Beta footage of canceled N64 game SimCopter 64 appears online, owner plans to dump the cart

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A little piece of gaming history has been uncovered this week, as a Reddit user has brought light to a game thought to no longer exist. Originally scheduled for release on the Nintendo 64 after its appearance at E3 1997, SimCopter 64 never found its way into final production. However, a picture was posted online of a prototype build playing on a Nintendo 64, only for it to promptly be removed by the owner a day later. Prior to deleting the post, the OP claimed that the development cartridge plays fine, but they're worried about it corrupting, and are currently looking into making a backup of the cart in order to preserve it. Footage of the game playing was also posted--and is now deleted as well--but it showed that the date on the build was December 26, 1997, a handful of months after its reveal at E3.

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stanleyopar2000

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Can he dump call of duty black ops instead? I wanna go to nuke town :creep:

That cartridge looks weird, Do all prototype carts look like that?

Yes they do. The Superman 64 Beta (much better than the final product) looked like that too
 

x65943

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Can he dump call of duty black ops instead? I wanna go to nuke town :creep:

That cartridge looks weird, Do all prototype carts look like that?
The beta cartridges I believe have more storage and are read/write
 

Mikemk

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So what game has the biggest storage size? :blink:
Released 64MB games: Biohazard 2, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Paper Mario (Europe), Pokemon Stadium 2, Resident Evil 2, all Nintendo 64DD games
Betas & unreleased 64MB games: Glover (8MB released), Majora's Mask (32MB released), Ocarina of Time: Master Quest (32MB released*), Mega Man 64 (32MB released)

* Not technically one of the largest cartridge storages as it was never released on a cartridge.

Technically Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Master quest is the largest N64 game at half of 1.4GB, though that's because it was one of 2 roms on a GameCube disc. The actual rom was only 32MB.
 

Gamemaster1379

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Released 64MB games: Biohazard 2, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Paper Mario (Europe), Pokemon Stadium 2, Resident Evil 2, all Nintendo 64DD games
Betas & unreleased 64MB games: Glover (8MB released), Majora's Mask (32MB released), Ocarina of Time: Master Quest (32MB released*), Mega Man 64 (32MB released)

* Not technically one of the largest cartridge storages as it was never released on a cartridge.

Technically Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Master quest is the largest N64 game at half of 1.4GB, though that's because it was one of 2 roms on a GameCube disc. The actual rom was only 32MB.
Even the 1.4 GB is disingenuous. Nintendo padded ISOs with garbage data to meet the exact size. If you ran a compression algo to rip out the data, the ROMs + overhead to run them is probably no more than a few hundred MB.
 

Mikemk

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Even the 1.4 GB is disingenuous. Nintendo padded ISOs with garbage data to meet the exact size. If you ran a compression algo to rip out the data, the ROMs + overhead to run them is probably no more than a few hundred MB.
Well that logic also applies to all the N64 games I mentioned - most games don't use every byte of storage on the cartridge.
In this specific case, the Ocarina of Time + Master Quest ISO uses 1.04GB on the disc.

Now, you don't need all of that. There's trailers for other games on the disc, and if you strip them out, it's 538 MB.

You can actually do further stripping. There's a gamecube disc image inside the disc image that you can pull out and run directly (It might be the japanese disc image). It's 518 MB. The game selection menu isn't included though, and it defaults to running the Master Quest version. Also, saving seems to be broken. If offers to format my memory card, but I'm unwilling to check if that fixes the issue.

Despite being unplayable, this tgz contains the unmodified rom, which can be deleted for a total of 485 MB which is actually "necessary" for playing the game. I put necessary in quotes because there's a 450 MB pre-rendered credits movie so credits can display at the gamecube's native resolution. You don't really need that, but it's part of the game, so I'm including it.
 

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