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Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes
@frankcifaldi
Founder, co-director and noisemaker and co-host of . Former ink-stained wretch. He/him.
Oakland, CAGameHistory.orgJoined March 2009

Frank Cifaldi (Unlicensed).nes’s Tweets

Grid Grabber (Jaleco). An original game by Elite out of the UK. Elite no longer has this in their archives. I know someone who has a demo cart but every time I ask him about it he kinda pretends like he doesn't know what I'm talking about, and has done so for about 20 years.
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4. Ace Harding: Lost in Las Vegas (Kemco). This is an NES conversion of the computer game Deja Vu II. It seems to have been totally finished for both U.S. and Japan release, but was never manufactured. The later Game Boy Color version likely uses a soundtrack written for NES.
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3. Mark Dart's Challenge (Arachnid). This game would have come with an electronic dart board that plugs into the NES! Someone who has a cart has been ghosting me for years, and separately, we archived the source code of its (deceased) author and he didn't maintain it. Argh.
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A Famicom version of Wild Boys was also evaluated. Maybe someone smarter than me should look into what weird nonsense Bandai Japan was licensing in 1988/1989, maybe this is based on an existing property I'm not aware of (and then changed for U.S. consumption?).
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2. Wild Boys, by Bandai. Seems to be about a fictional glam rock band? This is the one screenshot ever published, from Nintendo Power. The actual cartridge sent to Nintendo was spotted on eBay back in 2015...but it had long ago been harvested to test another game's chips.
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1. Cat Runner. Submitted in playable form by Kemco-Seika in 1989 but never seen or screenshotted. We knew absolutely nothing about this until some design work by anime director Rintarō (Metropolis) was exhibited in France about three months ago!
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Design documents made in 1989 for an unpublished game called Cat Runner and presented at an exhibition focusing on the work of movie director Rintarō (Metropolis, Kamui no Ken, Genma Wars) currently held in Nantes, France. twitter.com/Kessentchu/sta
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If you listen to his performance there was obviously a disconnect somewhere. Someone brilliant cast The Joker as Majima because duh, of course that's what you do, but whoever directed him obviously didn't get the memo so he gives a pretty generic tough guy performance.
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Mark Hamill voiced Majima in the original Yakuza on PS2 and doesn't even remember doing it twitter.com/SuperPodSaga/s…
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Column 2 is of course the file, column 3 (I hid a ton) is the file path on Nintendo's server somewhere for the first program ROM on the cartridge. The "extension" is another chronological number, I suspect for playable ROM submission (as opposed to merely "can we make this?")
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I'm gonna explain stuff and you're going to read it Column 1 is a chronological number that starts with the year (here, 1986). I'm not entirely sure when this number is assigned, my current theory based on how many are missing is initial concept approval.
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When the job is done and I've got time to cut loose and get wild I like to...stare really hard at Nintendo's ROM manufacturing database trying to find patterns in their chronological numbering schemes to determine how many NES games were evaluated but unreleased
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When you visit me you go home with water-logged relics of the past
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Hey, I'm a Nintendo player! I need "The Game Player's Guide to Nintendo"! (1988) Looks at these ads-- the pixels! Good tips like "your Spelunker is very, very fragile" LOL Thanks @frankcifaldi #retrogaming #nintendo #NES
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I've been told the sign is gone now. I get it, they're mad about an article from a year ago, but I totally forgot about that and I'm sure others did too. For me as a casual observer this was "KotakuInAction" and it made me feel gross for being here.
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And as is MAGFest tradition I will be creating tomorrow's talk entirely in my hotel room up to the wire
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MAGFest is upon us, and the schedule (guidebook.com/g/magfest2023/) says we're doing two panels: 💾 Preserving Games with VGHF — Thursday 3:30pm, Panels 4 📚 Inside the VGHF Archives — Saturday 9pm, Panels 2 If you're at the event - super.magfest.org - come check it out!
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No, I came up with a ridiculous process where I melt and absorb the glue off of the spine so that I'm left with loose sheets with zero margin loss (other scanners guillotine but I don't like the results). I'm left with a flat cover sheet that I just slice.
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Replying to @frankcifaldi
Do you guys have one of those big guillotine blade paper cutters?
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