Last week, I took my first trip to the Nintendo World Store in New York City. Curiously enough, I didn’t buy anything, but there was one item that I specifically wanted to see — the Advanced Video System, a computer prototype that eventually became the Nintendo Entertainment System that many of us have undying nostalgia for.

Without repeating what you can find better documented elsewhere, I’ll summarize: The Advanced Video System was a computer system that Nintendo debuted at CES in 1985, but scarcely seen thereafter. It was intended to be the American incarnation of the Famicom, to be co-distributed by Atari, but the deal with Atari fell through, and Nintendo re-imagined the system as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

One of the very few (the only?) prototypes of the AVS is on display at the Nintendo World Store in New York, and I really can’t begin to fathom how much sublte importance this piece may have for Nintendo’s initial history in America.

The thing that strikes me first and foremost is the look. It looks like an NES — it has that unmistakable gray/red/black color scheme that defined the gaming system for a generation, and even today, it just screams 8-bit Nintendo. But once you look past the initial color scheme, it’s all wrong. A keyboard? A joystick? A tape deck??

As you’ll notice (and read in the plaque), all of the AVS components were wireless via infrared. Although I read some comments that this was ahead of its time, I’m going to take the skeptical approach and say that I can’t imagine that it worked well — perhaps a reason that the AVS design was scrapped in the first place. Infrared is wildly unreliable for gaming. It requires a straight, uninterrupted line of sight between devises. I recall a numbmer of infrared controllers from the the 90s and all of them worked awfully. Thankfully RF wireless, in place in most modern gaming controllers, has made all of our lives better.

Nevertheless, the main purpose of this post was to share some of the photos I took. I was disappointed by the practically thumbnail sized photos on Flickr and knew I had to take some large photos for posterity while at Nintendo World.

My one regret is that I didn’t take a back-side photo of the display, as it would certainly be interesting to see what kind of ports this prototype had going in and out…

I should add, kudos to Nintendo for putting a fascinating museum-quality piece like this out for public display.

Today was one of my best ’saling days of the year to date. The weather was perfect — the day started out at 59° at 8 am and only moved up to around 80° for most of the day. (I’m glad sales start at 8 am around here rather than the 6 am in other regions.) Lots more people were out today than recent weeks, but the finds were still good.

I should add that I saw a pretty large number of games today, but nothing rare or desirable. In fact, one sale had a big stack of PSP games ($15 each, ack!), which is probably the first time I’ve seen PSP games at a yard sale. They were mostly puzzle and poker titles.

I haven’t had any good actual game scores lately. I’m praying to the yard sale dieties for a big RPG trove soon.

• NES, complete and working, with Super Mario/Duck Hunt — $12 (not the cheapest NES ever, but these are remarkably easy to flip)
• Jet black Gamecube, complete and working, with Rampage and Naruto and 2 controllers — $15
• 2 pack new DV tapes — $0.25
• a lovely sake set — asking $5, offered $2 (has around 5 cups, but the seller wrapped them up and I didn’t feel like unwrapping them all)
• single NES controller — asking $1, offered $0.50
• Flexible silicone USB keyboard — asking $2, offered $1
• USB mini CompactFlash reader — $0.50 (The above photo is brought to you courtesy of the new reader. It’s especially nifty since my previous CF reader required a power supply, making it not very good for travel.)

  and the Find of the Day:

• 250gb Western Digital Passport portable USB hard drive, new in blister pack — asking $10, offered $5 (Wow! This came at the perfect time, since my laptop is constantly giving me low storage warnings.)