Doctor V64

From Free net encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)

Revision as of 20:10, 22 February 2006
Sango123 (Talk | contribs)
Reverted edits by [[Special:Contributions/207.161.86.155|207.161.86.155]] ([[User talk:207.161.86.155|talk]]) to last version by FlyingPenguins
Next diff →

Current revision

The Doctor V64 is a backup/development device, made by Bung Enterprises Ltd, that is used in conjunction with the Nintendo 64.

The Doctor V64 came out in 1996 and soon dominated the market by the end of the year, facing virtually no competition. Many third party developers used the V64 in lieu of the PC64 Development Kit sold by Nintendo because of its much lower cost. Soon, individuals began to use the V64 for video game piracy.

The Doctor V64 unit contains a CD-ROM drive which sits underneath the Nintendo 64 and plugs into the expansion slot on the underside of the Nintendo 64. The expansion slot is essentially a mirror image of the cartridge slot on the top of the unit, with the same electrical connections, thus the Nintendo 64 reads data from the Doctor V64 in the same manner as it would from a cartridge plugged into the normal slot. In order to get around Nintendo's lockout chip, when using the Doctor V64 a game cartridge is plugged into the Nintendo 64 through an adaptor which connects only the lockout chip.

Bung was at one time contemplating releasing a Doctor V2, but instead decided to release the Doctor V64 Jr. in December 1998. This was basically a more cost-efficient condensed version of the original V64. The V64jr had no CD drive and plugged into the normal cartridge slot on the top of the Nintendo 64.

The Doctor V64 is not very user friendly. It was mainly designed for game designers even though it is possible to back up cartridges with it. The setup procedure is moderately harrowing and the user interface is very plain: text with no graphics. The CPU of the V64 is a 6502 chip (the CPU from the Nintendo Entertainment System); the operating system is stored in the BIOS chip. It is likely that Bung reused most of the design of their earlier NES clones in the Doctor V64.

The Doctor V64 could be used to read the data from a game cartridge and transfer the data to a PC via the parallel port. A somewhat odd characteristic of the V64 is that the original software to do this ignored the endianness of the data, resulting in a copy with each pair of bytes swapped, and the CD-ROM interface of the V64 was designed to expect data in this swapped format.

[edit]