In a recent article, I wrote about these 17 FDS development disks dropping on eBay. Well, today is the day that mine showed up in the mail! I have to say that there is quite a feeling of mystery surrounding this lot of disks. Where are they from? Are they the Sunsoft disks? Well, let me show you what is on mine.
The first thing I did was to make a RAW image of both sides and write a copy back to a spare disk to work with.
I popped the disk in on side B the first time so I received the expected ERR07, oops. Sliding in Side A, I am greeted with the generic Nintendo Legal notices.
After spinning for a bit, the Famicom is displaying: “ゲームディスクヲ イレテクダサイ” or “Gamu disuku o irette kudasai” which translates into “Please insert the game disk”
Ok, so this is starting to feel like some sort of copy program. I pop in a copy of SMB2. The drive spins a bit and then this screen appears: ”ナマディスクヲクダサイ” or Nama disuku o kudasai” which reanslates into “Please insert raw (blank) disk”
This dance happens a total of 4 times for the one sided game to finish up with this screen: “オワリマッタ” or “Owarimatta” which translates to “The End”
Lastly, I popped in the copied disk and there it is!
So 1 of the 17 FDS development disks is an un named disk copy program. Using a special utility Developed by Chris Covell, I was able to determine there are 5 files on side A and none on side B. The writing date was originally 10-29-1986 and the maker or developer was a null value.
Lets hope other collectors who bought these disks can determine what is on them and dump an image. If you have any information on this program or any insight on the other 16 disks, please drop me a message here.
[…] This particular disk sat at 10,500 yen for most of the 4 days it was up. However, 4:00 this morning (for me on the west coast of the United States), the bidding went pretty crazy. The disk ended up at 76,000 yen roughly $661 USD. As a side note, on Yahoo Auctions, if a bid is made before 5 mins left, the winning bid will add 3 minutes to the auction over and over whenever there is a last minute bid. Anything under 4 minutes (I think), it adds 8 minutes. Alternatively, if a bid is within seconds, I think the auction will end. I experienced this bidding on some Super Famicom game manuals. My high bid was 6000 yen and at the very last second, someone bid and my 6000 yen kicked in and won the auction. I am not really 100% positive on the time durations, however. Interesting note – the same seller also had a white developer disk for sale that ended up going for 38000 yen (about $330 USD). This is almost double what I paid for the white developer disk I bought last year on Ebay. […]