When I was 5 years old, my parents took me to the United States of America we got a hotel room right across from Disneyland.. In the hotel room there was a TV, but I noticed on top there was a Nintendo 64 controller looked down on it, and there were some extra buttons, and a telephone like cable coming out of it. What is this?
In 2011, today I found out what that controller was all about. It was a LodgeNet.. What's that you ask? A money operated Nintendo 64 that streams from a server into the LodgeNet box when requested by the customer, when the customer was finished they'd press menu I believe and these games were timed as well. If the customer wanted to play more, they then press Menu or Order depending if they wanted a different game or to continue. I remember my dad reading the instructions and it had something along the lines of: "25c per 10 minutes.." so this would be more of a luxury for the rainy days. If that doesn't make sense, well you try remembering when you were 5 about something you've forgotten about for over 10 years ;).
More about the LodgeNet, just as I was about to go to bed, I spotted these images on my favourite forum. A user named "wills82" managed to get a hold of the LodgeNet Nintendo 64 system and a controller for $5, and to my knowledge it might not be functional.
Previous to that post, another user, "grap3fruitman" got a hold of a bunch, yes a bunch! Of LodgeNet Systems and controllers a total of 5 units, complete with a PSU, but not as many controllers one of the units is missing one.
These boxes are rare and the controllers even more harder to find, and were only found in hotels around the USA (from my memory) but the server side of the hardware pretty much thin air, you'd need to be able to walk on water to find one, that's how rare the hardware is.
The owners of these are very lucky, the value is unknown.
I did a little bit of research as in looked on eBay and see how much they're going for. I only found a Super Nintendo Controller by Lodgenet, but it's actually not licensed by Nintendo. So maybe hotels later used Super Nintendo Boxes much like Japan Hotel's which is know by "SuperFamicomBox".
Some very HD images can be found below, of the controllers, stand and the boxes. You can enlarge these images.
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| You'd hate for your finger to slip. |
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| So many N64 collectors think they have every controller, think again. ;) |
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| I knew I wasn't dreaming, I've held this controller! |
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| Looks like the system could of had RAM upgrades for the ROMs. Maximum memory is unknown. |
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I have a complete collection of factory surplus controllers (except for my SNES controllers, those are lightly used from hotels).
ReplyDeleteI loved finding them at hotels when I was a kid. They were quite fun.
Does anyone have everything needed to get a game to run? I'd really like to do a complete setup of the whole thing with a little modification help (due to its age) and get a game running. It sounds fascinating with those little boxes I can have n64 games played in multiple rooms all from one console.
ReplyDelete