YouTuber Shane Luis has tweeted some amazing photos of a new-in-box game development kit for the Nintendo 64’s Disk Drive (64DD), a very rare peripheral never published outside of Japan that played matches off proprietary floppy disks. Read look through the whole thread starting with this particular tweet , but I’m going to discuss some of the pictures within this article.
Inside that darkened blue box on the top were 64DD Development Disks, which have been a dark blue instead of the gray utilized for retail games.
The development kit also included a special adapter allowing developers plug in two N64 cartridges at once instead of just one. When everything was connected together, here’s what that looked like:
Here is the 64DD itself, that has a blue trim around the disc slot used to signify it as a development apparatus that matches the colour used for the growth discs:
And here is the whole 64DD development system attached together and attached to a Nintendo 64. It is enormous!
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see a 64DD myself because the peripheral wasn’t much of a success (only nine games were released for it), and it just came out in Japan. However, these photos might be the next best thing and are just a plain intriguing look at something from Nintendo’s past.
Again, I strongly suggest scrolling through the entire thread in complete or checking his album of photos on the Internet Archive.
