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Doctor V64

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The Doctor V64 (also referred to simply as the V64 ) is a development and backup device made by Bung Enterprises Ltd that is used in conjunction with the Nintendo 64 . The Doctor V64 also had the ability to play video CDs and audio CDs. Additionally, it could apply stereo 3D effects to the audio.

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83-582: The V64 was released in 1996 and was priced around US$ 450. It was the one of the first commercially available backup devices for the Nintendo 64, appearing not long after the console's international release. The Partner N64 development kit , which was manufactured by Silicon Graphics and sold officially by Nintendo , was a comparatively expensive development machine. The V64 served as a lower-cost development machine, though its unofficial status would later lead to conflict with Nintendo. Some third-party developers used

166-772: A host adapter interfacing with the rest of the computer system. The remaining connector(s) plug into storage devices, most commonly hard disk drives or optical drives. Each connector has 39 physical pins arranged into two rows (2.54 mm, 1 ⁄ 10 -inch pitch), with a gap or key at pin 20. Earlier connectors may not have that gap, with all 40 pins available. Thus, later cables with the gap filled in are incompatible with earlier connectors, although earlier cables are compatible with later connectors. Round parallel ATA cables (as opposed to ribbon cables) were eventually made available for ' case modders ' for cosmetic reasons, as well as claims of improved computer cooling and were easier to handle; however, only ribbon cables are supported by

249-426: A cable can perform a read or write operation at one time; therefore, a fast device on the same cable as a slow device under heavy use will find it has to wait for the slow device to complete its task first. However, most modern devices will report write operations as complete once the data is stored in their onboard cache memory, before the data is written to the (slow) magnetic storage. This allows commands to be sent to

332-530: A cable, it should be configured as Device 0 . However, some certain era drives have a special setting called Single for this configuration (Western Digital, in particular). Also, depending on the hardware and software available, a Single drive on a cable will often work reliably even though configured as the Device 1 drive (most often seen where an optical drive is the only device on the secondary ATA interface). The words primary and secondary typically refers to

415-500: A complete software environment and console manufacturers such as Nintendo provide polished & powerful development hardware through their developer programs. Other console manufacturers even allow the retail consoles to be used as development kits, provided that the development software is being used by the developer. For a significant portion of the NES lifespan, there was no official development kit. Video game developers creating games for

498-532: A computer directly to the console, and included a software package. The Maestro 64 Music system allowed developers to load music software on to the console, and play music through the Nintendo 64's hardware. another unofficial alternative to develop games for the N64 was the Doctor V64 , made by Bung Enterprises . Sega Dreamcast units were unique in that they used GD-ROM discs; giga discs that held 1GB of data. This

581-603: A console manufacturer would have to write their games without the specialized software to access unique features such as the Xbox One's Kinect or the Wii U GamePad. Modern game development kits often come bundled with the specialized software, and are much more formalized compared to previous-generation GDKs. In older generations of console gaming, developers had to make their own hardware and write games at various levels of programming (such as assembly ). Today, programs such as Unity 3D provide

664-449: A drive to a host with an ATA-5 or earlier interface will limit the usable capacity to the maximum of the interface. Some operating systems, including Windows XP pre-SP1, and Windows 2000 pre-SP3, disable LBA48 by default, requiring the user to take extra steps to use the entire capacity of an ATA drive larger than about 137 gigabytes. Older operating systems, such as Windows 98 , do not support 48-bit LBA at all. However, members of

747-497: A maximum drive capacity of two gigabytes. Later, the first formalized ATA specification used a 28-bit addressing mode through LBA28 , allowing for the addressing of 2 ( 268 435 456 ) sectors (blocks) of 512 bytes each, resulting in a maximum capacity of 128  GiB (137  GB ). ATA-6 introduced 48-bit addressing, increasing the limit to 128 PiB (144 PB ). As a consequence, any ATA drive of capacity larger than about 137 GB must be an ATA-6 or later drive. Connecting such

