Nintendo Test Disc Mystery

[CavemanKrogg | 4]

Hey everyone, I'm hoping someone here might finally be able to give me an answer. A lot of people said check Nintendoage, only to find it was gone and this is it's spiritual successor, so hopefully someone in here has the knowledge I need.

 

I'll link my Reddit post but I'll also give a quick rundown here. I got these discs from a former Nintendo employee who said he saved them and a bunch of other stuff from the dumpster. I sent them to a fellow collector and he was able to bypass all the security encryptions to get at the disc files. They were written June 2nd, 1999 but I have 0 idea what they're for. Given the date, it seems like it's Gamecube development related, almost like they had toyed with the idea of having the Gamecube use full size discs or be able to play DVDs. What I really need is to talk to someone from Nintendo that worked there at the time and might have some recollection.

 

I can't even find a picture of these online that aren't my own, let alone any info on the discs so these are seemingly one of a kind. Or 2 of a kind, since I have 2

 

If you have ANY idea what they are, please feel free to message me directly on Reddit or reply here, I'll try to look at it often. Thanks fellow collectors!

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/iwr8pj/internet_i_need_your_help_solving_this_enduring/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

[CavemanKrogg | 4]

[RH | 4,895]

I have absolutely no clue.  If I had to venture a guess, this was used with the GameCube (considering the time frame) as was used in very early development of the hardware to test output.  Not just to be sure they were getting a signal but that the color output was working properly.

It's interesting that it's Nintendo-branded.  Maybe these were distributed to Panasonic, and possibly other companies, that licensed the rights to manufacture GameCube playable hardware.  I'm puzzled why something like that would be in the states, though, unless the team that designed the Panasonic GameCube was in the states.

I honestly have no clue about this, but I'll be following this topic in case anyone has any solid in site.  Oddities from Nintendo come up frequently enough, but this is a new one to me.

[Code Monkey | 2,005]

I think it could be one of two things.

• The same cartridge exists for Atari 2600, it's called Color Bar Generator. It's simply just a test cartridge you put into the machine to know if it's outputting a video signal or not. When running diagnostics on a machine, you don't want to use a retail cartridge because that could potentially have some extra encoding required or chips inside the cartridge, anything that could interfere with getting a simple video signal from a console. Using this Color Bar Generator will tell you that using the least amount of requirements from the console.
• It could also have been used when developing something related to the Wii or GameCube on the Wii. Maybe when they were initially building the GameCube firmware into the Wii, they wanted to know if it booted and then displayed a signal, this would tell them that.

[CavemanKrogg | 4]

So for the test cart idea, I had initially thought something like this, maybe even Nintendo Repair Center related. There's an issue with that however and that's the discs don't do anything on retail consoles. It says they can't be read. I've tried on 3 different Wiis (including a modded one), a Wii U kiosk unit and retail unit, dev unit for Wii and Wii U, etc. If it was meant to provide a video test signal I would think it should work on retail consoles with no other equipment needed but they don't.

 

As for the second part, I think it's very likely it has something to do with the Gamecube. I'm not sure it would be Gamecube Firmware for the Wii, however. Like I mentioned, the disc was written back in 1999. That's a long time to hold onto a disc of testing files that were made VERY early in the Gamecube development. I would think if they wanted to test Gamecube firmware in the Wii, it would be on a disc from that time frame especially because the console would have gone through radical changes since initial development and the files on a 1999 disc would've been outdated/incompatible. I mean the Dolphin units themselves used carts for development at first, then they switched it over to discs about halfway through development life.

 

This is why I'm so lost on these discs. They don't seem to have a straightforward answer.

[Code Monkey | 2,005]

1 hour ago, CavemanKrogg said:

So for the test cart idea, I had initially thought something like this, maybe even Nintendo Repair Center related. There's an issue with that however and that's the discs don't do anything on retail consoles. It says they can't be read. I've tried on 3 different Wiis (including a modded one), a Wii U kiosk unit and retail unit, dev unit for Wii and Wii U, etc. If it was meant to provide a video test signal I would think it should work on retail consoles with no other equipment needed but they don't.

