Nintendo Wii Prototype

[Mireille Kreines]

Inthe mid 1990s, Nintendo announced the 64DD disk drive add-on for the N64 for the US market ....but it never came out. Instead the Japanese version of the drive crashed and burned upon release and it took all the hopes of US gamers ever buying one along with it. For almost 20 years it was consider a myth that an actual US retail version exists... until now. I have found a working prototype of the 64DD for the US market AND it contains a developer blue diskette inside of its drive. This unit is unique in many ways and in this video I tell you all the things that make it special...and what happens next...

But if I understand it correctly... it's a region locked console... locked to a region that never had any officially released software... sooooo... it's a paperweight? Still cool to see that boot up screen and I hope you can get to see what's on that disc it came with.

I can't see why it would be region locked. I used my N64DD with a US console! So that's not the issue here. The problem is that the N64DD drive he's found is a genuine retail type unit. The blue disks ONLY work on development N64DD drives. That's why he can't read it.

I can't see why it would be region locked. I used my N64DD with a US console! So that's not the issue here. The problem is that the N64DD drive he's found is a genuine retail type unit. The blue disks ONLY work on development N64DD drives. That's why he can't read it.

What games are you using? The game disk themselves and/or the DD console are likely where the region check comes from. So you are using Japanese 64dd with Japanese games, the 64 itself is most likely irrelevant in this situation.

No, you're not getting it. The N64 is not the issue. The N64DD unit itself is region locked to North America so therefore it won't play Japanese games, which is a problem because all the officially released software was Japanese.

I don't think you watched the video at all. They got him in touch with the guy who was in charge of the North American N64DD and he recognized the unit and tells MJR the blue disc could be a final version of a game for the North American market. So the guy working on it knew final versions of games were still blue at this point, which makes sense because it never released to the public anyways.

Very very cool video! That thing has to be worth a crazy amount of money. I'd love to find out what's on the disk as well. I had a DD a while ago and thought it was really neat. Every once in a while I'll get the itch to get one again.

I watched the video over the weekend. What a find!!! I remember reading about the DD and wanting one after all the 90's gaming magazines were talking about a new/expanded Zelda game coming out for it. Back then, I had actually bought a N64 just because of Ocarina of Time, so seeing previews of Ura Zelda on the DD had me wanting to pick one up. And then, it never came out. I was bummed.

Fair enough if the American N64DD unit is region locked in itself and thus can't play Japanese retail games. But THAT'S NOT TRULY THE ISSUE HERE! As noted by myself and Punisher above, blue N64DD disks ONLY work on development units NOT retail units. I used to own a N64DD dev unit and a blue disk, so I was able to try this out first hand!

That is the whole point of this region locking being brought up in this thread. Just Because you could play Japanese games on a Japanese DD on a US N64, does not mean a US DD will/should play Japanese games.

Please watch the video already. The guy who handled this exact same unit that MJR discovered told MJR that the blue disc could either contain code he wrote or a completed game for the North American market. Don't you think if the system couldn't read it at all then the first thing he would have said is "it can't read it, you need a grey disc."??

Yes, dev units play blue discs and Japanese retail units play grey discs. That is still true. But this unit is one of a kind, it is not a Japanese retail unit, nor a dev unit. We don't know what it can play but going by what the guy said, it seems it should play blue discs. I'm sure it was supposed to play retail (grey) discs BUT NO SUCH SOFTWARE EXISTS, they never started the production line for North American N64DD software. It's no surprise that production-ready versions of games (that would work on this one) would be on a blue disc, none of it ever reached retail here so no need to use anything other than blue discs.

There's obviously something different about how the N64DD disks are recorded that prevent one machine type from reading the other type of disk. In a similar way that a normal GameCube can't read NR discs, and an NR Cube can't read retail discs.

As I already mentioned in the YT comments... Both of you should give Ben Heck a crack at your unique systems. It would be awesome to take a look inside, see how they tick and what the differences are.

Earlier this week, a rare prototype of the Super Famicom, the console that would come to be known as the Super NES worldwide, went up on a Japanese auction site. After quickly racking up millions in bids, the auction was pulled, and nobody seems to know why.

The Yahoo Japan auction listing was at just a few thousand dollars when I last checked in on it, but that number quickly ballooned into the millions - $3.2 million, according to a Kotaku report. You can still see the details of the auction in the original listing, but the ultimate price has disappeared since the close of the auction. I've seen suggestions that the bids actually reached nearly $7 million, but I've been unable to independently verify that number.

Another thing that remains unclear is whether this thing is even real. The account that posted the auction has a history of positive feedback for less exotic items, and the console does appear very similar to prototypes that appeared in Japanese gaming media at the time. But, as Chris Covell notes on Twitter, it's certainly not exactly the same as previously seen models. That could mean it's a fake, or it could simply mean it's a previously unknown prototype - it'd be impossible to tell without a historian having the chance to look at the machine.

Nobody's 100% sure why the auction was pulled, but much of the collecting community has a pretty good guess: fake bids. Online auction sites typically aren't well set up to handle one-of-a-kind rarities like this, and the closest equivalent I can think of, the Nintendo PlayStation prototype, fetched 'just' $360,000 when it went to auction back in 2020. Would this Super Famicom prototype, which isn't tied to one of the most infamous stories in gaming history, truly find a buyer willing to pay ten times more?

I've got my fingers crossed that this won't be the last time we hear about this console. In an ideal world, it'll turn out to be authentic, and the seller will make a tidy profit getting it to some philanthropic collector who'll get the machine in the hands of gaming historians who can properly examine and document it. That is, admittedly, a lot to hope for, but such is the state of gaming history.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Dustin BaileySocial Links NavigationStaff WriterDustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

The Super NES CD-ROM[1][a] (commonly abbreviated to SNES-CD) is an unreleased add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) video game console. It was built upon the functionality of the cartridge-based SNES by adding support for a CD-ROM-based format known as Super Disc.[4][5]

The SNES-CD was developed in a joint venture between Nintendo and Sony. Sony also planned to release it as a hybrid console, the PlayStation.[6] Another partnership with Philips yielded a few Nintendo-themed games for the CD-i platform instead of the SNES-CD.

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