
Nintendo has come a long way in terms of openness with developers for its consoles. Nowadays, anybody with a laptop and some time is welcome to submit a game on the eShop, and there are more tools than ever to help realize this goal. It hasn't always been that way, however, as Nintendo used to require certain standards of individuals that wished to develop for their consoles. Back in the day of the N64, a dev kit for the platform wasn't nearly as easy to obtain, but this interesting device from a third party company allowed some people to neatly sidestep the issue.
The device is called the Bung Doctor V64, and it functionally was a way to develop for the platform without having to buy an official dev kit and go through the lengthy approval process. It cost $450, which was still cheaper than a legitimate dev kit, and included a CD drive that also played video CDs, bizarrely enough. Our good friends Adrian and Phil from the excellent Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK recently picked one up so we can learn about this fascinating device:

What do you think? Are you glad Nintendo has loosened its restrictions on developers? Have you ever seen one of these? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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[source youtube.com]
Comments 21
You know, not just only that machine has a counterfeit. In my country, there are Vii (Cloning of Wii), PVP (Cloning of PSP), Bunch of GBA Cloning (I dunno the name), etc. And all of them Made in China.
@Anti-Matter You do realize this one aided homebrew and indie development and played David Bowie CDs. This is a much more valiant cause than some knock-off console, this is a revolution.
Cruis'n USA is the cheap booze of arcade games. You don't play cause you like it, you play it to get that fix.
Hm...I have one of those though it's busted now. They were really common back in Hong Kong (and were loaded with hundreds of pirated games in different languages).
Even if it wasn't intended for piracy doesn't mean people won't find a way....
@SanderEvers I'm really hoping Ben Heck fixes the disc drive now that we know what's wrong with it [laser diode] and put a Super Boss Gaiden CD in it. Too much nostaligia and curiosity.
Perhaps somebody finally use this to create N64 homebrew games. The platform has been sorely lacking...
bung doctor v64 is like the name of a questionable marital aid.
The bung doctor, a legend before its time.
I actually owned one of those, and I was brilliant. Selling it was one of the worst mistakes I ever made.
These were common and easy to obtain. You could put roms on CDs and just play them off the cd on the original hardware.
@anti-matter they aren't real consoles. They are either replicas with a bunch of nes roms built in or crappy 8bit original games based on popular real ones. The last true 'hardware' clone I can think of was the mega drive
Monstrosity.
I have one of these drives hooked up to a Japanese NTSC console. They're quite hard to source as most online auction sites don't allow them to be listed because they're regarded as piracy tools. But i just happened to find one at a fleamarket.
@Hamster_Overlord Developing for the N64 is not for the faint-hearted and newbies need not apply. There's no easy to use toolchain as the official devkit required a customized SGI workstation. In short: it's bloody difficult to do anything beyond simple textmode utilities like a controller tester.
Interesting piece of hardware. I had no idea this existed.
Reminds me of a similarly named device, probably the same company, that let you slot this ugly accessory into your N64 and allowed you to play NES and SNES games on it...
Ive actually got one of these in perfect working order with the memory upgrade (allowing for larger capacity games to be played) plus the save carts that stuck in the top allowing you to save games etc if anyone's interested in it i might consider selling it.
Remember the days of Nintendo Life past when there was a substantial amount of full articles, even if the original source material was originally from a video? I miss that. Now it's just a quick write up with a link to the video and "Well, so what'd you think?" below the video. smdh. I'm usually on NL when I'm commuting or killing some time in between activities and don't particularly want to watch a video because of sound/eating up my data. Guess I'll just read the same articles from 2008 AKA the golden age of NL
Calling it a "development tool" is lovingly naive, since 99% of the owners only used it to play illegal roms stored on CDRs. Nobody developed anything, actually. Devices like this existed for 16-bit consoles too, when roms were stored on floppy disks.
Owned one.. haha! great stuff.. 2x cd-rom player loading a game took a couple of minutes.. until is swapped the 2x CD-rom drive with a 16x! whoa! RAM was defective one time.. took me lots of lots of time to get that replaced! great times.. don't know where mine is..
@Rockman And the Everdrive N64 v3 can load Conker's BFD (a 64Mbyte game!) off my 32Gbyte Class 10 card in 3 seconds!
@MK_II Such a pity really. Even the Jaguar has a dedicated homebrew community, and it also used a similar CPU to the N64 MIPS.
I just feel like so much could be accomplished with homebrew apps on the N64. Even 2D sprite engines without a hint of 3D would be amazing on this powerhouse of a console.
@pckid73 Yeah, i've got a couple of those SNES "copy boxes" as well. Great way to play all those Pachinko games that were never released in the West. But one day I'll use it to develop an epic graphic adventure, honest !
I've seen people with these on assembler
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