 

As for the second part, I think it's very likely it has something to do with the Gamecube. I'm not sure it would be Gamecube Firmware for the Wii, however. Like I mentioned, the disc was written back in 1999. That's a long time to hold onto a disc of testing files that were made VERY early in the Gamecube development. I would think if they wanted to test Gamecube firmware in the Wii, it would be on a disc from that time frame especially because the console would have gone through radical changes since initial development and the files on a 1999 disc would've been outdated/incompatible. I mean the Dolphin units themselves used carts for development at first, then they switched it over to discs about halfway through development life.

 

This is why I'm so lost on these discs. They don't seem to have a straightforward answer.

I've seen a few Dolphin units, I thought they used full size CD in them.

[a3quit4s | 4,091]

I mean I could have printed those at my house? If they were prototypes they would have some kind of legal on them and probably not even be branded with Nintendo them. What’s with the cityscape background? To me it just seems like they were printed with commercial off the shelf software. 

Maybe they were testing creating CD burner/label software?!

Nintendo employee making burned DVDs on company time for fun?

Edited September 21, 2020 by a3quit4s

[CavemanKrogg | 4]

44 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

I've seen a few Dolphin units, I thought they used full size CD in them.

Nah, I've got a Dolphin unit, it uses really long NDPD? Carts. They're the weirdest thing. Maybe the first proto they made used discs, I really don't know. I don't think I'm going to get an answer until I can actually speak with someone who was there or had inside knowledge of the program.

[CavemanKrogg | 4]

42 minutes ago, a3quit4s said:

I mean I could have printed those at my house? If they were prototypes they would have some kind of legal on them and probably not even be branded with Nintendo them. What’s with the cityscape background? To me it just seems like they were printed with commercial off the shelf software. 

Maybe they were testing creating CD burner/label software?!

Nintendo employee making burned DVDs on company time for fun?

I can say with confidence they were not produced at home. These are commercially produced discs. You cannot produce silver bottom with CPPM protection except at a commercial plant. These are official discs, especially since they were pulled from the dumpster at Nintendo of America headquarters in WA. If employees or random people were messing around with this stuff at home, they wouldn't get thrown out at corporate. Not to mention you can see the file write date of June 2, 1999 and that was WAY before software and hardware to do this were prevalent at home.

They're authentic, I just have no idea what for.

[a3quit4s | 4,091]

5 minutes ago, CavemanKrogg said:

I can say with confidence they were not produced at home. These are commercially produced discs. You cannot produce silver bottom with CPPM protection except at a commercial plant. These are official discs, especially since they were pulled from the dumpster at Nintendo of America headquarters in WA. If employees or random people were messing around with this stuff at home, they wouldn't get thrown out at corporate. Not to mention you can see the file write date of June 2, 1999 and that was WAY before software and hardware to do this were prevalent at home.

They're authentic, I just have no idea what for.

Could literally just be a test disc. I don’t remember there being any ex Nintendo employees here but I wish you luck in finding an answer. 
 

The Truth is out there!

[RH | 4,895]

13 hours ago, a3quit4s said:

Could literally just be a test disc. I don’t remember there being any ex Nintendo employees here but I wish you luck in finding an answer. 
 

The Truth is out there!

The only ex-employee I know who's come around here is the infamous Howard.  (Yes, THAT Howard.) But I doubt he knew about these.

Another theory, and this is a long shot, but maybe back in the early days of developing for the GameCube, they would have wanted to have had many types of tests.  Since this was their first CD-style media, maybe these are test samples of burning media from a major disc writing company.  In other words, they wanted to test the quality and output from the maker or the hardware that would print these "official" silver CDs.  There's even a chance that only a small batch of these were printed (100?) and since this was testing the effectiveness of the equipment or printing company, they paid the price to get 100 "official" CDs made for QA inspection.

In fact, I'm not saying that's what these are but when you plan/hope to make potentially billions of CDs for a new game system, you want to make sure the hardware you buy (or maybe even had custom built) to print this is working properly.  You'd do that before you have a game and for legal reasons ,throwing test pattern videos on their are better than a video pulled form a DVD.  Even Nintendo Promo material doesn't make since if you want to test using this stuff and make sure the coloring matches up, etc., from the disc.

In fact, if I had to make a bet, I'd place it on the fact that this is a test subset of disc creation when Nintendo was learning how to print CD-style media.  It just makes since, especially knowing that Nintendo QA is pretty thorough (usually.)