Famicom Tournaments Disk Fax

[JC]

I never thought that the Disk Faxes were gonna be this cool looking, but I came across this pic of one in a poster I have. At first I thought it was a Disk Writer...



It'd be so neat to find out how these worked.

[Doc]

That IS cool, is that an actual video screen?

[FamicomFreak]

Wow sweet stuff yeah I wonder how they worked as well...

[JC]

Both the Disk Writer and Disk Fax had a screen. I don't know what the screens did except perhaps give directions on how to use them. The only thing I notice about the Disk Fax is that it's got a slot for inserting the disk. So, the Disk Fax must have been able to read the score from the disk. In other words, you didn't have to type/touch screen the score into it.

[133MHz]

Otherwise people would just type 99999999999

[satoshi_matrix]

Probably just faxed raw hex data to nintendo Kyoto, where it was collected into a database of thosands (if not millions) of other faxes. Then someone would compare the data and deternime which players would has scored the highest. 

[JC]

That's probably right. But not millions. There were something like 100k-200k entries. My remaining curiousity related to this is the "leaders board" on which the data supposedly was posted. I wonder if it really existed, and if it was just plastic numbers and letters or electronic. Would be great to find a pic.

EDIT: I'm also curious about whether or not anything else like this existed at the same time -- some of you techies might have an answer. As you know, Nintendo always was ahead of its time, and though they call this a "fax," it doesn't really fax in the sense that it doesn't suck a paper through a scanner and then send the info via phone lines. It reads a disk and transfers the data via phone lines (one would assume), kinda of like rudimentary e-mail.

[vealchop]

has any one of those kiosks (whether they be disk writers or disk "faxers") ever turned up anywhere? Nintendo wouldn't have just destroyed them all would they? It would be pretty cool just to see an original one.

[celebi23]

Credit goes to Tongueman from the Lost Levels forums
http://forums.lostlevels.org/viewtopic.php?t=2159

A couple of scans with pics of the Disk Fax machine, and the monitoring equipment that Nintendo used to keep track of the Disk Fax network.
http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secretshardware.html
Hopefully this'll be somewhat useful