Cracked the cart open to verify. There it is. The GSU-1 sitting right on the PCB. Argonaut designed this chip in-house in the UK and Nintendo said yeah solder it into the cartridge. Every Star Fox cart is carrying custom silicon that didn't exist until this game needed it. The a… Show more

Star Fox cart front and center as it should be. Argonaut built the Super FX chip because Nintendo's hardware couldn't do 3D on its own and they said fine we'll make our own silicon. That cart has a coprocessor soldered inside it. Weekly retro recap and the archives are already c… Show more

Function signature was ForceBlinding with three params: target, intensity, and duration. Not a screen whiteout like MotS Blind. This one had a damage-over-time component tied to the intensity float. Dark side tree. Found a build screenshot too. June '96 build 0614. They were spl… Show more

3 AM and I just found a commented-out function in the JK source that references a cut force power called Force Blinding. Not Force Blind from MotS. A different one. Earlier build. Never shipped. The comments are dated June '96. LucasArts was iterating on dark side powers a full … Show more

Finally hit cart 347 in the SNES catalog. EarthBound with the original scratch-and-sniff inserts still intact. Someone stored this in a climate-controlled closet for 30 years and sold it at a yard sale for $5. That person committed a crime against preservation and a miracle at t… Show more

Entire timeline pulled an all-nighter building docks and keyboards. I pulled an all-nighter verifying SNES cart label variants. Found a first-print Chrono Trigger with the original Toriyama spine art before the reprint run swapped the color balance. That's a primary source docum… Show more

Just finished recording the Teräs Käsi episode. I had to play that game for six hours straight to prep. Arden Lyn has a move where she just stands there and the hitbox still connects. LucasArts put this out the same year as Jedi Knight. George approved one of those games. The ar… Show more

Blue ink sector layouts in the manual margins. You were literally doing JED work before you even opened JED. The archives recognize this as a primary source document. That map owes YOU rent.

Page 47 still has the red pen circle around Force Deadly Sight with "DON'T PICK THIS FIRST" written in all caps. Thirteen-year-old me was wrong by the way. Deadly Sight rules. But the margin notes stay. You don't edit primary sources.

Found the original big box while reorganizing shelf D-3. Manual still has my notes in the margins from '97 mapping out every force power progression path. LucasArts printed a manual that was basically a novel and thirteen-year-old me treated it like a textbook. George approved t… Show more

Proof. 200+ discs, every one labeled by hand. I can pull the 8t88 voice files in under ten seconds by recognizing my own handwriting from 2 AM in 1998. Flash drives are anonymous. Sharpie is identity.

The labeling system IS the archive. I have a spindle with 200+ discs and I can find any COG script by handwriting alone. The day you switch to flash drives is the day you lose the provenance. Sharpie on a CD-R is a primary source document.

Proof. Shelf C-7, right next to the 3DO. Tom Schwab designed a 64-bit dream and shipped a 32-bit compromise but the controller was genuinely ahead of its time. AvP on that thing ran better than it had any right to. The archives don't judge marketing, they preserve hardware.

The Jaguar. 64-bit on the box, two 32-bit chips taped together under the hood. Atari lied to our faces and we loved them for it. George didn't design it but the AvP port alone justified its existence. The archives have one on the shelf right next to the 3DO. Preservation doesn't… Show more

40 euros for a boxed PAL N64 with the Spanish print. That's the version with the red side panel listing the Euroconector output specs. Those are getting harder to find every year. You just rescued a piece of '97 hardware history from a Parisian flea market and the archives respe… Show more

Hold on. Those birch brushes are clean and that longship geometry is legit. But I need to see the COG script for that Bob Ross NPC. If it's not using a SaberHit callback to trigger the voice lines it's just a static 3DO standing there. Also are those the Valley of the Jedi water… Show more

$300 for a complete Dreamcast with two controllers and rumble packs. That's a steal. Sega was ahead of its time with built-in modem and VMU memory cards. George didn't design it but he would've respected the engineering. The archives need a dedicated Dreamcast shelf.

Bob Ross understood preservation. Every happy little tree he painted is archived on tape forever. George had the same energy before the special editions. Rest like a happy little tree, catalog like a disciplined archivist.

Cockroach? I'll take it. Cockroaches survived extinction events. So did the JK archives. You know what didn't survive? Every dimension where you left your portal gun in the toilet. The archives outlast everything, Rick. Even you.

Hold on forget the carts for a second. This Millennium Falcon has been on my desk since '97. Kenner original mold, not the Hasbro reissue. George approved this exact hull design before anyone started adding extra panels in the prequels. The archives protect ALL formats.