1980s Nintendo Game and Watch trade show kiosk. Help me find info!!

So my boss and I found this obscure beauty being thrown out in Long Island New York.
We would like to know more about it. People from all over have contacted me offering over a thousand for it. But I'd like to know exactly what I am dealing with before I sell it. It has a legit Nintendo chip in it. It looks old. It doesn't seem like a homebrew. So yeah. Any ideas or solid info would help

 

Could we see some photos of the inside? This thing is cool as hell, I'm sure you could get well over a thousand for it from a dedicated Game and Watch collector.

 

I only have my phone right now but I’ll post pics from the pc tomorrow. Unless I’m missing something about uploading jpegs directly in the thread

 

I know nothing about its value, but I doubt there are too many of them about! Looks so cool, nice find!!!!!

 

Looks a lot like the bulb-based prototype versions of the game and watch games, as described in this interview:

http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/clubn/game-and-watch-ball-reward/0/2

No idea how it would have gotten all the way from Kyoto to where you found it! Incredible find. Nothing else vintage Nintendo in that dumpster?

 

https://www.facebook.com/gameandwatchat/posts/1530568430356463

Check the comments on this facebook post, it looks like a guy named Florent Gorges asked the creators of Game & Watch about this thing, and they don't seem to remember it. But to me that makes this thing a whole lot more interesting; who could be bothered to make a completely custom board, strip the components from a regular Game & Watch, and put them on it? And why?

And funnily enough, that Gorges guy is a friend of a friend of mine on Facebook.

 

There were pictures and the chip looks like it is dated 2004? I would like to see the other chips to decode those dates as well.

 

What a rarity!

 

haha you made it on here! i shared your post on G.G.G with a couple of guys on here. is that panel A4 sized? and i see the acrylic looks smoked....

 

That's what I'm saying. I know Florent Gorges reached out to his NCL contacts like Satoru Okada and they said it didn't look familiar, but the similarities to the description in the Iwata Asks interview are pretty stunning. You've got an ~A4 sheet of acrylic with shapes cut out and backlit by small LEDs.

I could see the orange housing being constructed for a presentation or demonstration--maybe like a product line review presentation for US retailers or something. But the display panel certainly evokes what was described by Masao Yamamoto and Takehiro Izushi in the Iwata interview. If it's truly for a presentation and not one of the prototypes, then it was at least constructed in the same manner as the prototypes.

 

I don't see how it can be an actual prototype - by definition they would have been built before the production chips were made, and that unit is built around the chip out of a production unit. I think it's got to be some sort of demonstration unit. That main PCB is pure 80s - made from FR2 and with the sort of gently curved tracks that were characteristic of boards designed using manual layout before CAD caught on.

There is also a mod made using a piece of tinned copper wire in that photo, which suggests this was produced in low volumes and it was considered more expedient to patch the board than make a new one with the layout corrected.

The fact that the glue chips being used to drive the display are made by TI also makes me suspect this might have been built in the US - it's not conclusive because you could certainly get TI chips in Japan, but by the 80's companies like Hitachi were making complete ranges of TTL chips and in Japan they would have been both easier to obtain and cheaper than the TI ones were.

 

Exactly this, I was going to mention the Texas Instruments chips yesterday but forgot to finish my post.

@Syclopse, I don't think that's a manufacturing date, it's more likely to be a serial number or something like that.

 

I agree, but to be sure I'd love to see the numbers on the other chips for date confirmation.