There are tons of controllers, but what about the system!?

A little preview

 

Any basement of a big hotel would probably have these buried somewhere.

 

Some more things:

Each one of those are mini computers with AMD Geode processors and they slide out for easy access. They are part of the chain of delivering the games somehow.





The (what a few of us are assuming) cards that connect to the TVs?

 

What am I looking at here?

 

A Lodgenet Hotel delivery system. The first picture is of the main unit holding the N64 consoles which go through the other unit + an additional server to deliver the games to hotel rooms. The last picture is of the interface to the TV.

 

Is it yours? Pics of the inside of the main unit, pronto please

 

I'll get more pictures of all of it tomorrow. Quite some interesting stuff...I was quite shocked to see that the daughter boards on top of the N64s seemed to be made by NOA as well.

 

Awesome! Do you think you've got all of the parts needed to get it running?

 

My friend and I plugged in the helper unit in and they booted up to a Lodgenet title screen, then it said it was searching for the server (which is most likely the additional server that it needs to send the games to the N64). It's hard to say at this point, but it looks promising that it can be done, just need to get a server up and running to send the actual data to it.

 

Forgot to mention. There is a top board that has nintendo lockout chips on it and areas for other lockout chips in case they are needed.

 

Black boxes to hide top secret information?

 

I've never seen the actual console before.
only played them in the hotel with the lodgenet controller in the wall
very cool item you have. Most hotels would have thrown them away

 

Presumably serial numbers and/or barcodes - IIRC, this stuff was all leased and not sold, so in theory it still belongs to Nintendo or Lodgenet. In practice, I doubt anyone at all cares anymore, but the equipment numbers could still allow the location it was originally instaled at to be traced, and might get someone in trouble.

 

That's what I'm guessing, these were either leased or were supposed to be destroyed (there's a reason why you never see these even though they were supposed to be in thousands of hotels).

 

I had some experience with the old "Nintendo Gateway System" stuff - that was based around a custom super Nintendo board with RAM for holding the downloaded games, and there was also another Nintendo supplied board that controlled the download functions. While it was a current system, they were incredibly paranoid about it, and required you to account for every single board.

 

Nintendo or Lodgenet?

 

Nintendo - in this case, it had nothing to do with Lodgenet, since the boards were being used as part of a Panasonic in-flight entertainment system and they supplied the rest of the hardware. My involvement was with the new system that replaced it (designing an interface board that allowed the new seat electronics unit to interface to the existing LCD display and PCU), and by that time Nintendo were much less paranoid about keeping track of this stuff.