Update, 7/15, 9am EDT: The man who discovered the rare, American 64DD has now posted video proof of his discovery, embedded above from his YouTube channel. The video shows off one surprising quirk: the hardware is region locked—designed to load American 64DD software that was never actually produced! There's also some speculation about what kind of in-development, US 64DD software might be on the blue development disk that was included with the hardware (which isn't currently launchable).

We look forward to Lindsey uncovering more about the hardware, including possibly a BIOS dump, as time goes on.

Original Story

Nintendo has launched a few pieces of hardware in Japan that never made their way to the West, including the backlit Game Boy Light and the Satellaview online attachment for the Super Famicom. But the best-known of Nintendo's Japan-only hardware has to be the 64DD—as in, the disk-drive attachment for the Nintendo 64 that landed with a whopping thud in Japan in 1999.

Though Nintendo of America had originally hinted at the add-on launching in the United States, that never happened, even though the company had once reached out to Western developers about making software for the system—and taking advantage of its disks' maximum 38MB of rewritable memory (which was huge compared to the N64's 32KB memory cards). But that doesn't mean an American 64DD never existed. A game-console collector announced on Tuesday that he had discovered an English-language version of the 64DD hardware—and based on insider Nintendo knowledge, this is almost certainly a retail prototype, as opposed to a dev kit.

Jason Lindsey

Jason Lindsey

Jason Lindsey

Jason Lindsey

Jason Lindsey

Jason Lindsey

Former Sierra game developer Jason Lindsey took to the Assembler Games forums this week—where you'll find no shortage of classic and rare gaming topics—to show off his latest acquisition. Lindsey told the forum that he had purchased a "prototype for the US version of the 64DD." His attached photos include two screens of the 64DD's boot-up sequence, which normally contains kanji characters asking players to insert a disk; his unit, however, offers those instructions in English.

Retail, or at least 'retail-ish'

The rest of his images reveal hardware that looks mostly like the retail hardware that launched in Japan. The biggest difference is a sticker that labels the system "Nintendo 64 Disk Drive" instead of the final "DD64" name. (Additionally, that sticker is dated 1997, while the final hardware's information stickers were dated 1999.) Lindsey asked for Assembler Games' help to figure out what might be on the blue disk that came with the system, which his English-language 64DD was unable to read. The blue disk color indicates compatibility with the hardware's development units, but its labels and serial numbers didn't hint to it containing anything specific. Collectors will surely hope for a unique game on the disk, as the system only saw nine official pieces of software during its 14 months of Japanese existence, along with dozens more announced games for the add-on that either never came out or were moved to traditional N64 cartridges.

So what makes this a possible retail prototype, as opposed to a dev kit? Most telling, according to a former Nintendo support specialist Mark Deloura (who eventually became the White House's Video Gaming Czar), is the English menu seen in these images. "You couldn't boot into the DD units hooked up for development," Deloura told Ars in an interview. "That is a sign of it being a retail unit, or at least 'retail-ish.' My recollection is that the development DD wouldn't boot at all."

Deloura, who currently runs one of the industry's best games-in-education newsletters, was careful to point out that his recollection is a little fuzzy after 20 years: "I wish I'd kept my DD so I could be more definitive about it!" That being said, Deloura was no slouch about DD development, having worked on the team that ported the 64DD version of Ocarina of Time to a smaller-memory cartridge: "At one point I had an early version of the Ocarina codebase from Japan and wrote the code to get it to work properly on the cartridge. I had to do some special things since it was so freakin' big."

Additionally, Lindsey's find did not have blue plastic trim around the disk slot, a detail that appeared in even the earliest 64DD dev kits. That hardware detail appears to indicate that the hardware build is not a dev kit, but rather a prototype of the retail hardware that could have landed in American shops.

Another forum member dumped water on the hardware's supposed rarity, claiming that he once owned 50 such US 64DD systems; that member claims he is still holding on to many of them, which he will sell when the prices peak, then "buy a boat and retire." Whether that's true or not, Lindsey's post and photos are still the first public proof that US versions of a retail 64DD were actually produced, and he went on to tell Assembler Games' members that he would post more information about his discovery on his “MetalJesusRocks” YouTube channel before long. In a phone interview, Lindsey declined to answer Ars' questions about the 64DD at this point, telling Ars that he's "on a fact-finding mission right now."

Listing image by Jason Lindsey