Sponsored by our neighborhood blogs[With all the official and unofficial small console announcements, it's interesting to learn about what was effectively the NES in Japan—though not really. I won't bore you with my endless explanations of what the Famicom Disk System was and wasn't. ~Marcel Hoang] Learn more about it from \strong>Adzuken.
In North America, the Nintendo Entertainment System was a revolutionary system. After the 1983 video game collapse, it helped to revive a flagging business and gave rise to the console ecology that we use today. The industry would be substantially different without it. On this side of the water, anyhow.
The Family Computer, or Famicom as it was more often known in Japan, debuted on the market two years prior to the NES in 1983. I can tell you that, if you haven't explored its library, it's almost a different machine altogether from the NES: it has comparable technology but a totally different mentality. Check out the amazing products from Konami that were never able to cross the Pacific for an amazing example. Classics like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, Radius, Contra, , and Castelvania were available here, but a ton of other excellent games were left out.
From the Ganbare Goemon series, to arcade titles like Parodius, quirky series like Moai-Kun, and even the Konami Wai WaiWorld series, which combined characters from their greatest works. Konami was even free to design its own unique mapper chip, which gave them the ability to produce graphics showcases such as Lagrange Point. It was a whole other world over there, as I said.The introduction of the Famicom Disk System, which lacked a comparable system here, was another significant distinction between the two areas. Basically, it was just a large RAM attachment that fitted into the cartridge port of the Famicom, like a floppy disk drive. Put a disk in, hear it spin, and then step into another world.
A universe within a universe
The disk system's history begins with the size of a Famicom cartridge—not in terms of physical dimensions, but rather in terms of capacity. A Famicom cartridge in 1983 could store 8kB to 32kB of data, which is very little by today's standards. For example, this webpage would not fit on one of those cartridges. Furthermore, the cost was unaffordable for both publishers and customers. Nintendo offered a substitute in 1986 with the Famicom Disk System.A Famicom disk was far less expensive than cartridges and could store up to 112 kB of data. Moreover, kiosks that allowed customers to write new games on their disks for a fee of around 500 yen (roughly five Canadian loonies) were sent to shops throughout the nation. It would be less expensive to rewrite an existing game than to create a new one if someone completed or didn't like one they had purchased. Additionally, some games only required one side of them, allowing two games to be transferred onto a single disk. I myself own a copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 with a B-side copy of Othello. A few games, such All Night Nippon Mario Bros., which was based on a well-liked radio program, were only available at the kiosks. Another game was Super Mario Bros..In addition to writing games to disks, the system could store user data on drives. Games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid were the outcome of this. While they had a complicated password system or a circuitboard backup for batteries over here, they could be copied directly to the disk on the FDS. Even if it was just used to save top scores, most games made advantage of this functionality.
STORED AMAGNETICALLY
A little over 230 games were released for the Disk System. Some of the more well-known games, including Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania 1and 2, were never published in North America after being converted to cartridge format.Notably, Super Mario Bros. 2 was present. The "real" Super Mario Bros. 2, dubbed the Lost Levels in the west, was considered too difficult for audiences in the west. Instead, we received a reversed version of Yume Koujou: Doki Doki Panic, in which Mario and the gang are the main protagonists. The majority of people in the west aren't even aware of the changeover; our Super Mario Bros. 2 just seems like a strange outlier for the franchise.Panic, Doki Doki, nonetheless, it still stuck on disk; however, there is a tale for another day. Games like as Famicom Grand Prix and its follow-up, 3D Hot Rally, were also available. Konami offered two products: Ai Senshi Nicol and Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. The latter was also available as a cartridge, however it is a somewhat uncommon edition.The prevalence of visual novels, a genre that hasn't really taken off here, is the largest difference in terms of libraries. There were many in Japan, yet none of them ever made it onto a plastic cartridge. Nintendo, on the other hand, made significant contributions to the genre with titles like the Famicom Tantei Club and Time Twist series, making the FDS a hotspot. With the possible exception of Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, these kinds of games were never ever released in North America due to the absence of a NES counterpart to the FDS.
