Page 22 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #40 FREE Edition

the advent of the N64 and more famously the Gamecube.
This accessory is one you might know but probably never owned. Actually, it’s likely you have never even seen one in person unless you frequent video game conventions; even then it’s a pretty rare sight. I am talking about The Miracle Piano Teaching System. This product was produced by The Software Toolworks and was available for the NES, SNES, Macintosh, Amiga, Sega Genesis, and MS-DOS. The software has over 100 lessons and sold for a whopping $500 in 1990 when it was released. The worst part of this device is that the software on the NES cartridge
is flawed. There are lessons that tell you to play notes on the screen that are incorrect, making it impossible to complete all of the lessons. NES players of the current age have since figured this out and have released the correct combination of notes to clear the lessons, but as they say
it’s a day late and a dollar short. I suppose this device was made to cash in on the trend of keyboards during the early 90’s. Pretty much everyone I knew had one of those cheap Casio keyboards. The Casio keyboards were so over-produced you could buy them for less than five dollars at thriftstores because kids lost interest quickly and the parents couldn’t resell them. No matter the reason why Software Toolworks made this product, it was a complete
failure and very few were sold.
The final accessory is something very rare that I only found out about in the last few years. The accessory is called the Computrainer and is part of the Racermate Challenge
II unlicensed NES game. As you can see from the photo, the NES cartridge looks similar to a Tengen game except it has a strange plastic tip attached to the top that was intended to be used as a handle
to remove the game from the NES easier. Even more strange is that the game came with a bicycle contraption that you would need
to physically use in order to play the game. A complete system
includes the cart, interface box to the controller ports, manual, bike trainer, and handlebar display. It even has support for two players just in case someone was rich enough to own two of these. The game keeps track of your stats like a traditional bike you would find at a gym and
it also includes a computer racer that you can set to different speeds so that you have someone to race against in single player. Sadly, you need your own bicycle that hooks up to the Computrainer via the back wheels. On top of all that weird stuff, the game does not circumvent the NES lockout chip like the Tengen games do. There is a warning on
the cartridge that it will not work on NES consoles that are not modified by RacerMate.
Luckily you can play this on an NES toploader since the toploader does not have a lockout chip. I guess Nintendo didn’t see the point of including one when the top loader was released, it was probably to save on costs. I hope you enjoyed this short trip through a few of the strange and rare NES accessories.
Keep digging through those bins at conventions, game stores, and garage sales so that you have a chance to unearth some of these forgotten NES relics.
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