The Nintendo Gigaleak continues, but this time we go some interesting tidbits of Nintendo History to sift through, and in one case, a Nintendo employee pushing the company to use ROMs.
A few days ago, another major leak of Nintendo products was dumped onto 4chan. The dumped roms and information was a slew of more obscure or unusual Nintendo products, ranging from Pokemon Ranger, to 3DS tools, to the master ROMs for the Japanese-only Famicom Disk System.
It is within those Famicom ROM's, where several major tidbits were found, the first and foremost a message from an unknown Nintendo employee arguing that the company download an emulator for game testing, going as far as creating a program to convert the original .RDA files to the pirated .FDS format.
This, on the surface, would likely make many charge Nintendo for being hypocritical, as they famously advocate for the prohibition of emulators for their products. When you think it through, however, considering Nintendo owns all of the properties that would be emulated, the possible hypocrisy is unfounded.
Still, it is interesting to see employees of the company push for emulation, but this is just scratching the surface. A number of preservationists online have begun dissecting the new leaks and discovering a ton of useful items, mostly with the Famicom Disk System.
For those who don't know, the Famicom Disk System is a peripheral released in Japan in 1986. Selling over 4.4 million units, the peripheral was an add-on that would allow the Famicom, the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System, to play floppy disks.
The Disk games most notably launched the franchises The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but were home to about 200 different titles, some store kiosk disks, and a number of games which went unreleased in its four year run on the market.
This leak in particular has shown a ton of potential for preserving long-lost Famicom Disk titles. Some of the titles found, such as Nintendo's Golf for the Famicom Disk System, have never been dumped before online. Others, such as The Legend of Zelda which had its original master disk lost previously, only to be re-created by fans based on internal Famicom data. This new master disk copy has been proven to be an exact copy of the dumped Zelda ROMs.
Other titles and items have been released as well, including Metroid ROMS, and a disk version of the Nintendo Game Balloon Fight, which was never commercially released.
The full scope of the new leak is still being uncovered now, from new sprite conversions to debugging the 3DS developer tools. Regardless, this is another trove of information that, at the very least, will now be preserved for a long time.
