Nintendo's Most Pointless Hidden Feature (N64 DD + Gameboy Camera) | Punching Weight [SSFF] 

"Nintendo 64 Mouse Power user" is something I'd write into my resume if I were you.

I came down to look for a comment about this because, while I didn't know exactly how, I figured he was doing something wrong there. I was thinking there was maybe a hidden setting somewhere for mouse sensitivity, but your explanation makes perfect sense.

I was thinking that or that the ball needs to be cleaned

Yeah, the N64 really hates any and all forms of hotswapping for some reason. No wonder Rare had to cut Stop 'n' Swop.

I'm never gonna have another opportunity to consult a Nintendo 64 Mouse power user ever again, so I have to ask, is it at all possible to modify it into an optical mouse? Maybe swap the motherboard and controller port connector with an otherwise typical mouse? Or replace the ball with an optical sensor on the device itself?

Nerd 64 Derek Derek

This is perfect

“Maximum Derek!”

It is also me, Derek

Lol

That's why it's a halloween video.

It was three years ago. 2038. I'd just gone through a divorce, and was trying to distract myself with nostalgia. I'd always wanted to splurge and buy all the obscure Japanese-only Nintendo peripherals. 64DD, Satellaview, the Game Boy real-life fishing peripheral. Now I had all these savings, and now I wasn't going to be spending it on a wife or kids. Eventually a found someone who was selling a 64DD, Japanese Game Boy Camera, and GameCube Game Boy Player all in a bundle with a bunch of 64DD games. It wasn't even that expensive. I asked the seller where he got it all when I came to pick it up. The old lady said she got a bunch of boxes from an auction of seized property. She didn't quite have the language to describe the story, but using context I made sense of it. Years back, around the early 2020s, there was this degenerate manchild obsessed with collecting obscure gaming peripherals. "One of those RU-vid people," she said. "He must've thought he could make a career out of filming himself indulging in his refusal to grow up." The description made me smirk. I almost felt nostalgic for the retro gaming RU-vidrs I used to watch, before the Creator Crash of '24. Anyways, she said, this particular RU-vidr was particularly hard hit by the Crash. Even as his viewcounts plummeted, and his Patreon bled out, he refused to get a normal life. The obsession with sharing retro gaming peripherals with a now absent audience drove him to destitution and debt piling on debt. His friends and family tried to help, only to be violently refused, and for their own health, checked in on him less and less often. It seemed he was parting from reality altogether, no longer lost just in nostalgia for childhoods he never had due to region-locking, but lost in nightmarish phantasms that defied rational description except in a sort of poetry. Back home, looking over my new loot, I wondered how such a story could jive with the colorful, if a bit flat, images on the floppy disks before me. Mario Artist, Doshin the Giant, Perfect Dark, SimCity 64. I started with Doshin the Giant, since it always stood out in my mind as "the" 64DD game, for some reason. But eventually I slotted in SimCity64. I was a big Maxis fan. SimCity 2000, The Sims: Hot Date, Spore, these were a calming background ambiance to a few different eras of my life growing up. I knew about a lot of weird SimCity spinoffs, like Simcopter and Streets of SimCity, but I didn't know there was a 64DD exclusive. It was when I realized there was a street-level free-roam mode that I saw him. In this charmingly simple and pastel world that reminded me of the Onett stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee, amid fully-realized cars and detailed, full-bodied pedestrian sprites, was a monochrome floating head, _always looking at me,_ as it moved towards me or away, or side to side, grainy, but photorealistic. It just did not fit. I approached it, to talk, and spent an hour trying to translate the Japanese text character-by-character, knowing zero Japanese. It turned out to be just a default canned dialogue. But I did finally realize what this sprite was. This was that RU-vidr who went mad in the early 2020s. A picture of him, I mean. I remembered the other peripherals; the Game Boy Camera, the Game Boy Player, the Mario Artist game, the mouse and trackpad. He went through all that trouble to get a photo of himself from the chest up to float around in this forgotten 64-bit city for the last two decades. Had that been already after his insanity had begun? Or was that what "sane" looked like before things really went south? Looking into his heavily pixelated eyes, I for the first time came to be legitimately interested in his story, beyond another sad bemusement of the Creator Crash, another Millennial Lost Dream. There was a... madness in those eyes, an _inviting_ madness. A madness that demanded me, dared me to understand his dark passions. And just what had become of him? Distanced from his friends and family, losing his home and belongings... no, if he was still alive, surely he wouldn't have let his prized collection of retro peripherals and games get seized with the rest and auctioned off. Was the man behind this face still out there somewhere, perhaps having moved on with his life, forgotten retro gaming? Or was this face mocking me with a smile between polygonal city blocks-the face of a ghost? That face sent me down a rabbit hole of turn-of-the-millennium experiments in player face uploading. Experiments which uploaded more into the games than the game developers could ever have intended.

