Super Mario 64... running on the N64DD!?

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and before you go screaming "FAKE!"; the castle music is different, and besides that, there's this

Spoiler: the guy's channel in case you want to yell at him about it

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknzgHiZqONH_YqNEnv1gxA

so; there's a copy of mario 64 out there for the nintendo 64 disk drive, that has to at least have SOME differences to it compared to the cartridge version: what that may be is currently unknown, besides some notable bugs and at least one musical difference

 

[Glowsquid]

Woah, man.Whenever I think the well of cool old-timey protos/development stories has dried up, something like this happen.

Here's a quick and dirty translation of last three paragraphs of the guy's blog post, since it has some more details on the proto. I didn't bother translating the rest since it's essentially "The title screen you see below replaces the 3D Mario head from the original and the disk labels frequently have errors so I'm going with the title screen name":

I didn't notice much differences from my Japanese copy of Super Mario 64. This looks like to be a quick and dirty port. The load times seem to be slightly longer than on cartridge. However, the game is glitched. Super Mario 64 wasn't optimized for the 64DD. When trying to enter the moutain in Tiny Huge Island for Star 5 and 6, the game crashes.

I also noticed the disk has no identifier. I tried to read the game's identifier, which should be "DSMJ", but the game has none - every value is set at 0x00. Consequently, the game doesn't do any control of the identifier (ie: If I remove the Sm64 disk and put another, the game will still try to load data from the disk).

The game seems to be simply a SM64 port with no debugging made. It is still, however, a valuable and interesting Disk.

 

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apparently, as it turns out: the guy who found this managed to find it in a japanese game shop

it also turns out that this is one of the disks shown off at the... 1996 spaceworld?

At SpaceWorld 1996, Nintendo demonstrated a disk version of Super Mario 64 to attendees to showcase the new hardware, the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, also known as the 64DD. One of the reasons which Nintendo decided to use the 64DD as an external media storage device is its really fast transfer speeds. For explaining that, a Nintendo worker showed us a copy of Super Mario 64 but into a disk (he states that it's the same game, just copied into a disk). We did look very carefully how much did each part in the game to load, and here are the results:

Between the time you insert the disk and the save select screen appears, 2.5 seconds do pass. In this time, the start logo has already loaded, and of course, all the files with the saved stars, coins, etc.

3 seconds for waiting the game to start. That is nearly unnoticeable with the cartridge version.

Takes 2.5 seconds for loading the whole castle, Mario animations, and all that stuff, if you haven't noticed, the game keeps reading data from the disk when you're playing, reading the data on-the-fly.

When you enter into a level, instead of watching the star select sequence, and waiting until the level appears, all the whole level with every object does load in a mere 4 seconds.

If you do compare the loading times with the actual cartridge, most are not noticeable, since the cartridge loading times are very fast too.

as it ALSO apparently turns out: the N64DD was already produced/made by 1996, but it wasn't released till later

so we're getting a lot of interesting information out of this; it's certainly a real cartridge, but now comes the question: can it be dumped? and if so, are there any things from that point in SM64's development somewhere in there? (such as an early version of "Mario's Face" or whatever it was called)