Forbidden Four: Make your own pirate multi

[tepples]

That's not my font. It looks like Terminal, when F4 uses something that looks more like Chicago.

Then there might be something up inside the PowerPak itself. Maybe it can't find the battery file. F4 has a battery because Zelda has a battery.

[steve0]

Love the title screen...

[Dwedit]

I wonder if this explains why Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure has copies of the reset vector and bankswitching code every 16k?

[TakuikaNinja]

Necrobump.

It's now known that NES ROMs and FDS QD images can be injected into a GameCube memory card and be read by the blank NES/FDS furniture item to emulate it in-game. See this video by Hunter R. for details: https://youtu.be/2w0U_evVEd4

To demonstrate this further, I injected Forbidden Four into Dōbutsu no Mori e+ (a JP release which removes the four games entirely) to bring this multicart project full circle: https://youtu.be/rZZsNrOC4Bo

I had already updated the wiki page but was delaying the release of my video since I was waiting for a video to be published for the other ROM showcased, 100th_Coin's AccuracyCoin test suite.

In relation to this, it was discovered that N64 Dōbutsu no Mori also contains this feature and requires controller paks with bankswitching capabilities to store files larger than 32KiB. It was only ever officially used for a limited giveaway, where winners would receive a 64KiB controller pak containing Ice Climber and a letter from Takashi Tezuka, with a blank FDS item as the attached present. Hunter R. has 2 videos covering this topic: https://youtu.be/A5YdD1pYzes https://youtu.be/0cpjhIS6ClI

[No Carrier]

Great update 17 years later, hell yeah!

[Pokun]

Wow what great development to the story, so to summarize:

Doubutsu no Mori for the 64 allows loading an arbitrary NES ROM from a controller pak and this feature was only used with Ice Climber given away in two contests, in each 30 controller paks were given away. Although Ice Climber fits on a 32 kB memory card using the yay0 compression, the game also came with a letter from Tezuka which would mean that the memory cards must have been 64 kB or larger or they won't both fit, a memory card size which Nintendo planned but never sold and Doubutsu no Mori fully supports (confirmed on hardware).

Then Nintendo implemented the same feature in Doubutsu no Mori+ for the Gamecube, allowing to load an arbitrary ROM from a Gamecube memory card. Ice Climber was again only given out in an event (this time as part of their N64 -> Gamecube transferal service), but this time the Ice Climber ROM is found on the disc so it wasn't using the arbitrary ROM loading feature.
In Animal Crossing NA version (and probably Doubutsu no Mori e+), Ice Climber was instead available via the new e-Reader card loading feature (Doubutsu no Mori+ didn't support loading cards at all as it predates the Card-e+ reader).


Before the story ends happily though, there might be 60 official N64 controller paks of the rare 64 kB size somewhere with an Ice Climber label and potentially the ROM and letter (unless the SRAM battery is dead) waiting to surface. It would be nice to at least hear of an authentic 64 kB controller pak coming up, but it would be ideal if some of the lucky winners would have backed up the data somehow.

[lidnariq]

It would be nice to at least hear of an authentic 64 kB controller pak coming up

There were authentic licensed (but not first party) 128kB and 512kB controller paks made by Datel. The former isn't too rare; the latter is very rare. https://www.nesworld.com/n64-datel4megcontrollerpak.php

Further research has shown that the filesystem supports up to 2MB. Libdragon now supports this.

[TakuikaNinja]

The main problem with using these "linear banking" paks for commercial games (as mentioned by Datel themselves back then) is that some games assume a fixed 32KiB size (or do some other stupid things), which makes them incompatible. It unfortunately sounds like Nintendo didn't really give clear guidance/documentation on the subject of handling bankswitched controller paks. This is less of an issue for homebrew development, of course.

[Pokun]

Yeah and some seems to believe that may be the reason Nintendo never released any larger cards. I don't know though, Gamecube had similar problems with some games not supporting larger cards than 512 kB, yet they released both 2 MB and 8 MB cards. Especially the 8 MB one had problems with several games and it was supposedly not even released in Japan. I also read somewhere that the Wii has problems with it.

I'd think it was canceled for marketing reasons. I guess the 64 kB cards (assuming they had that size) with Ice Climber might had been a small batch of prototypes or something and since the N64 was closing in on its end they decided to give them away in a contest (Doubutsu no Mori had sold very well).
Since they look the same as normal memory cards (except for the Ice Climber label), many people probably didn't even notice that they are larger than normal and may be lying around in some attic without the owner knowing what they have.


I'm glad this was bought attention to though. Emulators have long ignored the fact that the memory card filesystem and Nintendo's SDK supports larger cards (and we have known this for quite a while), but still none of them supported more than 32 kB. Now thanks to this story, Ares at last added support for both the two Datel Cards 128 and 512 kB as well as the largest theoretical card at 1984 kB.