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I would have enjoyed my Nintendo Family Computer gaming experience more. I mean, purchasing ROM cartridges and eventually playing the video games that came with them had appeal, but good games were hard to come by, mostly due to their high price.
That’s exactly why the guys up at Nintendo came up with the novel idea of the Family Computer Disk System, or FDS. Let’s take a look at a short description of the system:
The Family Computer Disk System was released in February 1986 by Nintendo as a peripheral for the Family Computer console in Japan. It was a unit that used proprietary floppy disks for data storage. It was announced, but never released, for the North American Nintendo Entertainment System. Through its entire production span, from 1986 to 2003, 4.5 million units were sold.
The device was connected to the Famicom deck by plugging a modified cartridge known as the RAM Adapter into the system’s cartridge port, which attached via a supplied cable to the disk drive. The RAM Adapter contained 32 kilobytes of RAM for temporary program storage, eight kilobytes of RAM for tile and sprite data storage, and an application-specific integrated circuit known as the 2C33. The ASIC acted as a disk controller for the floppy drive, and also included additional sound hardware featuring primitive frequency modulation synthesis capabilities. The floppy disks used were double-sided, with a capacity of 64 kilobytes per side. Many games spanned both sides of a disk, requiring the user to switch sides at some point during gameplay. A few games used two full disks (four sides). The Famicom Disk System was capable of running on six C-Cell batteries or the supplied AC adapter. The battery option was included due to the likelihood of a standard set of AC plugs already being occupied by a Famicom and a television.
Yup, it’s too bad it never got to North America. Heck, it didn’t even reach the cartridge slot of my Nintendo Family Computer, and I live in Asia!
Here’s an old television commercial for the Family Computer Disk System:
More on the Nintendo Family Computer Disk System in a later post.
Yes, it reached the Philippines. A friend owned one, but I didn’t. Sad.
Good thing you didn’t plug in those imitation FDSs into your original Nintendo Family Computer. That probably would’ve shortened the lifespan of your console. ^^
It did actually reached other Asian countries, the Philippines to be exact. I remember I asked my parents to buy me that, but when that time came, the product was pulled out.
Some of my friends were able to buy the FDS.
Oh, after the mass pull-out, the imitations started flooding the market, most works but I don’t want to plug a fake to my orig FamiCom. :p
1257 days ago
[...] No, you’re not misreading the title. It’s not supposed to come out as a fragment, but part of the title of my previous posting, “If only I had a Nintendo Family Computer Disk System …” [...]
1262 days ago
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