US Version of N64 64DD has been found !

Either way great find and thanks for sharing

 

Amazing find man.

 

This is awesome! Also, nice seeing you here, Metal Jesus! I actually stumbled upon this thread earlier and quickly peaked at the photos. I saw the TV and thought "Huh... Metal Jesus has that same TV, doesn't he? Cool."

Came back as I saw this cross posted onto Reddit and noticed the Opeth poster... One YouTube search later and I confirmed it was MetalJesusRocks!

 

Well there was apparently a GameShark way to do it... or you use a 64drive with my IPL ROM dumper which has been tested and works fine.
(The source code is available and to anyone who wants to make it work on an Everdrive 64, feel free to do so, I'll gladly host it. )

 

Prepatched GS version is mirrored here:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ba2sgdwa7ub8u0u/N64_Utils_[8MB]_-_IPL_dumper.zip
Hook GS to your PC, run utilities, go to the "Other Utilities" tab, push "Grab 64DD IPL" button.

Takes longer than 64drive but works fine.

If you have a v64jr could make a small patch to zyalII if you're really desperate.

 

Ars picked this up and is running with it FYI:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...64s-disc-drive-add-on-unearthed-near-seattle/

 

"Another forum member" didn't know @ASSEMbler was just another random guy here on this site.

 

Maybe the blue disc is Mother 3?

 

Forgot to mention that 64DD dev disks are region-typed to themselves. They should be dumpable from any dev drive.

Each disk has a word in its disk header, set when the disk is written, indicating region. Dev disks regardless of region use 00000000, Japanese retail disks will use E848D316, USA presumably uses 2263EE56. This is read from the disk header, split into bytes, set just after each of the general exception vectors, then read back and compared later.

This isn't to be confused with how the IPL has a checkword that's unique to each region, reduced to a single byte. Disks themselves have region-typing.

In actual fact the libraries test the drive type, and if the dev disk's region code doesn't match 0 when a dev drive is in use will permaloop. Never mind that unless you set the region during formatting this basically is an impossible situation, since formatting and physical disk/drive differences prevent retail and dev disks working on the wrong type of hardware. You'd just hear terrible grinding and repeated clicking noises.

 

To be honest I think it is interesting just for the fact they got Mark Deloura talking about it.

 

Yeah and it just needs the cart to boot it up ;-)

 

Last version of Mother3 on N64 was on proto carts.
http://earthboundcentral.com/2009/03/playing-the-earthbound-64-demo/

They have at least half a dozen photos where it's obviously on cart with no drives.

 

Mario Party is the one game that comes to mind when I think of N64DD support or lack thereof. The US version omits the detection screen when a disk drive is attached. Was the detection screen completely removed from the US version or will it respond specifically to this hardware?

 

I'm always surprised when Nintendo stuff leaks. I'm kinda curious if 64dd was finalized at this point but they were still skeptical about releasing it at all. Someone must of taken this home. Can only dream of that 50% version of Mario 64 getting leaked.

 

Incredible. So even if there wouldn't exist a specific disk to enable anything for it, would a US copy of Ocarina of Time react to this unit in any way even superficially?

That would be so divine, but we shouldn't hold our breath.

 

Yes. The region flag used throughout the game to determine if it should use Japanese or English text is also used when testing the 64DD. A USA copy of Ocarina of Time will hook a USA drive and use its region word when detecting if the disk is present. USA copies will also check if a dev drive is inserted in the same loop.

Merely detecting any drive's IPL when an expansion pak is inserted will cause any N64 version of OoT to utilize 6MB of the available 8MB. This may be a relic of when they were originally going to release only a 2MB exp pak, or just silly programming.