[MUSIC] On November 21st 1997, Nintendo of America filed a lawsuit in federal court against Hong Kong-based Bung enterprises limited According to the lawsuit, Nintendo argued that bung had willfully and directly Infringed Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks with the sale of a device known as the Doctor V64 A backup device used to play Nintendo 64 games illegally and they were seeking damages and an immediate injunction To stop the manufacture and distribution of the product Nintendo also argued that the sale of any device that circumvented the Nintendo 64 security measures was Illegal the courts agreed and granted Nintendo's motion and Bung was ordered to cease all sales of the Dr. V64 Nintendo was awarded 7 million dollars in damages Yet, the Dr. V64 has made its way into some well-known development houses such as Akklaim one of the largest third-party developers on the Nintendo 64 at the time, who used the product as an unofficial dev kit on Turok 3 and others. So how did this come to be? In 1994, Bung Enterprises was formed by Thomas Magnus and was focused on building electronic devices That would allow game systems on cartridge to be backed up Of course another way to say this is that these were Piracy tools once you had a ROM then you didn't need the original to play Bung developed many backup devices including the game doctor for the Super Famicom and the GB exchanger which used flash chips to back up Game Boy games. Bung was mostly unknown to North America But when the popular online store lik-sang.com began to sell Bung products Nintendo became aware of the company By the time the Nintendo 64 was released, Nintendo was well aware of disk copies that were used to flood the market Especially on the Super NES and they took further steps to boost security. The Nintendo 64 used a CIC lockout chip just like the Super NES and NES before it but this time the algorithm was much more advanced and the CIC chip worked in conjunction with the peripheral interface or piff as it's known and this was much more complex to circumvent It also became quickly apparent that floppy disk copiers would become obsolete. In general Nintendo 64 ROMs are much larger than the Super Nintendo counterparts and even the smallest N64 ROM would spend multiple discs But the same goes for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Both developers and the public wanted the Nintendo 64 to use CD ROMs when it was clear that Nintendo was going to stay with cartridges, it wasn't received well. Well popular RPG developer on the Super Nintendo Squaresoft cancelled all development on the Nintendo 64 and moved their efforts to the Sony Playstation and took advantage of the CD ROM format, where they would develop one of the best video games ever made, Final Fantasy 7 The PlayStation had CD ROM, Video CD, and Audio CD. The Nintendo 64 had none of these So electronics manufacturers in Taiwan and Hong Kong including Bung who were well established by now began building CD ROM based backup devices that utilize the expansion port found underneath the Nintendo 64. This port was only ever used for one thing: the 64DD Expansion but it was reverse engineered and discovered that the bottom expansion port has the same connectors as the cartridge port. This meant that a third party add-on could be developed with a custom BIOS and use a CD ROM drive to boot games from and keep the cartridge port free for other things. It also meant with an original cartridges, It could be used to circumvent the lockout security check, as the Nintendo 64 would think that an official game was connected. This would become the CD ROM drive that the Nintendo 64 never officially received So I finally got my hands on a Dr. V64 This was a piece of hardware that I wanted to get for my collection for a while So, let's go ahead and take a look and see what this device actually does, and how it operates Bung Enterprises released the Dr. V64 originally in 1997 at the cost of four hundred and fifty US dollars on face value that is quite expensive But it has many features that justify the cost. The Dr. V64 plugs into the Nintendo 64's connecter and comes with an IDE CD-Drive. Initial units came with an 8x CD Drive, but later models incorporated 16 and 32 speed CD drives The heart of the Dr. V64 is the MOS technology 6502 CPU and a custom BIOS The 6502 is a popular 8-bit CPU that was used in many computers and consoles such as the Atari 800 Commodore VIC-20 and Nintendo Entertainment System the V64 contains its own memory Initially came with 128 Mega Bits or 16 Mega Bytes of RAM. But this was increased to 256 Mega Bits or 32 Mega Bytes as the size of the games on cartridge began to increase Although the Dr. V64 is a Nintendo 64 backup device, it can also be used as a external CD player and this was one of the ways Bung Enterprises managed to get this product through customs and in North America even after their court case with Nintendo they simply they simply rebranded and in some cases, just concealed the fact that this product was a backup device for the Nintendo 64 But the system came with a CD-ROM full of Nintendo 64 ROMs Which was certainly one of the areas of concern for Nintendo. You simply turn on the Dr. V64, navigate to the ROM that you wanted to load and it would load itself into the Dr V64's main memory, but in order to play backup software the Dr. V64 came with an adapter that you would connect into the cartridge port and you would plug in any cartridge from any region. This was used as a donor cartridge and utilized the CIC lockout chip in order to bypass the security check Once the game had completely loaded from CD into the Dr. V64's main memory turning on the Nintendo 64 would treat the Dr. V64 like it was just another cartridge that was plugged in The Dr. V64 would also allow you to dump the content of a cartridge to a ROM. Incidentally, if you've ever downloaded a Nintendo 64 ROM and seen the extension .V64 It's originally come from the Dr. V64, as that was the file extension