40 Winks on N64 being officially released

This is a cool project, but I'm wondering what people's thoughts are on the actual game itself? I can't say I ever got to play it on PSX.

 

Hah, I had that edition of NOM (but not the one that actually contained the review). Do remember thinking it was weird after all these hands-on impressions, I never saw it for sale anywhere. Remember somebody here saying the boxes for the cartridges were printed and ready to go & that it could be the most 11-th hour cancellation for a game there's ever been.

 

I only got as far as "Link to the kickstarter:" before losing interest.

 

Better then a link to indiegogo

 

But that is pretty much the last thing I wrote, so, yeah, that means you read everything.

 

How are these guys going to deal with the copy protection on the N64? I know the copy protection chip on the NES and SNES has been cloned (the CICClone or whatever it is) and that's how the retro-bit guys were able to release their NES and SNES carts (Nintendo probably doesn't care in this case since the owners of those games have given permission for the releases and because the systems are so old Nintendo doesn't care about the copy protection anymore) but I haven't heard of any cracks for the Nintendo 64 copy protection that would allow a newly made cartridge to run on a stock unmodified N64 (last I heard there was a need to decap some of the copy protection chips and read out their contents)

 

There's tons of pirate N64 carts on those chinese knock-off sites, why should this not be able to do the same thing?

 

N64 bootlegs are definitely becoming a thing now. There was even a guy in Nintendo Age selling his own Mario Party hack. I was curious myself since this is definitely a very recent thing and found this Youtube video, if it helps any.



On that note, anyone remember the days when Assembler had a museum front page and there was a section detailing the incredibly scarce N64 bootlegs of the 90's? Those must have been so expensive to make. We've come quite a ways now..

 

In the age of RGB-modded consoles, excellent upscalers, everdrives and homebrews on real carts, I'd say there has never been a better time to enjoy retro games.

 

The N64 CIC has been cloned too. It's slightly more complex to use than the NES and SNES ones are because there is a seed value stored in the CIC and the boot code used on the cart image has to match it - but that's not a big problem if you are aware of it.
The main reason that N64 repro carts are less common is that they are more complicated - the mask ROM chips used in N64 carts have a 16 bit multiplexed address/data bus and internal address counters in the chip and there isn't any equivalent flash chip so you have to fake up the logic with a bunch of chips or a CPLD.

Bootlegs of the early N64 games were relatively common in HK back in the day, but as the ROM sizes got larger they made less and less economic sense and the piracy market turned much more towards copiers. I did have a pirate cart of Biohazard 2 - I assume that was made because most of the copiers couldn't handle a game that size. It was also pretty packed inside; the program was written into 8 x 64Mbit TSOP flash chips that judging from the labels had been salvaged from pachinko machines - presumably using recycled flash was the only way the economics made any sense...

 

Have they confirmed where they got the ROM from? Having been lucky enough to spend a few weeks at Eurocom way back in 2007. I did at the time ask them about 40 Winks and I got told that the finish version was in their archive vaults. After Eurocom went bust we can only guess at what happened to their vault.

What I'd like to know is the version of the game Piko have ithat final build and not some other unfinished build maybe sent to reviewers. They haven't mentioned any of the Eurocom team involve in the game or if they are working with Piko, which isn't a good sign for me. Hopefully some of the team our working with this, but if that's the case they should be given a mention on Kickstarter. It's nice to see this get an N64 release, but I would want to be sure I'm playing the final, final build of the game Eurocom made.