@@coreyander286 lol

Living the dream. 😁

Derek would either be the most terrifying min max'er that a DM would ever have to deal with, or an amazingly chaotic entity that would keep the campaign moving in ways the DM never could have dreamed. Also "Hey I'm Cleric, it's me Cleric" is the best damn intro to a class/character I've ever seen.

@@TheBloodswordsman He'd make a perfectly min-maxed character, then act like he has absolutely no clue how to work it purely for the chaos and laughs is my bet. Worse/better yet, he'd do it for Curse of Strahd. At that point, even the Count would be woefully confused as how to proceed.

Would the campaign be called the Nintendo64 D&D?

Damn it, that's good. XD

It's okay everybody, Candace won the internet. We can all go home now. 😂

I feel like the disc drive might cause more vibration than the fan.

@@GerardMenvussa The disc drive isn't operative when the Gameboy Player is in use. The disc is only read on boot to allow the Gamecube to interface with the Gameboy Player.

@@alfo2804 Really? I actually own one but I never noticed that ^^

No, they're more likely from EM interference. Similar lines can be seen on digital cameras, even today, under certain kinds of lighting or electronic equipment.

@@Draknfyre That would imply that the Gamecube emits some kind of EM signal, which it doesn't. At least not one strong enough to interfere with a digital camera, anyway. It's a different issue, but it manifests in the same way, because vibration (sound) from the fan's motor and electromagnetic radiation both travel as longitudinal waves.

Doesn't being an adult frickin' rock sometimes?

I've bought plenty of video game collectables including extra themed systems I didn't need. So no judgement here man. You bought a cool retro piece of obscure game history. Now if you told me you spent $500 on VBucks in Fortnite, then I'd question your sanity! 😲

@@rareroe305 Nah.

And I can clearly remember a shop in Belgium (Europe) having a Virtual Boy Kiosk. Despite it never being officially being released here..

@@KevinArcade87 was it officially released in Europe at all? Any part of the EU I mean. I only hear / read about its USA and Japan releases.

And the funny part about their regionlocking was that they half-assed it. With the exception of the famicom, which requires an adaptor, playing games of different regions was always as simple as removing the little plastic nubs they added to the U.S. and European models of the console.

@@jesternario Nahh son, PAL consoles were always incompatible. Their graphics hardware would always output at 50hz bc that is the frequency that power is transmitted in PAL regions. On top of that, the NES, SNES and N64 in PAL regions had their own sets of security chips that prevented cross-region play. Initially this was due to power delivery needs on the NES, but by the N64 it just didn't matter because technology had surpassed issues like that. Nintendo likely just locked it down to make localising to PAL regions more specific in the N64's case. They could limit controversy in European and Oceanic markets, as opposed to full-fledged moral panics in America

outrageous

yeah that sounds about right...

The BEST reason!

Your contributions to the 64DD and Satellaview community are much appreciated. Thanks Luigiblood! ❤️

And it totally lived up to it, too O.O

Yes, I distinctly remember news articles from back in the day that suggested this feature got cut due to post-Columbine concerns. Same reasons why Sega never released the Dreamcast light gun in the US, despite compatible games existing for it.

Honestly, I would lose it if someone made a proof-of-concept homebrew port someday

TBH it still would've been pretty limiting. DD Disks were still only 64MB, granted it would've been wayyyy cheaper to make than the actual 64MB carts that came out. But it was still a far cry from the 650MB discs of the PS1 and even then FF7 still needed 1.3GB.

@@VexAcer True; I don't know if we would've gotten a mainline FF title on it, but I think we could have gotten more RPG's on the 64 if the DD had been released earlier, including from Square / Square Enix.

We need a homebrew port of FF7 for the Everdrive!

But it did not have CDs. If FF7 were on the 64DD, it would have to have a whopping 32 discs

What is that

What podcast?

What are the other two?