830-529: 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 V64, a game cartridge is plugged into the Nintendo 64 through an adapter which connects only the lockout chip. The game cart used for

913-543: A non-disclosure agreement. The PlayStation developer program allows registered developers to publish their games across the PlayStation Network , making their games accessible on the PlayStation 3 , PlayStation 4 , PlayStation Vita , and PlayStation TV all through one program. The Wii development kit was a bundle of the "NDEV" hardware – a big black box full of debugging/testing hardware that looks nothing like

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996-400: A number of V64s in their development process, with games such as Turok: Dinosaur Hunter utilizing the device during development. The CPU of the V64 is a 6502 , and the operating system is contained in a BIOS . The 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

1079-666: A problem in MS-DOS limited the number of heads to 255. This totals to 8 422 686 720 bytes (8032.5 MiB ), commonly referred to as the 8.4 gigabyte barrier. This is again a limit imposed by x86 BIOSes, and not a limit imposed by the ATA interface. It was eventually determined that these size limitations could be overridden with a small program loaded at startup from a hard drive's boot sector. Some hard drive manufacturers, such as Western Digital, started including these override utilities with large hard drives to help overcome these problems. However, if

1162-483: A result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations are still in common informal use, in particular Extended IDE (EIDE) and Ultra ATA (UATA). After the introduction of SATA in 2003, the original ATA was renamed to Parallel ATA, or PATA for short. Parallel ATA cables have a maximum allowable length of 18 in (457 mm). Because of this limit, the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. For many years, ATA provided

1245-619: A sound card but ultimately as two physical interfaces embedded in a Southbridge chip on a motherboard. Called the "primary" and "secondary" ATA interfaces, they were assigned to base addresses 0x1F0 and 0x170 on ISA bus systems. They were replaced by SATA interfaces. The first version of what is now called the ATA/ATAPI interface was developed by Western Digital under the name Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE). Together with Compaq (the initial customer), they worked with various disk drive manufacturers to develop and ship early products with

1328-473: A standard IDE 8X CD-ROM . During the manufacturing lifetime of the device, latter V64 models shipped with 16X and eventually 20X drives. V64 units could be purchased without a CD-ROM drive. It is possible to replace the unit with a faster IDE CD-ROM unit (such as the 52X model in the image on this page). Many Doctor V64s shipped internationally were ordered without an installed CD-ROM drive, to save on shipping costs associated with weight, to avoid import duty on

1411-408: A tower desktop PC, with the controller ports being where the optical disk drive would normally go. When developers were creating software for the original Xbox , a prototype of the controller was used in the early development kits. This controller was slimmer, had elongated sides, and used a USB cable instead of an Xbox port-compatible cable. The dev kit console was shaped like a tower desktop PC,

1494-515: A unified developer program for both its Wii U and Nintendo 3DS families of platforms. This developer program provided software and middleware to developers, and allowed developers to self-publish their games to the Nintendo eShop . Games and applications published through this program are considered "third-party" and do not belong to Nintendo, allowing independent developers to publish their games on multiple different platforms. This service ended alongside

1577-406: A way for the host to determine whether the media is present, and these were not provided in the ATA protocol. ATAPI is a protocol allowing the ATA interface to carry SCSI commands and responses; therefore, all ATAPI devices are actually "speaking SCSI" other than at the electrical interface. The SCSI commands and responses are embedded in "packets" (hence "ATA Packet Interface") for transmission on

1660-458: Is a standard interface designed for IBM PC -compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives , floppy disk drives , optical disc drives , and tape drives in computers . The standard is maintained by the X3/ INCITS committee. It uses

1743-504: Is a designation that has been primarily used by Western Digital for different speed enhancements to the ATA/ATAPI standards. For example, in 2000 Western Digital published a document describing "Ultra ATA/100", which brought performance improvements for the then-current ATA/ATAPI-5 standard by improving maximum speed of the Parallel ATA interface from 66 to 100 MB/s. Most of Western Digital's changes, along with others, were included in

