medium.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

Very interesting. Any chance Nintendo of Europe had an N64DD too without the public knowing about?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

The 64 cartridge was 32MB max. The 64DD disk was 64MB max.

The max for cartridges was actually 64MB. Conker's Bad Fur Day uses a 64MB cartridge and so does Resident Evil 2, but those are the only two AFAIK.

Ahh, that makes sense. Why was it slower than the cart? Could they not have just made it a secondary cart slot which took a cart with a larger capacity? Better yet, carts for the N64 cart slot which had a larger capacity. Even if it couldn't be addressed directly through the port, they should be able to incorporate a controller into the cart which would direct requests to one storage area or another. These kinds of things aren't unprecedented - just look at special chips in SNES carts.

Edit - just to clarify, I understand why magnetic media are slower... I really meant, why did they choose to use a slower medium.

Nintendo fucked up in choosing cartridges period. Pretty much the only reasons they did go for cartridges was for substantially shorter load times and they're more durable than CDs. But on the flip side they cost like 10x more to manufacture, they take longer to manufacture, and the max storage space (at the time) was terrible.

As to why they didn't have multi-cartridge options, it would've ended up being insanely expensive and probably would've doubled the price of a game.

 

[Pluupy]

If this person became trans, would their name become "Lindsey Jason"?

 

[Mikemk]

Ahh, that makes sense. Why was it slower than the cart? Could they not have just made it a secondary cart slot which took a cart with a larger capacity? Better yet, carts for the N64 cart slot which had a larger capacity. Even if it couldn't be addressed directly through the port, they should be able to incorporate a controller into the cart which would direct requests to one storage area or another. These kinds of things aren't unprecedented - just look at special chips in SNES carts.

Edit - just to clarify, I understand why magnetic media are slower... I really meant, why did they choose to use a slower medium.

When they started development, the max cartridge size was (I think) 8MB, and 64MB was a huge improvement. They just took too long to come out with it.
And they choose the magnetic disks because they stored more than a cartridge but were still faster than a CD.

 

[GOT4N]

Or even better Mario 64-2

If only...

 

[Procyon]

SATA???

Would have been an extremely pioneering device if it was using SATA, considering the standard didn't come about until about 20 years later!

Even if it did, the media is clearly proprietary, so there's no compatible media readers to swap with.

Dude SATA isn't from 2017, but from 2003

 

[cvskid]

Maybe it's a beta of Dinosaur Planet? I hope.

 

[VinsCool]

I am happy:

https://twitter.com/MetalJesusRocks/status/753709108050612224

 

[Pleng]

Dude SATA isn't from 2017, but from 2003

Well I meant to type 10 years. I'd have still been 4 years out but the point still stands that there was no way it would have been used on this device

 

[Fun_Zephyr]

A little off topic but of a similar nature - I have a fake N64 DD device that has a clear outer shell that sits perfectly under the N64 (same shape and all) like this authentic device. Mine has a built in CD-Rom instead and you place a burnt disc in that has multiple games / roms on it. You select them from a very basic list menu (from memory). Have not used it in forever - but this thread reminded me of it

My limited knowledge on terminology - but you could almost call it an ODE or sorts (I know it is not an ODE as it is not Emulating an Optical Disc Drive But no idea what to call it)..

 

[AboodXD]

Imagine if that blue cartridge had Super Mario 64 2?

Super Mario 64 2 is an unreleased game due to unknown reasons, there's no footage of it, Nintendo only mentioned that it'd include Luigi as a second player...

 

[FAST6191]

My limited knowledge on terminology - but you could almost call it an ODE or sorts (I know it is not an ODE as it is not Emulating an Optical Disc Drive But no idea what to call it)..

It would probably just be a flash cart -- otherwise what do we call the things that ran DS code, including commercial games, from the DS GBA slot? Functionally it is not different, actually it might be quite a lot different from how a N64 cart worked and would be something I am curious to see but that is getting off topic. You don't tend to look at a device you want to hack and think "how do I make a flash cart" and instead think "how do I get copied commercial code or homebrew (maybe delete as appropriate) onto it", flash carts, mod chips, drive emulation, network loading, side loading from internal storage, side loading from ports the device might have, adapting rare media to more common/cheap... are then all means of doing things rather than a goal in and of themselves.

Imagine if that blue cartridge had Super Mario 64 2?

Super Mario 64 2 is an unreleased game due to unknown reasons, there's no footage of it, Nintendo only mentioned that it'd include Luigi as a second player...

I wonder how far along in development it was, and what, if anything, made it into the DS edition of the game.

 

[LuigiBlood]

You can guess that I'm looking closely at this particular thing and hope to talk to the owner soon...

Very interesting. Any chance Nintendo of Europe had an N64DD too without the public knowing about?

I don't think it was ever made. The SDK doesn't hint at anything of the sort unlike the US 64DD.

 

[AboodXD]

I wonder how far along in development it was, and what, if anything, made it into the DS edition of the game.

Luigi made it to DS.

 

[Saiyan Lusitano]

I am happy:

https://twitter.com/MetalJesusRocks/status/753709108050612224

That's cool. I rarely watch his videos so here's a reason to.