You've heard of the Playstation 2. You probably have never heard of the Nuon.
There's reasons for that.
It turns out that marketing game consoles that incidentally can play DVDs was a much better strategy than marketing DVD players that incidentally can play games.
It has a fascinating quad-core architecture -- fairly rare for 2001 -- and it flopped on the market. It came to my attention because VM Labs released a consumer SDK for it, which is also a fairly rare thing. So, of course, I had to get one.
The fan site Nuon Dome hosts a variety of CD-R images of homebrew games. Ideally, one simply writes a file called NUON.CD to the top level of an ISO9660 CD image. I tried this using the Yaroze Classics, Breakout, Snake, and VG Music. All of these gave "No disc" errors. It turns out you need to also include a dummy file (at the top level to pad the CD) with a filename whose name that comes earlier than NUON in alphabetical order. I tried using BombNewYear.zip, which was contained the source code for one of the Nuon games. It was around 15 megabytes. Discs written with the padding file worked fine. I wrote them using an LG Slim Portable DVD Writer, Model SP80NB80, at the lowest speed the writer supports, which is 10x. I used the macOS program Burn. The CD-Rs were Verbatim 700 MB, 52x, 80 min media.
There was a disc that worked OK without padding, namely BOMB, but it had several additional files to include of the form level?.pcm (where ? is the numbers 1 through 5). I think these inherently provided the need padding.
At this point I decided to keep including the padding file, and successfully made discs for Same Game (shape version) and the slow Atari 800 emulator that runs M.U.L.E. I decided to test other media, and successfully wrote discs for the 2600-style Pac-Man, Pac-Man Tournament Edition, and Same Game (colors version) on Maxell 700 MB, 80 min media.
Actually... I started this blog post in the middle of the story. The experiments described above were conducted on the second Samsung DVD-N501 I have obtained. The first one appeared when I didn't have any official Nuon-compatible movies or games, so I solely tried burned CD-Rs of home-brew games. Only a few burns of Decaying Orbit would occasionally start up. After burning dozens upon dozens of CD-Rs in different ways, most failing in different ways, I finally picked up the game Ballistic (one of only eight games officially released) and the Nuon-enhanced movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (one of only four such movies officially released). Both official releases seemed to work fine, so I assumed I was doing something wrong in burning the CD-Rs, but at one point I went back and checked the official releases and neither ran. I then finally realized that the first DVD-N501 I obtained had a failing DVD drive that increasingly giving up the ghost as I was using it.
This lead me to obtain the second DVD-N501. When I went back and tried the many Maxell CD-Rs I had created -- some on my Mac with Burn, others on a Windows 10 computer with imgburn (careful, it will install a bunch of other software you don't want unless you explicitly tell it "no," repeatedly) -- I discovered most of them played fine: Decaying Orbit, Ambient Monsters, Chomp, Sheshell, and even Doom. At that point I wasn't keeping accurate records, but I can tell from looking at the discs that the ones that didn't have the padding file were the discs that showed the "no disc" error. Some of the programs had additional files, like music files, that seemed to provide the needed padding for the machine to find the NUON.CD file.
I'm hoping to talk a few of my Vertically Integrated Project Retrofuturistic Hardware students into trying to write games for it, or at least get the development environment up and running.
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