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1826-600: Is defined in the MMC SCSI command set. ATAPI was adopted as part of ATA in INCITS 317-1998, AT Attachment with Packet Interface Extension (ATA/ATAPI-4) . The ATA/ATAPI-4 standard also introduced several " Ultra DMA " transfer modes. These initially supported speeds from 16 to 33 MB/s. In later versions, faster Ultra DMA modes were added, requiring new 80-wire cables to reduce crosstalk. The latest versions of Parallel ATA support up to 133 MB/s. Ultra ATA, abbreviated UATA,

1909-455: The PlayStation Network , making their games accessible on the PlayStation 3 , PlayStation 4 , PlayStation Vita , and PlayStation TV all through one program. The PlayStation 4 development kits were known as "Orbis", though this was just a codename. Academic institutions can register to receive PS4 development kits for educational use, and are not region-restricted unlike regular PlayStation Developer Program members. Nintendo maintained

1992-494: The Zip drive and SuperDisk drive . Some early ATAPI devices were simply SCSI devices with an ATA/ATAPI to SCSI protocol converter added on. The SCSI commands and responses used by each class of ATAPI device (CD-ROM, tape, etc.) are described in other documents or specifications specific to those device classes and are not within ATA/ATAPI or the T13 committee's purview. One commonly used set

2075-434: The ATA cable. This allows any device class for which a SCSI command set has been defined to be interfaced via ATA/ATAPI. ATAPI devices are also "speaking ATA", as the ATA physical interface and protocol are still being used to send the packets. On the other hand, ATA hard drives and solid state drives do not use ATAPI. ATAPI devices include CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives, tape drives , and large-capacity floppy drives such as

2158-448: The ATA specifications. A 44-pin variant PATA connector is used for 2.5 inch drives inside laptops. The pins are closer together (2.0 mm pitch) and the connector is physically smaller than the 40-pin connector. The extra pins carry power. ATA's cables have had 40 conductors for most of its history (44 conductors for the smaller form-factor version used for 2.5" drives—the extra four for power), but an 80-conductor version appeared with

2241-747: The ATA/ATAPI-6 standard (2002). Initially, the size of an ATA drive was stored in the system x86 BIOS using a type number (1 through 45) that predefined the C/H/S parameters and also often the landing zone, in which the drive heads are parked while not in use. Later, a "user definable" format called C/H/S or cylinders, heads, sectors was made available. These numbers were important for the earlier ST-506 interface, but were generally meaningless for ATA—the CHS parameters for later ATA large drives often specified impossibly high numbers of heads or sectors that did not actually define

2324-502: The Doctor V64 Jr.'s battery-backed RAM from a PC via a parallel port connection. The Doctor V64 Jr. has up to 512 megabits (64 MB) of memory storage. This was done to provide for future Nintendo 64 carts that employed larger memory storage, but the high costs associated with ordering large storage carts kept this occurrence at a minimum. Only a handful of 512-megabit games were released for the Nintendo 64 system. In 1998 and 1999, there

2407-515: The Doctor V64 without having to create a CD backup each time. It also allowed users to upload game images taken from the Internet. Following the Doctor V64's success, Bung released the Doctor V64 Jr. in December 1998. This was a condensed, cost-efficient version of the original V64. The Doctor V64 Jr. has no CD drive and plugs into the normal cartridge slot on the top of the Nintendo 64. Data is loaded into

2490-514: The Internet. The Doctor V64 unit was the first commercially available backup device for the Nintendo 64 unit. Though the unit was sold as a development machine, it could be modified to enable the creation and use of commercial game backups. Unlike official development units, the purchase of V64s was not restricted to software companies only. For this reason, the unit became a popular choice among those looking to proliferate unlicensed copies of games. Original Doctor V64 units sold by Bung did not allow

