Hi!. I found this article in a Spanish magazine of the N64: 64 Magazine n ° 37 of January of the 2001, in a note it shows a series of patents including a keyboard for NES of 1989 (published in 1993) designed by Lance Barr of Nintendo of America. Anyone know anything about this?

Translation of the magazine:
"In Japan you could couple the NES to peripherals such as a disc reader and a modem to devote to the exchange of information on the net, in addition to many other applications that had nothing to do with the games." If the idea had also curdled in other countries , the keyboard would have had, more or less this aspect ".

Google Patents http://www.google.me/patents/USD3...

Lance was the in-house industrial designer at Nintendo of America. He designed the housings for the lunchbox and the Advantage controller and I recall him making mock-ups of a keyboard for the AVS (do an image web search on AVS and Nintendo and you'll see at least one keyboard ; )

Nintendo AVS prototype.

It is a design patent so there isn't any real info, more like a sketch of something that might be interesting instead of an actual product in development. https://patents.google.com/patent...

I wonder if he thought about bringing a version of the Family Disk for the NES ... Here there seem to be other patents of ideas and designs for the Famicom / NES of accessories without launching:

-Memory Cartridge: A 1987 cartridge to save games and then return them at the same level with the same lives, score, etc. https://patents.google.com/patent...

-Bycicle Type Training System https://patents.google.com/patent... This is an NES bicycle from Japan, similar to Radac Taylor-Made, 1987.

-Knitting Machine System

https://patents.google.com/patent... = Knitting + Machine & assignee = Nintendo & oq = Nintendo + Knitting + Machine) This is known an advertisement, was designed in 1986 by Masakazu Nagano and Yasuko Nagano, there are no patent images.

-Patient of the ROB https://patents.google.com/patent...

On the possibility of an expansion for diskettes in the bottom of the NES, there were rumors about a "Phantom System" in 1986 (Computer Entertainer, August), perhaps the aforementioned expansion.

An NES memory cartridge would have changed my life back in the day! Hell, I still want one haha.