Jason Lindsey That’s quite the find! 6 more images in gallery 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. 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. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Rare US version of the N64’s disc-drive add-on unearthed near Seattle
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Gamasutra: The Sega Saturn’s DRM has finally been cracked after it hit store shelves nearly 23 years ago in November 1994. Engineer James Laird-Wah first set forth to break through the console’s copy protection in an attempt to harness its chiptune capabilities. Laird-Wah has, however, developed a way to run games and other software from a USB stick in the process. Since disc drive failure is a common fault with the game console, his method circumvents the disc drive altogether, instead reworking the Video CD Slot so it can take games stored on a USB stick and run them directly through the Saturn’s CD Block. “This is now at the point where, not only can it boot and run games, I’ve finished just recently putting in audio support, so it can play audio tracks, ” explained Laird-Wah, speaking to YouTuber debuglive. “For the time being, I possess the only Saturn in the world that’s capable of writing files to a USB stick. There’s actually, for developers of home-brew, the ability to read and write files on the USB stick that’s attached to the device. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Khari Johnson, writing for VentureBeat:A bot made to challenge traffic tickets has been used more than 9, 000 times by New Yorkers, according to DoNotPay maker Joshua Browder. The bot was made available to New Yorkers in March. In recent years and decades, residents of The Big Apple have seen a persistent increase in traffic fines. A record $1.9 billion in traffic fines was issued by the City of New York in 2015. Since the first version of the bot was released in London last fall, 160, 000 of 250, 000 tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay, Browder said. “I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society, ” said Browder. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.” Browder, who’s 19, hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall. Read more of this story at Slashdot.