A fake Famicom disc. Take note of the logo's indented letters, which are utilized to get around the system's physical authentication mechanism. Nothing else on this CD is remarkable. Nope. (Source of image: tinycartridge.com.)WHIIIRRRRRRRR! Press here
What became of the Famicom Disk System, and why hasn't something like to it appeared here? Both of those queries have a similar solution. The exorbitant cost of ROM chips was the reason for the founding of the FDS, and by the time the FDS was introduced in 1986, costs had already begun to decline. It was practically unnecessary to establish a regional counterpart even when the chance to do so arose. Nintendo of America was also very suspicious of third-party manufacture and piracy, and it was quite simple to imitate the FDS. Its only method of identification was physical; only disks with comparable indentions could be read. Specific letters in the "Nintendo" emblem at the bottom of each disk were strongly indented. As you may expect, bootleg producers can easily imitate a form factor like this.It persisted for a very long time in Japan; the last game was released there in 1992. Partner businesses, such as Sharp, offered Famicom variations with integrated disk drives. But after 1988, there were many fewer releases for it, which allowed the system to gradually die.The fact that the FDS is prone to malfunctions didn't help. The most frequent one is when the drive belt wears out and turns to tar. One of the Famicom Twin systems I described before needed a new belt for the drive. It's not too difficult to disassemble and replace the belt; the difficult part is recalibrating the motor and read/write head afterward. A Famicom disk writes its data sequentially in a spiral rather than in clusters as a regular floppy disk does. This implies that for the data to be read properly, the head and the motor must be moving in unison. The game won't load if the speed is too fast or too slow since it causes read problems. Up until 2004, Nintendo in Japan will repair these systems; after that, you're on your own. I feel like I know these machines inside and out now, having spent almost eight hours inside of one of them.The disks are delicate objects, much like any other magnetic storage. Like every floppy disk, it might be deguassed, meaning that the magnetism would be lost, wiping out all of the data on it. Additionally, normal disks lacked a slide, which meant debris might enter and create problems. Although I have only had one side of a disk failing to operate out of all the titles I have purchased for the FDS, it is still possible.Hardware-wise, the differences weren't that great. With the use of an additional sound channel that was only partly deleted from the NES and concealed on the Famicom, the FDS is able to provide some additional depth to soundtracks such as Metroid. Fascinating, but not really important. Every game now has load times because of how often the drive must transfer data from the disk to the RAM cartridge. Even while most games only need one or two loads, it is still a significant drawback for the medium.
Me and my Famicom Twin. An integrated disk drive is present.A PERMANENT HISTORY
The Famicom Disk System was a clever and entertaining little gadget, so it's unfortunate that it never made it to North America. Its library, like the Famicom, has a distinct flavor that makes it stand out from other systems of the era. Later, NEC and Sega would make attempts to imitate the FDS's popularity with the CD-ROM/Turbografx-CD and Sega CD, respectively. Both would correctly predict the arrival of the optical medium change, but neither was able to match the FDS's level of success. A notoriously canceled optical drive for the Super NES was almost a Nintendo product. The Nintendo 64 64DD was then introduced, and it was a huge failure. But that's a tale for another day, when I have the $1500 to import one. Do you want to find me?I suggest importing a Famicom disk system if you have the resources to do so and you like 8-bit games from the past. There is no other tactile sensation like what the Disk System offers. However, I would caution that there is really little use for possessing one other than the fact that it is a cool gadget and a historical curiosity. If iconic games like Zelda were trapped on those yellow rectangles, the narrative would be completely different, but almost all of the big games were moved to cartridge. Later, Nazo no Murasame-Jou was scrubbed and rereleased as The Mysterious Murasame Castle on Nintendo's Virtual Console service.Even yet, there's a certain sound associated with seeing the BIOS screen appear, inserting a plastic disk, and hearing the drive spin up to a last click. It was a significant aspect of the Famicom experience in Japan, and it was something that I and other foreigners were unable to partake in.Originally published on the Game Complaint Department, my personal blog, was this essay.