11th May 2022, 8:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 11th May 2022, 11:22 AM by Dark Jaguar.)
Silicon Valley had a revision, and you can usually spot a Nintendo game revision by looking for the little stamped imprint on the label. On N64 games, it's on the back sticker. Rather than ink it looks like the number was pressed in physically. The first two numbers just indicate the production run, but if there's a letter after, that indicates it's a revision. No letter means first revision, A is second, B is third if it went that far. I can't think of a single Nintendo game that ever went as far as a C though.
That said, the "letter imprinted" method is a little unreliable. Not only is it rather hard to spot under bad lighting conditions (which makes online shopping for it without tipping your hand harder), but there's always the chance someone swapped parts of the cartridge which would make that imprinted code inaccurate. I don't assume any deception though, since that could just be a matter of everything from repairing the cart plastic to an accidental switcharoo while cleaning or fixing a bunch of them en masse. The most accurate way, which these days is easier to spot since more and more people are disassembling their carts to prove their authenticity for photos, is to find the ROM chip inside the game. Look for the text matching the outside label's tiny printed "code" for that specific game, and find a dash after it. -0 means initial version, -1 is first revision, -2 second revision etc...
https://tcrf.net/Space_Station_Silicon_V...ntendo_64)
While this particular game's page lists it under "regional differences", it still indicates the revision fix for that glitch.
If you aren't aware of this site, this is "The Cutting Room Floor", which not only lists out all the dummied out or incomplete content inside games, but also lists changes between regions and even revisions. Recently I've become a semi-contributor there just adding nips and tucks when I notice details missing. (Killer Instinct Gold, you may know, doesn't work if you have a rumble pak plugged into ANY controllers connected to the system, but revision B (third version) fixed that glitch completely. Revision A may have fixed it too, but I don't have that one so I was unable to check. Once I get a N64 Everdrive, I'll be able to check these things far more reliably and quickly thanks to full revision ROM sets like nointro.
There's another detail, some nuance with Donkey Kong 64. We "knew" that it needed the expansion pak to work, then we "knew" that it didn't, but the reality is it DOES need it, but only to fix a memory leak that will eventually crash the game. It doesn't even fix the glitch, it just delays it. Remember when that game first came out and we commented on the thing "locking up" if it was on for over a day, and we'd see store displays that showed a locked up game out in the wild? That was the memory leak. It had nothing to do with the RAM running too hot like some of us assumed. Here's another important detail. The glitch was not "unfixable", it was just unfixable in the short time they had left before launch. In all honesty, they should have delayed it a little longer and fixed it anyway. Once the N64 hacking community gets around to reverse engineering the source code to DK64, we'll finally know for sure what went wrong and there will very likely be a fan patch. Heck, they might even implement proper support for the expansion pak to improve peformance. Have you see what some hackers have done with the Super Mario 64 source code? The game's been optimized into such a beast it's running at 60FPS on original hardware, though all these optimizations were done specifically to allow it to support a megamod of a whole new game world to explore, and THAT runs closer to 30FPS.
Oh I think I can speculate on the bizarre naming choice for the two Battletoads game. The sequel came out first, and the port came out second. I think it's simply a matter of the sequel makers not thinking far enough ahead to realize what confusion their name and box art choice might cause if they ever actually ported the NES game to GB.
I recently picked up two more Dreamcast controllers (I finally have four!) and some extra VMUs. It's rather annoying that the Dreamcast started the regrettable "tradition" of allowing developers to "lock" files from copying/moving. Sonic Adventure's Chao garden data and Soul Calibur's save file suffer that restriction, but neither are implemented very well. Soul Calibur literally has an in-game menu to save your data manually to whichever device you pick, so I have no clue why they bothered flagging the file that way since they clearly WANTED you to be able to move it around. Sonic Adenture? I got around it by walking into my loaded chao garden, swapping VMUs, and stepping right back out of it to trigger the autosave.
That said, the "letter imprinted" method is a little unreliable. Not only is it rather hard to spot under bad lighting conditions (which makes online shopping for it without tipping your hand harder), but there's always the chance someone swapped parts of the cartridge which would make that imprinted code inaccurate. I don't assume any deception though, since that could just be a matter of everything from repairing the cart plastic to an accidental switcharoo while cleaning or fixing a bunch of them en masse. The most accurate way, which these days is easier to spot since more and more people are disassembling their carts to prove their authenticity for photos, is to find the ROM chip inside the game. Look for the text matching the outside label's tiny printed "code" for that specific game, and find a dash after it. -0 means initial version, -1 is first revision, -2 second revision etc...
https://tcrf.net/Space_Station_Silicon_V...ntendo_64)
While this particular game's page lists it under "regional differences", it still indicates the revision fix for that glitch.
If you aren't aware of this site, this is "The Cutting Room Floor", which not only lists out all the dummied out or incomplete content inside games, but also lists changes between regions and even revisions. Recently I've become a semi-contributor there just adding nips and tucks when I notice details missing. (Killer Instinct Gold, you may know, doesn't work if you have a rumble pak plugged into ANY controllers connected to the system, but revision B (third version) fixed that glitch completely. Revision A may have fixed it too, but I don't have that one so I was unable to check. Once I get a N64 Everdrive, I'll be able to check these things far more reliably and quickly thanks to full revision ROM sets like nointro.
There's another detail, some nuance with Donkey Kong 64. We "knew" that it needed the expansion pak to work, then we "knew" that it didn't, but the reality is it DOES need it, but only to fix a memory leak that will eventually crash the game. It doesn't even fix the glitch, it just delays it. Remember when that game first came out and we commented on the thing "locking up" if it was on for over a day, and we'd see store displays that showed a locked up game out in the wild? That was the memory leak. It had nothing to do with the RAM running too hot like some of us assumed. Here's another important detail. The glitch was not "unfixable", it was just unfixable in the short time they had left before launch. In all honesty, they should have delayed it a little longer and fixed it anyway. Once the N64 hacking community gets around to reverse engineering the source code to DK64, we'll finally know for sure what went wrong and there will very likely be a fan patch. Heck, they might even implement proper support for the expansion pak to improve peformance. Have you see what some hackers have done with the Super Mario 64 source code? The game's been optimized into such a beast it's running at 60FPS on original hardware, though all these optimizations were done specifically to allow it to support a megamod of a whole new game world to explore, and THAT runs closer to 30FPS.
Oh I think I can speculate on the bizarre naming choice for the two Battletoads game. The sequel came out first, and the port came out second. I think it's simply a matter of the sequel makers not thinking far enough ahead to realize what confusion their name and box art choice might cause if they ever actually ported the NES game to GB.
I recently picked up two more Dreamcast controllers (I finally have four!) and some extra VMUs. It's rather annoying that the Dreamcast started the regrettable "tradition" of allowing developers to "lock" files from copying/moving. Sonic Adventure's Chao garden data and Soul Calibur's save file suffer that restriction, but neither are implemented very well. Soul Calibur literally has an in-game menu to save your data manually to whichever device you pick, so I have no clue why they bothered flagging the file that way since they clearly WANTED you to be able to move it around. Sonic Adenture? I got around it by walking into my loaded chao garden, swapping VMUs, and stepping right back out of it to trigger the autosave.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)