Nuclear Strike 64 PAL Prototype

Well, it's finally here- the holy grail everyone has been waiting for. Yes, that's right.. it's a German PAL prototype for Nuclear Strike for Nintendo 64!

Wait, this isn't your holy grail? Well, at least it's another N64 prototype!

While the cart and labels are actually very clean and in excellent condition, there appears to be some sticker residue on the front of the cart. Strangely, I didn't really notice it much in person, but judging from this picture it looks like the cartridge could use a bath!

Differences Discovered

Kind of interesting story- I went to do a binary comparison of the dump of this prototype and the retail rom found in the No Intro set, and WinDiff shows a pretty good amount of differences in the prototype rom.

For those unititiated to the wonderful world of binary file comparison tools, notice the two hollow vertical columns on the left hand side of the image below. Each column represents the entirety of one of the files being compared, and the different colored areas represent the locations and sizes of data mismatches between the two files.

While anytime you see a decent amount of potential differences like this it can be exciting to see, this is the interesting part..

While booting up the retail Germany PAL rom to get a sense of the retail game and start looking for obvious differences, I noticed some image artifacts in the graphics almost immediately after the game booted.

Granted, my picture sucks, but notice the blockiness and random colors on the guy's face at the bottom of the screen of the retail game. The image of the guy's face in the prototype actually looks much more clear (wtf?!)

I checked the other retail roms and I am confident that the issue just appears to be with the Germany PAL dump in the No Intro set. I went to check the No Intro website, and sure enough, this is one of the remaining roms in the "unverified" category for the set.

It seems that the current rom in the No Intro set is actually a bad dump. But, never fear- our friend and fellow preservationist olivieryuyu has taken it upon himself to buy a fresh copy of the retail game and get a clean verified dump once and for all! Will update the article once we have a good dump of the retail game.

Update: olivieryuyu got a good dump of the retail German PAL release, and the prototype is still showing some differences in the rom! Will try to make sure that the proper retail dump makes it's way to the No Intro group, etc :)

One thing to note- I had to play the prototype rom on an actual N64 using an Everdrive as, while I am confident that the prototype has been properly dumped, I could not find an emulator that could smoothly play the rom (but I rarely venture past the latest "official" release of PJ64 and 1964 and I didn't experiment with plugins much, so your mileage may vary).

If you have a 64Drive or EverDrive handy, you are in luck! Otherwise, if you manage to get things running nicely on an emulator, let us know what works! But whatever you do, help us play and hack apart this prototype rom and let us know what you find- it might be a very late localization or it might be something completely different, but we haven't even scratched the surface yet.

Oh, and if you have any prototypes that you want to share or need help dumping and safely backing up, please let us know!

This prototype dumped and brought to you by Baker64