2573-493: The N64's lifetime, Nintendo revised the N64's model, making the serial port area smaller. This slight change in the N64's plastic casing made the connection to the Doctor V64 difficult to achieve without user modification. This revision may have been a direct reaction from Nintendo to discourage the use of V64 devices, and may also explain why Bung decided to discontinue the use of this port in the later Doctor V64 Jr. models. Nintendo made many legal efforts worldwide in order to stop

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2656-653: The NES would have to make their own development kits, such as Rocket Science Production with their "NES Mission Control" development system. At least two programs were used in conjunction with the NES Mission Control hardware; NESTEST.EXE which would be used to test and debug the development hardware, and HST.EXE which would be used for communication between a computer and the NES development hardware. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System used specialized EPROM cartridges for development, as well as various software. Similar to

2739-508: The NES, developers often made their own development software or relied on middleware made by other developers. There are several variations of the PlayStation development kit used for game creation. One variation of the development kit had only three components, while the PlayStation Ultimate Development Kit included up to 26 components, including the complete Net Yaroze development kit. The Net Yaroze version of

2822-489: The Nintendo Wii U section above, games and applications published through this program are considered "third-party" and do not belong to Nintendo, allowing independent developers to publish their games on multiple different platforms. Strangely, some 3DS development kits cannot play retail games . Parallel ATA Parallel ATA ( PATA ), originally AT Attachment , also known as Integrated Drive Electronics ( IDE ),

2905-449: The V64 unit, a user would navigate the menus and issue commands. Though the menu was mainly designed for game developers, it is possible to back up cartridges with it (through the use of an unofficial V64 BIOS). Some of the menu items related to game backups were removed from the V64's BIOS near the end of its life due to pressure from Nintendo. These items are only available by obtaining a patched V64 BIOS. Most early V64 models shipped with

2988-487: The V64. It is possible to modify an AT PC power supply for V64 use. Only 4 cables have to be connected to the V64 for it to function. Game development kit#Nintendo 64 Game development kits ( GDK ) are specialized hardware and software used to create commercial video games for game consoles. They may be partnered with game development tools, special game engine licenses, and other middleware to aid video game development . GDKs are typically not available to

3071-559: The blue PlayStation, regular CD-Rs were also compatible with the system. The Nintendo 64 development kit consisted of multiple components, both for the N64 and its add-on, the N64DD. The main hardware used in N64 game development was the Partner-N64 Development Kit, and used tall cartridges for game development/testing rather than the short cartridges that were sold with retail games. Another hardware component in N64 development

3154-497: The bridge was especially simple in case of an ATA connector being located on an ISA interface card. The integrated controller presented the drive to the host computer as an array of 512-byte blocks with a relatively simple command interface. This relieved the mainboard and interface cards in the host computer of the chores of stepping the disk head arm, moving the head arm in and out, and so on, as had to be done with earlier ST-506 and ESDI hard drives. All of these low-level details of

3237-550: The cable. Cable select is controlled by pin 28. The host adapter grounds this pin; if a device sees that the pin is grounded, it becomes the Device 0 (master) device; if it sees that pin 28 is open, the device becomes the Device 1 (slave) device. This setting is usually chosen by a jumper setting on the drive called "cable select", usually marked CS , which is separate from the Device 0/1 setting. If two drives are configured as Device 0 and Device 1 manually, this configuration does not need to correspond to their position on

3320-409: The cable. Pin 28 is only used to let the drives know their position on the cable; it is not used by the host when communicating with the drives. In other words, the manual master/slave setting using jumpers on the drives takes precedence and allows them to be freely placed on either connector of the ribbon cable. With the 40-conductor cable, it was very common to implement cable select by simply cutting

