@@ThriftShopHustler The Walmart chain was founded in 1962, and expanded into Florida, where I am from by 1982. I remember going there often as a kid. Way before super walmarts were a thing. We had two of them in Bradenton. One at the Cortez Plaza near me and one off Manatee Ave. They were a lot smaller back then., about the size of a K-Mart. Both of these stores have closed down and moved locations years back when the, at the time, Super Walmarts were established that needed a greater footprint in a store.
I assume the cartridge slot is because they used a production or prototype nes board that already had a cartridge slot or its the bottom of the board that has the expension port.
So weird that the demo machine included a game that required the R.O.B. robot. Maybe they intended the demo unit would come with a robot too? It's especially odd that they chose a really unfinished game like Stack Up instead of Gyromite.
I'd suspect the ROB was placed right next to the TV in the demo setup. This looks like a first gen, initial launch demo box - probably before later games were ready. For gods sake, Nintendo would have put Super Mario front and center if they knew what a hit it would be. It's buried in the list on this box. haha. So, this was probably the very first demo box sent out as the NES first entered the market - before they saw ROB was a flop and SMB was a hit ;) BTW, as far as I recalled, ROB had no connection to the console or the TV - it read light flashes off the TV screen to operate. So no wires needed :)
Yo. 🤯 What a find! That giant board appears to be a very large cartridge switcher. Almost ALL the chips you see on there are EPROM chips containing game data - in the original most basic NES configuration, one chip contains program data (code), and one chip contains graphics data, for each game. Then there's supporting logic for switching them in and out. It all appears to go to a BOG STANDARD CARTRIDGE PORT that goes to a BOG STANDARD NES CONSOLE BOARD. Like, that board with the port?. That's nuts. That looks like just an NES, upside down (expansion port exposed on top). Almost ALL those chips are UV erasable EPROM chips (so... try not to leave it out in the sun... kinda looks like they're mostly missing their window cover labels? Eek). So with the right tools and knowledge, you could back up all those games, match them up as either the retail release or a special, previously unknown version of the games (likely, since EPROM was usually used instead of mask ROM in case of low volume, special modifications)... and you could even load different games (that don't require mapper chips, used in later games) onto them.
