Earlier today, an eBay auction listing the 17 white FDS development disks dropped on the popular auction site. Several collectors snapped up a handful and within the hour, only two are remaining at a slightly higher price than originally listed. It is speculated, high level collectors communicated using back channels to snap up the disks that routinely fetch north of $400 USD each on Yahoo Auctions Japan.
Sources speculate this is the infamous Sunsoft dump of 2009 FDS development disks. Originally, there were 19 disks in total with various prototypes including Aiden no Tsue, a step drill game and various development tools on these dumps.
A dump is a copy of the data on the media (the floppy disk) that can then be read on a computer or original Nintendo hardware using special tools or an emulator program.
Sources also say that this could be a totally different discovery of 17 FDS development disks with unknown data locked up for the last 25 years just waiting to be discovered by collectors. Alternatively, the disks could simply be blank. The few high level collectors I have been able to contact tell me they intend to dump the disks for the community before they are all locked up again for the next 25 years. We will follow up with an article hopefully showing the FDS community new dev tools or better yet, prototype games!
The Famicom Disk System (FDS) is a floppy disk based hardware add-on for the Nintendo Famicom based on the Mitsumi Quick Disk. The Nintendo Famicom is the Japan local version of the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES here in the United States. The FDS never hit the US market and was short lived even in the original Japanese market. The FDS is popular to a small community of hard core collectors who strive to collect every game for the limited system.