3403-547: The closure of the Wii U and 3DS eShops on the 27 March 2023. The Wii U development hardware consists of a system called "CAT-DEV", with its accompanying peripherals such as the Display Remote Controller (presumably the Wii U GamePad ) and sensor bar. Nintendo's developer program allows developers to use Nintendo 3DS development kits, and allows developers to self-publish their games to the Nintendo eShop. As mentioned in

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3486-469: The computer was booted in some other manner without loading the special utility, the invalid BIOS settings would be used and the drive could either be inaccessible or appear to the operating system to be damaged. Later, an extension to the x86 BIOS disk services called the " Enhanced Disk Drive " (EDD) was made available, which makes it possible to address drives as large as 2 sectors. The first drive interface used 22-bit addressing mode which resulted in

3569-413: The computer's BIOS and/or operating system . In most personal computers the drives are often designated as "C:" for the Device 0 and "D:" for the Device 1 referring to one active primary partitions on each. The mode that a device must use is often set by a jumper setting on the device itself, which must be manually set to Device 0 ( Master ) or Device 1 ( Slave ). If there is a single device on

3652-402: The connection cable to the drive. On an IBM PC compatible, CP/M machine, or similar, this was typically a card installed on a motherboard . The interface cards used to connect a parallel ATA drive to, for example, an ISA Slot , are not drive controllers: they are merely bridges between the host bus and the ATA interface . Since the original ATA interface is essentially just a 16-bit ISA bus ,

3735-574: The development kit was unique in that it had some features removed and added compared to the official (complete) PlayStation development kit. The Net Yaroze hardware was designed for hobbyists, while official developers would have access to the official PlayStation development kits. There was also a blue version of the PlayStation made for developers that would read burned discs to allow quick testing of imaged builds of their videogames. While there were official PlayStation-branded CD-Rs that could be used with

3818-538: The drive, and to allow users to customize the units in response to the ever-increasing speeds of drives available. The variance in the power draw of different manufacturers drives at different speeds caused issues with disc spin-ups exceeding the wattage rating of the included Bung PSU. This led to users swapping out the Bung PSU for a more powerful model, or selecting low draw drives (mainly Panasonic drives sometimes badged as Creative). V64s can read CD-Rs and CD-RWs (provided

3901-482: The era have a SATA hard disk and an optical drive connected to PATA. As of 2007, some PC chipsets , for example the Intel ICH10, had removed support for PATA. Motherboard vendors still wishing to offer Parallel ATA with those chipsets must include an additional interface chip. In more recent computers, the Parallel ATA interface is rarely used even if present, as four or more Serial ATA connectors are usually provided on

3984-468: The fifth generation of consoles, game development kits were developed to encourage more developers to make console games and grow the videogame industry. Game development kits began as a simple way for developers to connect their computers to console hardware, allowing them to compile software on their PC and see it play directly on a console. Once most GDKs started becoming bundled with hardware-specific software, hobbyists or anyone not directly affiliated with

4067-563: The goal of remaining software compatible with the existing IBM PC hard drive interface. The first such drives appeared internally in Compaq PCs in 1986 and were first separately offered by Conner Peripherals as the CP342 in June 1987. The term Integrated Drive Electronics refers to the drive controller being integrated into the drive, as opposed to a separate controller situated at the other side of

4150-472: The hard drive in question is also expected to provide good throughput for other tasks at the same time, it probably should not be on the same cable as the optical drive. A drive mode called cable select was described as optional in ATA-1 and has come into fairly widespread use with ATA-5 and later. A drive set to "cable select" automatically configures itself as Device 0 or Device 1 , according to its position on

4233-540: The inserted cartridge. These devices were inserted into the top-slot of the N64 with the game cartridge being then inserted into the top of them to just provide the security bypass. Save slots on the DX256 were selected using an alpha and numeric encoder knobs on the front of the device. 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. This allowed developers and homebrew programmers to upload their game images to

