North American Prototype of the N64DD found in Seattle

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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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S

Saiyan Lusitano

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This is a unicorn of a unicorn. I can't wait to see what's on that disk.
If only Nintendo hadn't applied restrictions to the system MetalJesus could have shown us all. Also, I hope that region locking isn't on the NX.
 

codezer0

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Well, for anyone that didn't see it already, there is this video where someone finally does give it a try, and gets in contact to determine what it is...



So, it's basically a ready-for-retail 64DD meant for the US market. It unfortunately cannot play any of the existing Japanese 64DD games directly, because Nintendo still had/has a hard-on for region locking. The disk it comes with is unfortunately one that requires this Partner64 cartridge to put the thing into developer mode to actually read it.

The most interesting thing to me, is that its copyright predates the release of the 64DD to the Japanese market by a full two years(!!)

So, we could have had this thing well ahead of the Japanese Market, since this unit was effectively done. But we didn't, because Iwata. :angry:
 

cracker

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CD burners wouldn't have helped pirates because it is a magnetic disk like a floppy or Zip disk. You would have had to buy a (surely) expensive (re)writable drive and blank disks.
 
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I want some of this stuff so bad, Like N64DD and Nintendo Playstation, but since there are so few, they go for about $2000 Dollars. Plus, one DD game is another $1000. Now I know why they say Video Games are an expensive hobby :lol:
 

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