News/NESMas - Day 2
Merry NESMas!
For the second day of NESMas, we bring you a collection of prototypes amassed by the Nolan Brothers.
Twin brothers Mark "MrMark0673" and Matt "BeaglePuss" Nolan were mainstays in the online collecting world through much of the 2000s. If you spent any time on the NintendoAge forums, these names are surely familiar to you. They quickly made a name for themselves in particular as collectors of prototype games, building up a sizable collection that included a number of unreleased games. Some games they acquired - Kitty's Catch and Hoppin' Mad, for example - were games that we didn't even know existed until the Nolans found them.
The Nolans enjoyed contributing to fellow NES-playing hobbyists by making these games available, either as physical game cartridges they produced in small quantities or, in some cases, by simply releasing the ROM files online.
The Nolans have mostly stepped away from game collecting today, but they were kind enough to pass along the majority of the ROM files they'd dumped over the years for the sake of historical preservation. While most of these are not completely new to the internet, one thing that is significant for me is that we can now validate clean, unmodified ROMs for unreleased games for the NES. These games were often modified slightly before being put on to physical cartridges, which might have led to some unintended consequences in altering game logic, so being able to provide "clean" copies means that these games are, finally, preserved.
Here it is!
Thanks to Mark and Matt Nolan & Frank Cifaldi for the release as well as hwd45, togemet2 for help with the release!
Make sure you catch our NES Year stream on January 1st!