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4316-553: The installed CD-ROM unit supports rewritable media). Supported media has to be recorded in Mode 1, ISO 9660 format. Doctor V64s only support the 8.3 DOS naming convention . As such, Joliet file system is not supported. Depending on the model, V64s came with either 128 megabits (16 MB) or 256 megabits (32 MB) of RAM. Original V64 units shipped with 128 megabits of RAM. V64 units started shipping with 256 megabits when developers started using bigger sized memory carts for their games. Users had

4399-414: The internal physical layout of the drive at all. From the start, and up to ATA-2, every user had to specify explicitly how large every attached drive was. From ATA-2 on, an "identify drive" command was implemented that can be sent and which will return all drive parameters. Owing to a lack of foresight by motherboard manufacturers, the system BIOS was often hobbled by artificial C/H/S size limitations due to

4482-565: The introduction of the UDMA/66 mode. All of the additional conductors in the new cable are grounds , interleaved with the signal conductors to reduce the effects of capacitive coupling between neighboring signal conductors, reducing crosstalk . Capacitive coupling is more of a problem at higher transfer rates, and this change was necessary to enable the 66 megabytes per second (MB/s) transfer rate of UDMA4 to work reliably. The faster UDMA5 and UDMA6 modes also require 80-conductor cables. Though

4565-548: The limitations of hardware. This, combined with the hobbyist nature of early computer game programming, meant that not many individuals or smaller companies would develop for consoles. Even when consoles became mainstream (such as the Nintendo Entertainment System), there was no official or publicly available GDK since most console manufacturers would develop their games in-house. For example, Nintendo had internal development teams for both hardware and software. By

4648-548: The manufacturer assuming certain values would never exceed a particular numerical maximum. The first of these BIOS limits occurred when ATA drives reached sizes in excess of 504 MiB , because some motherboard BIOSes would not allow C/H/S values above 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors. Multiplied by 512 bytes per sector, this totals 528 482 304 bytes which, divided by 1 048 576 bytes per MiB , equals 504 MiB (528 MB ). The second of these BIOS limitations occurred at 1024 cylinders , 256 heads , and 63 sectors , and

4731-442: The mechanical operation of the drive were now handled by the controller on the drive itself. This also eliminated the need to design a single controller that could handle many different types of drives, since the controller could be unique for the drive. The host need only to ask for a particular sector, or block, to be read or written, and either accept the data from the drive or send the data to it. The interface used by these drives

4814-458: The most common and the least expensive interface for this application. It has largely been replaced by SATA in newer systems. The standard was originally conceived as the "AT Bus Attachment", officially called "AT Attachment" and abbreviated "ATA" because its primary feature was a direct connection to the 16-bit ISA bus introduced with the IBM PC/AT . The original ATA specifications published by

4897-547: The motherboard and SATA devices of all types are common. With Western Digital 's withdrawal from the PATA market, hard disk drives with the PATA interface were no longer in production after December 2013 for other than specialty applications. Parallel ATA cables transfer data 16 bits at a time. The traditional cable uses 40-pin female insulation displacement connectors (IDC) attached to a 40- or 80-conductor ribbon cable . Each cable has two or three connectors, one of which plugs into

4980-753: The number of conductors doubled, the number of connector pins and the pinout remain the same as 40-conductor cables, and the external appearance of the connectors is identical. Internally, the connectors are different; the connectors for the 80-conductor cable connect a larger number of ground conductors to the ground pins, while the connectors for the 40-conductor cable connect ground conductors to ground pins one-to-one. 80-conductor cables usually come with three differently colored connectors (blue, black, and gray for controller, master drive, and slave drive respectively) as opposed to uniformly colored 40-conductor cable's connectors (commonly all gray). The gray connector on 80-conductor cables has pin 28 CSEL not connected, making it

5063-460: The operation had to contain the same lockout chip used by the game back up. The second problem concerned saving progress. Most N64 games are saved to the cart itself instead of external memory cards. If the player wanted to keep their progress, then the cartridge used had to have the same type of non-volatile memory hardware. Alternatively, Bung produced the "DX256" and "DS1" add-ons to allow (EEPROM and SRAM respectively) saves to be made without using

