It's Critter Time!

I love hearing about the Weird Things folks collect, so I wanna see what Crittertime's got to offer! I'll go first:



This is a DataPlay disc, an incredibly failed physical media format from the early 2000s! This pic doesn't really show scale well (I may try to grab some more later), but these things are tiny - an inch and a half wide on their long side, or about half the size of even a minidisc! They were announced in 2001, released in 2002, and utterly dead by '03. They were meant as a general-purpose disc format with half a gig per side, but had special features for music such as...on-disc DLC!

From the research I've done, maybe five or six albums ever got released on the format. The ones I've found include:
* M!ssundaztood by P!nk
* Let Go by Avril Lavigne
* Britney by Britney Spears
* Brand New Day by Sting
* Big Boi & Dre Present OutKast
* Celebrity by NSYNC

It's just the perfect snapshot of popular music in 2002! I have a dozen or so blank discs (including some in their original packaging) alongside a drive and USB interface for them. I would love to write something to one of them sometime, but given they're non-rewritable I keep having second thoughts about it LMAO

Every so often I see them go up on ebay - a lot of times they've been around $50-80 per disc, but once I nabbed someone selling a pack of three of them for under $20! Maybe someday I'll be able to afford one of the dedicated music players or such for them...

Anyway, let me know what weird stuff y'all have got! I would love to see [^-^]

There's a lot of obscure/weird game console peripherals out there, and it's difficult just picking one thing, but I'm sure having more to look at and read about isn't bad hehe. I took a photo of my Game Boy Printer, Nintendo e-Reader, SNES Voicer-kun from Koei, and Turbo File Twin from ASCII.

The most fun tech out of these four is definitely the printer; the stuff you can print from licensed games is fun enough (like all the silly printable things in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe) but the fun really elevated when I wrote a Game Boy program that lets you scroll through an album of pictures and print them, and I have had way too much fun at family parties whipping out my Game Boy and printing all sorts of silly stuff. There's just something inherently funny about watching it slowly spit out the ALDI logo onto thermal paper.

The e-Reader is neat. It's really cool to me to have games stored on paper and have that actually work. I have a bunch of Animal Crossing cards and each one has a unique letter displayed on the GBA when you scan it, and a second unique letter when you scan it into the GameCube game, and these letters add a lot of per-villager characterization beyond just the personality types.

Going into more obscure, Voicer-Kun is an infrared transmitter/receiver that plugs into a SNES controller port, and the purpose is to control CD players in order to have CD audio accompanying games. We never got the SNES CD add-on so this happened instead. I haven't played any of the games that released that use this (and I don't have an infrared controlled CD player or know Japanese - which is very important because I think the supported games are visual novels) and I got it because I thought it would be really fun to write code to have my SNES interact with a TV remote control, or a Tamagotchi Connection, or a Game Boy Color. I never ended up doing that though.

Turbo File Twin is effectively a memory card for the SNES, following a similar product that was a memory card for the Famicom. Including a save feature in a cartridge was not free and this was a cost cutting measure, but also meant that you could have the possibility of multiple games interacting with the same save file, even if they're on different consoles (there was an adapter to plug the Famicom version into a Super Famicom) - supposedly the Wizardry series lets you bring characters between games. The Japanese versions of RPG Maker on the Super Famicom support this peripheral, which sounds like the kind of game where you really would want to expand the storage past what's in the cart.

I guess my Super Famicom accessories are more just fun to look at and think about the possibilities and my printer and e-Reader are fun right now. I've seen people making new e-Reader games (and I ordered some recently) and I hope that becomes a bigger thing.

Ooh, bringing up both the e-reader and GB Printer at the same time just makes me think about weird synergies you could do with printing out an e-reader code on something from the GB printer, though I expect there'd be a few limiting factors making that less than feasible lol

While it's not a piece of tech I own, The Alphasmart Neo 2 was a key part of my life in elementary school and one of the big reasons why I am a writer today.

I was given it as a kid as a disability accommodation (I didn't like handwriting) and I used it so much to write when I had free time during class. It's sort of like a digital typewriter that stored your writing on it, and you could use a USB cable to transfer your writing to a PC. It's not a very good device... but I have lots of fond memories of it!

As for weird technology I actually own right now... uh... a New 3DS XL is weird, right...?