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