How many NGC NR readers exist?

I just purchased a GameCube nr reader. I’m wondering how many actually exist? I can’t imagine Nintendo has released that kind of info.

Factors to consider:

1.) There are around 660ish games for gamecube. If we made an assumption and said each game was made by an individual team, we could assume there are 660ish nr readers.

2.) Each game was likely not made by an individual team, several teams most likely made multiple games and re-used nr readers and other hardware, so we could assume there are less than 660ish Nr readers.

3.) Nr readers may have broke and may have needed to be replaced and/or teams developers may have had more than 1 nr reader. So we could assume very roughly that it evens out around 660. (Very rough estimate.)

4.) Game reviewers had nr readers to review games in progress, so we can estimate there are perhaps over 660 units in existence.

My guess based on this reasoning is there are under 1000 nr reader units produced. Does anyone know otherwise, or have a better guess?

 

With out giving out the exact serial number on my Nr reader, mines around SN 4900. But sometimes the serial numbers can be based on when they were made and not necessarily by order being made.

But I’d guess around 2500. They seem to pop up a lot on ebay so it seems like there must be a bunch.

Have you gotten any NR disks yet to play on your console?

 

A lot. I've seen pictures of developers with multiple on a desk . Qa testers used them too. Thousands were out there.

 

I just received a pal nr disc today in the mail from a user here on Assembler. The actual console, I got from eBay. It’s payed for, and should be shipped soon, but I don’t have it in my hands yet

 

Awesome what game did you get if you don’t mind me asking?

 

Balder’s gate dark alliance. Not sure how early or finished it is yet. Will hopefully find out soon and be able to share

 

Awesome, I look forward to hearing about it

 

I have 4 NR disks coming my way in a couple weeks. Nothing super exciting, they are just review copies but I’ll send them into Hard4games for them to back up the roms for me and possibly make a video on them if anything exciting is discovered.

 

You know I was considering doing that also. I love that channel. I’m not sure how he does that or what his policy is on sending stuff in.

 

I send him lots of dev items.
If they make a video on the item, they tend to pay for shipping. But if you want them to dump the rom for you, you’d probably have to pay to ship to them. They also won’t release your roms.

You should just send them an email and ask about dumping it. Its never a bad idea to have the back up rom just Incase something happens to the disk or any dev item in general.

 

Ah I see. I’ll try emailing them, however I’m actually interested in releasing mine to the public as long as the seller doesn’t mind

 

You can assume all that but you'd be wrong. As pointed out some teams had multiple units.

 

Yeah that’s why I was asking to see if anyone knew more

 

Also, a lot of teams were working on making games but never finished them so you can't assume all of that based on that data.

 

Perhaps “presumption” would have been a better word for me to use than “assumption.” I’m just presenting my thought process and seeing if I can get any feedback or info.

 

Yeah, and I hope that we will get the answer to how many there are, not just because of the gamecube but it would provide us with a hint for the other systems of that generation as well.

 

There was probably an excess of them produced that were never distributed and sent to e waste. So they probably approximated how many they may need, and made a few more incase new devs hopped on the band wagon, or more units were required/needed to be replaced. In short, the only way to truly know would be know someone at Nintendo. Otherwise make a record of serial numbers and see what the highest known is.

 

I think the numbers being talked about here are way low - the people most likely to use an NR reader are the testers, and the QA department is often quite large. That was also part of the reason that they produced the NR reader in the first place - the NPDP-Reader setup was expensive and so were the carts, and hence equipping a large QA team with them cost a lot of money.

 

Oh shoot I didn’t think of testers. The other thing I was wondering is were the NR readers supposed to be sent back or do they belong to the developers?

 

I mentioned QA testers in my post