Hi all, I'm new to AssemblerGames, so excuse me if this isn't the appropriate category to start this thread. Yesterday the exciting news was announced that MetalJesusRocks/Hard4Games/LuigiBlood were able to dump a Prototype US 64DD firmware along with the contents of a blue disk that was found inside. See video here: This was a result of collaborative efforts from helpers like yourselves as discussed in another thread on this topic. (See http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/us-version-of-n64-64dd-has-been-found.62294/). For those interested in checking out the dump, see https://www.64dd.org/dumps_u.html for the blue disk contents "ddspgame" and the firmware "64DD IPL (USA)" (US Retail Prototype)". That aside, I'm interested in digging deeper into that blue disk to see what we can find. The demo contained in that blue disk is actually a demo that was contained in an Ultra64 devkit. In 2014, a GitHub account uploaded some uncompiled demos from that devkit, and you can find the demo used on the blue disk there. (See https://github.com/shlomnissan/ultra64demos/tree/master/ddspgame). If you look in the "Texture" directory on that GitHub link, the "12_tv.rgb" and "ball.rgba" are the same as used in MetalJesusRocks' YouTube video starting at 08:39 in the video. (See textured images below) However, I was cross-referencing the dumped blue disk with the uncompiled version, and they are actually different builds. The blue disk demo is older than the uncompiled demo. I can't find a builddate to confirm this, but the "messages.c" contains additional text that the blue disk dump doesn't. Specifically, the uncompiled version mentions an built-in clock, setting the time, and checking if a Memory Pak is inserted. In the following two screenshots, the first shows messages in the blue disk dump, the second shows the uncompiled messages and differences from the blue disk boxed in red. Blue Disk Demo Messages: Uncompiled Demo Messages: Anyway, the uncompiled version of this demo only consumes about 2MB disk space. I can't imagine that the compiled version takes more than that. If a 64DD disk holds about 62MB of storage and this demo takes about 2MB of the space, what is the rest of the data on the blue disk dump? There's probably more goodies. For example, In 2005ish, a developer copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest from Nintendo of Europe was dumped from a 64MB cartridge, and the dump had data from Pokemon Stadium 2 near the back of it that wasn't overwritten completely by Master Quest. I'm curious if this blue disk dump has 60MB of data leftover from something important. Let me know your thoughts, I'm curious what approaches other users might take to find leftover data rather than just looking for strings in a hex editor. Thanks for reading! EDIT: For those interested, this technical Introduction to N64 documentation has some goodies about 64DD disks and the developer units. http://level42.ca/projects/ultra64/Documentation/Intro to the N64.pdf Enjoy!
I'm just going to reply to this thread when I find some dirt. On the blue disk, I found some credits that have something to do with what's called "RSP SW". Probably something with the graphics. These credits appear in many N64 games but do not appear in the uncompiled demo. At the top of my head, Super Mario 64 is the only game I know it belongs to. These credits can be found in the blue disk dump about four times, but I believe they appear in other N64 games just once. I'm not sure why it would be written four times though.
I've already scanned through the rest of the disk data. Nothing interesting beyond the SDK demo. Code: # Uploaded via Partner64 ~Oct.20th, 1998 @6:13.20 P.M. # Loads 0x14 LBAs to 80000400. LBA 0018, 0x5E9F0 system.bin # 0x738C0 # 0xD22B0 end of system.bin LBA 0x2C # 0xD3D60 # Copies of the same 0xE718 bytes over and over again. # In other words, "random" noise generated and used to initialize disk LBAs. LBA 0x5A2, 0x100000 ram.bin # 0x1942A40 through 0x1A42A40, set via tests in program. LBA 0x5E3 # More of the same fill to EOF. No content besides ddspgame.
That's too bad I was hoping there would be more in the dump than what we saw in his video. Not to say that the menu and test functions aren't great in their own way.
Thanks for checking out the disk! It's too bad that there doesn't seem to be anything else, just mostly garbage data. As atkfromabove mentioned, at least we got a cool demo out of it.