the device used for its ROM dumps Dumping a cartridge is stored in the Dr. V64's main memory and of course this is volatile and as soon as you turn off the system, the contents are lost But there was another way to dump games and retain them and that's to use a PC one of the features of the Dr. V64 is its ability to transfer files, allowing you to send any contents of the DRAM to a PC so you could make ROM dumps of any cartridge. You could also use this feature to dump the BIOS as well As well as this, you could upload a new updated BIOS to the Dr. V64. So let's be clear, the Bung Enterprises Dr. V64 is a piracy tool. It allows you to dump ROMs from cartridge, burn them onto a CD You can have a CD full of Nintendo 64 ROMs and then load those ROMs back onto the Nintendo 64 without needing the original game I mean that is a piracy tool in anyone's book, but where it gets interesting is on the back of the Bung Dr. V64 is a parallel port connector and interfacing into a PC would allow the Bung Dr. V64 to turn itself into a fully-fledged Nintendo 64 development kit. With a Windows PC, Parallel cable and a Nintendo 64 MIPS cross compiler by plugging one end into the PC and the other end into the Dr. V64 meant that you could write code on your PC, then push it to the Nintendo 64 and test This meant that the Dr V64 could be used as a development kit by simply leaving the transfer program enabled on the Dr. 64, you could transmit new data over to test and debug quickly. Although you couldn't do some advanced stuff like remote debugging use of debug symbols and breakpoints It worked well enough and for 450 US dollars all of a sudden became a very attractive proposition for development studios working on Nintendo 64 games and the Dr. V64 was more than capable as a development kit, even Bung would frequent Nintendo 64 usenet groups to advertise the Dr. V64 as a development kit and attempt to undercut Nintendo Why pay Nintendo three to four thousand dollars more for their development kit that does about the same thing? Equipped 10 or more programmers, play testers for the price of one Nintendo SDK. Imagine saving 30 to 40 thousand dollars in development costs in one shot they proclaimed Akklaim Studios in Austin the same development studio who worked on the turok line of games used Dr V64's in their office during the development and testing of Turok 3 But the timeline here is important. Turok 3 was released in August of 2000 for the Nintendo 64 in North America Nintendo won its court case against Bung in 1999, so how does Akklaim studios end up using illegal backup devices as dev kits? Quite simply, cost. A Nintendo 64 partner development kit was very expensive to purchase. Even though Akklaim had millions of dollars in the bank, it made more sense to them just to buy a four hundred and fifty dollar alternative and provide them to all developers and testers in the studio. It's not entirely clear if they used the Dr. V64 on any other projects, but they certainly had them and they used them on the Turok 3 project Bung Enterprises themselves also wanted to promote the Dr V64 for homebrew development. A demo competition known as Presence of Mine or POM was set up in 1998 with Bung as the major sponsor and supplied Dr. V64s as prizes. The contest also occurred in 1999 and there were some very clever and innovative demos that came out of this particular demo competition After Nintendo won its court case, Bung ceased selling their products. But not before they tried to rebrand and try a few shady tricks to keep selling their products in North America Four days after Bung announced they were closing down operations, they returned as first union limited initially bung denied that they were connected First Union supposedly had products that were compatible with Bung, but in reality was the same company trying to fill out standing Bung orders. It's also worth noting that the Dr. V64 was released in 1997 before the first ever Nintendo 64 emulators were released on the PC Back then, no one was emulating the N64, so unless you own original Nintendo 64 hardware and a way to load ROMs, there was not much you could do with the ROMs themselves Of course these days, all this is replaced by one of these EverDrive cartridge and while it's easy to forget about the Dr. V64, it's unique set of features meant that it was so much more than just another tool for piracy. So there you have it guys, that's the story of the Bung Enterprises' Dr. V64 interesting story to go back and revisit Obviously this hardware was used for piracy first and foremost. I mean you could load Nintendo 64 ROMs off a CD that came supplied with the hardware itself I mean this was a piracy tool first and foremost no question about it. Yet, somehow ended up being a development kit for major development studios in North America, like Akklaim for the development of games like Turok 3 So how does that happen? And I think at the end of the day, that Acclaim and other studios saw the cost benefit of a four hundred and fifty dollar Development kit versus the tens of thousands of dollars that you would have to spend on official Nintendo 64 development hardware back at the time and really just You know, leverage the cost savings that they were able to get from these types of things and utilize the Bung Dr. V64 for the development of Turok 3 I mean you know ten of these would cost you four and a half thousand and you could purchase one for every developer in your dev studio and essentially it would do the same thing as the kind of high-end Nintendo 64 development hardware that was around at the same time So, it was a no-brainer at the time to utilize hardware like this in order to do your development on. Well guys, I'm going to leave it here for this video. I hope you enjoyed it Let me know what you thought about it in the comments below if you liked this video, you know what to do Leave me a thumbs up. As always don't forget to Like and subscribe and I'll catch you guys in the next video Bye for now [MUSIC]
