V64 Doctor - N64 Development kit - help

[nwaugh]

I recently came across a V64 Doctor, but have no idea how to use it. Anybody here have experience with it? Unfortunately, it didn't come with a power cord or instructions, so it may be worthless anyway. The Wikipedia entry had some interesting info, but nothing of practical of use. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

PS. I'd love to find a cheap replacement power cord for it.

PPS. The one I have says "Property of Iguana Entertainment" on it. I opened the CD drive manually and found a CD! Unfortunately, it's some dumb mpeg sampler disc. I was hoping for an NBA Jam 64 prototype or something.

[Juganawt]

First off, it uses a brick power supply, and I'm not sure if you can just use any replacement power supply. Try so at your own risk.

You also need a few other bits, you need a bridge cartridge which sits in the N64's cart slots with a game on top of it to bypass the lockout chip. You also need a DSP save adaptor for games that have built in cartridge saves.

Once you've got everything set, it's easy to use.

All the menus are self explanatory, apart from the byte swapping... some ROMS you download in Z64 format have swapped bytes which can cause problems with the V64, so you select that option to swap them back to the way that the V64 can interpret.

Playing, Dumping, and Transferring to PC is dead simple.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

PPS. The one I have says "Property of Iguana Entertainment" on it. I opened the CD drive manually and found a CD! Unfortunately, it's some dumb mpeg sampler disc. I was hoping for an NBA Jam 64 prototype or something.
Are you kidding?

The V64 is not official Nintendo development hardware. It's Honmg Kong stuff mostly intended for pirating N64 games. In fact, it was made by Bung Enterprises, who Nintendo was pretty intrumental in putting out of business. It's amazing that a licensed N64 developer would be using a V64 for testing. They certainly would have been quite a bit cheaper than the official IS kits, I guess. I bet Nintendo wouldn't have been happy to know that developers were using those things, though.


...word is bondage...

[madman77]

Send me a PM and I can tell you about the details of the power supply, you can easily find a replacement. It uses +5 and +12v and obviously a 3rd pin for ground. You should be able to get a PS online from Jameco.

The only other things you'll need are the connector between the N64 and V64, as well as the emulation adapter. You can alternatively use a DS-1 or DX-256 instead which will provide more save capacity than a standard cart. For some games, it'll write to the SRAM on the cart you have in the emulation adapter.

Some official developers did use V64s back in the day.

[RARusk]

"Property of Iguana Entertainment"

They're the same guys that did the Turok series on the N64. Must have sold it off when the company, which was part of Acclaim, cratered.

[nwaugh]

Here are some pics:

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n196/temptempcrap/one.jpg

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n196/temptempcrap/iguana.jpg

[nwaugh]

Sorry about the links, I'm obviously an amateur

[nwaugh]

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n196/temptempcrap/one.jpg

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n196/temptempcrap/iguana.jpg

[shadowkn55]

Reminds me of when developers used SF7's for programming snes games when they couldn't get a hold of official dev kits for either finnancial or distribution reasons.

[rbudrick]

It's amazing that a licensed N64 developer would be using a V64 for testing.

EVERYBODY used copiers since the beginning of copiers. Developers used them all the time. They were a cheap and very effective solution to many problems and they were a fuckload cheaper than using Nintendo's (or Sega, etc, but especially Nintendo) own tools (which the pirate companies often did a far better job of), if Nintendo made the proper tools at all. Many of these pirate devices saves the companies millions in development costs, because there was already a device made that did so many things they needed them to do.

The companies would have been fools not to go behind Nintendo et al's backs and use these devices, thought they were against all licensing agreements.

Business is business and profit is profit.

-Rob