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5146-452: The option of buying a memory upgrade from Bung and other re-sellers. The Doctor V64 uses a 4 Pin MiniDIN jack (as used for S-Video ) for connecting the power supply cord. Power supplies included with Doctor V64s were very unreliable. Bung replaced the power supply with a sturdier version in later V64 units. Replacing broken power supplies became one of the most common maintenance problems with

5229-408: The other device on the cable, reducing the impact of the "one operation at a time" limit. The impact of this on a system's performance depends on the application. For example, when copying data from an optical drive to a hard drive (such as during software installation), this effect probably will not matter. Such jobs are necessarily limited by the speed of the optical drive no matter where it is. But if

5312-413: The playing of backups. A person would have to modify the unit by themselves in order to make it backup friendly. This usually required a user to download and install a modified Doctor V64 BIOS. Additionally, the cartridge adapter had to be opened and soldered in order to allow for the operational procedure. Though Bung never sold backup enabled V64s, many re-sellers would modify the units themselves. During

5395-416: The primary storage device interface for PCs soon after its introduction. In some systems, a third and fourth motherboard interface was provided, allowing up to eight ATA devices to be attached to the motherboard. Often, these additional connectors were implemented by inexpensive RAID controllers. Soon after the introduction of Serial ATA (SATA) in 2003, use of Parallel ATA declined. Some PCs and laptops of

5478-459: The public, and require game developers to enter an agreement, partnership, or program with the hardware manufacturer to gain access to the hardware. As console generations pass, development kits often get sold through websites like eBay without repercussions. This is often because the console manufacturers discontinue certain development programs as time passes. In the 1980s, computing did not involve 3D modelling or any complex programming due to

5561-517: The retail console, the dev kit console looked like a typical desktop PC from the 1990s but shorter in height. The boot up screen of the dev kit console is also different, as it uses 3D graphics instead of the 2D graphics used in the retail console. The dev kit console for the PS2 looked like a retail PS2, but substantially thicker. The dev kit console of the Nintendo GameCube was white and shaped like

5644-516: The sale of Doctor V64 units. They sued Bung directly as well as specific store retailers in Europe and North America for copyright infringement. Eventually, Nintendo managed to have the courts prohibit the sale of Doctor V64 units in the United States. The Doctor V64 implemented text-based menu-driven screens. The menus consisted of white text superimposed over a black background. Utilizing the buttons on

5727-473: The same cable. For all modern ATA host adapters, this is not true, as modern ATA host adapters support independent device timing . This allows each device on the cable to transfer data at its own best speed. Even with earlier adapters without independent timing, this effect applies only to the data transfer phase of a read or write operation. This is caused by the omission of both overlapped and queued feature sets from most parallel ATA products. Only one device on

5810-485: The same time that the ATA-1 standard was adopted, Western Digital introduced drives under a newer name, Enhanced IDE (EIDE). These included most of the features of the forthcoming ATA-2 specification and several additional enhancements. Other manufacturers introduced their own variations of ATA-1 such as "Fast ATA" and "Fast ATA-2". The new version of the ANSI standard, AT Attachment Interface with Extensions ATA-2 (X3.279-1996),

5893-414: The slave position for drives configured cable select. If two devices are attached to a single cable, one must be designated as Device 0 (in the past, commonly designated master ) and the other as Device 1 (in the past, commonly designated as slave ). This distinction is necessary to allow both drives to share the cable without conflict. The Device 0 drive is the drive that usually appears "first" to

5976-532: The slim white Wii consoles sold to consumers – and a disc containing the developer software tools. Microsoft maintains multiple developer programs for people wanting to develop games for their platforms; ID@Xbox for Xbox One game development , and the Windows Dev Center for Windows 8 , Windows 8.1 , Windows 10 , and Xbox One game and application development. The PlayStation developer program allows registered developers to publish their games across

6059-475: The standards committees use the name "AT Attachment". The "AT" in the IBM PC/AT referred to "Advanced Technology" so ATA has also been referred to as "Advanced Technology Attachment". When a newer Serial ATA (SATA) was introduced in 2003, the original ATA was renamed to Parallel ATA, or PATA for short. Physical ATA interfaces became a standard component in all PCs, initially on host bus adapters, sometimes on

6142-480: The third-party group MSFN have modified the Windows 98 disk drivers to add unofficial support for 48-bit LBA to Windows 95 OSR2 , Windows 98 , Windows 98 SE and Windows ME . Some 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems supporting LBA48 may still not support disks larger than 2 TiB due to using 32-bit arithmetic only; a limitation also applying to many boot sectors . Parallel ATA (then simply called ATA or IDE) became

6225-402: The two IDE cables, which can have two drives each (primary master, primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave). There are many debates about how much a slow device can impact the performance of a faster device on the same cable. On early ATA host adapters, both devices' data transfers can be constrained to the speed of the slower device, if two devices of different speed capabilities are on

6308-425: The underlying AT Attachment (ATA) and AT Attachment Packet Interface ( ATAPI ) standards. The Parallel ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development, which began with the original AT Attachment interface, developed for use in early PC AT equipment. The ATA interface itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital 's original Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. As

6391-440: Was a homebrew competition known as "Presence of Mind" (POM), an N64 demo competition led by dextrose.com. The contest consisted of submitting a user-developed N64 program, game, or utility. Bung Enterprises promoted the event and supplied prizes (usually Doctor V64 related accessories). Though a contest was planned for 2000, the interest in the N64 was already fading, and so did the event. POM contest demo entries can still be found on

6474-432: Was approved in 1996. It included most of the features of the manufacturer-specific variants. ATA-2 also was the first to note that devices other than hard drives could be attached to the interface: 3.1.7 Device: Device is a storage peripheral. Traditionally, a device on the ATA interface has been a hard disk drive, but any form of storage device may be placed on the ATA interface provided it adheres to this standard. ATA

6557-490: Was grey colored and had a green circle in the middle of the front of the console with an X inside the circle. Microsoft manages the Xbox 360 Tools and Middleware Program, which licenses development kits (hardware and software) to professional software developers working on tools and technologies for games. Access to this program requires good industry references, prior experience in games tools and middleware development, and signing

6640-469: Was originally designed for, and worked only with, hard disk drives and devices that could emulate them. The introduction of ATAPI (ATA Packet Interface) by a group called the Small Form Factor committee (SFF) allowed ATA to be used for a variety of other devices that require functions beyond those necessary for hard disk drives. For example, any removable media device needs a "media eject" command, and

6723-463: Was slightly more than a typical CD, but less than a DVD. While GD-ROM burners were used by some developers, since the Dreamcast was compatible with CDs and since most games didn't take up 1GB of data at the time, GD-ROMs remained uncommon as developers opted to use the more-easily accessible CDs for their disc media. The console itself was white, like the retail version of the Dreamcast console, but unlike

6806-504: Was standardized in 1994 as ANSI standard X3.221-1994, AT Attachment Interface for Disk Drives . After later versions of the standard were developed, this became known as "ATA-1". A short-lived, seldom-used implementation of ATA was created for the IBM XT and similar machines that used the 8-bit version of the ISA bus. It has been referred to as "XT-IDE" , "XTA" or "XT Attachment". In 1994, about

6889-634: Was the NU64 Flash Gang Writer, which allowed developers to copy data from one cartridge to multiple cartridges simultaneously. This device was primarily used to create press and test copies of games, and also relied on tall cartridges instead of short retail cartridges. Other versions of the Nintendo 64 GDK are the SN Systems development suite, as well as the SN Maestro 64 Music development system. The development suite allowed developers to run code from

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