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Nintendo Famicom

First written October 10, 2024

The Nintendo Family Computer was Nintendo's first Japanese home console with interchangeable game cartridges and software. It was first released in Japan on July 15, 1983 and was reformatted as the Nintendo Entertainment System for international sale. Over 1000 licensed games were produced for the Famicom.

Family Computer HVC-001

The Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom for short, is a cream and red video games console with attached controllers released in Japan as part of the third generation of video game consoles. Nintendo had previously released a few Pong clones and other plug-in TV games, but this was their first "dedicated" console with interchangeable software.

Most software was distributed on ROM cartridges in different colored plastic shells. More advanced games include mappers, battery-backed RAM, and other hardware in the cartridge itself. The console has a red flap that can be used to cover the cartridge door when not in use, and a large red eject lever helps push games up and out of the console.

The main controllers are hard-wired into the console and fit into holding slots on either side. They have a metal faceplate, but this tarnishes over time and with use. The second player controller has a built-in microphone instead of start and select buttons that can be used to talk through the television or "sing" and blow into it while playing some games. The red cover on the front of the console reveals an extension port that was used for external controllers as well as 3D glasses and other accessories. The rear of the console has jacks for 10 volts center negative DC power input and RF output - no A/V - as well as switches for setting the channel and if the modulator is outputting or not.

The HVC-002 Famicom AC Adapter, a 10 volt 850mA DC supply. This power supply also works for the Super Famicom. The HVC-003 RF switch, with a short connection for the TV and a long RF cable going to the Famicom so that it could be set on a table or the floor in front of the television and easily within reach - the controller cables are shorter because it was expected that the console would be right within reach. The box could be stuck down to the back of the TV set and the left portion of the box has a place to attach the TV antenna - there are two screw terminals for a blade-type connection or a funky clamp that can either be screwed down around either a screw-type RF cable or the end of one that has been cut bare, with the clamp going around the shielding and the tip of the wire reaching up to one of the screw terminals.

Inside the Famicom is a larger main board with the CPU, RAM, and other main control electronics (phew, a little dusty) as well as the 60 pin cartridge connector and the controller ports. A smaller rear board handles power and the RF modulator. When the Famicom was reworked into the Nintendo Entertainment System for export, additional components like the lockout chip circuitry were added. The NES also uses a larger pin connector for the game cartridges (72 pins instead of 60), but these pins mostly go to the unused expansion connector and actually remove one of the Famicom's neat features - a loopback audio channel through the cartridge port that allows cartridge hardware to produce additional sound and music channels that can be mixed into the console's audio before it heads out to the TV.

Very early Japanese Famicoms have square A and B buttons and are somewhat sought after, although the processors contain some known bugs and Nintendo replaced many of these units under recall. My Famicom is a fairly pedestrian seventh revision board, the second revision to come with round buttons, that was sold in the mid to late 1980s. Later "VCCI" Famicoms have slightly nicer connected circuit boards with additional shielding and a redesigned "A/V Famicom" was released in the 1990s with composite output, detachable controllers, and other designs based on the toploading version of the NES. I have previously owned two other Famicoms, but one was yellowed and junk... the other looked and worked fine (it was a VCCI Famicon, which can be identified from the top by the presence of the Famicom "FF" mark on the front "Family Computer" badge), but I did not really need either of them, so I held on to this one which was the first one I bought back in high school and the one I used the most.

Family Computer Disk System HVC-022

The Family Computer Disk System or Famicom Disk System was a disk-drive add-on for the Family Computer released only in Japan on February 21, 1986. The unit contains the disk drive at the front, a battery compartment that can hold 6 C cells on the rear top, and jacks for an optional AC adaptor and the RAM adapter on the rear. My disk drive has some small circular stickers attached by a previous owner - I kind of like how they look, a little bit like a bug with spots, so I have left them on there.

At this time in the 1980s, the Famicom was flying off shelves and chip shortages and high prices caused game shortages, with production unable to keep up with demand. Having already taken inspiration from home computers, Nintendo saw the rise of the floppy disk and its advantages as cheap, rewritable media and decided to develop a disk add-on for the Famicom. Games would be sold on pre-written disks with disk-writing kiosks around Japan where users could overwrite new games onto their disks (or buy blank ones). Some games took up only a single side of a disk, while others would have to be flipped at some point to complete the whole game. The Disk System was the home of the original releases of legendary games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid.

The original HVC-025 Disk System AC adapter, sold separately, and only 400mA compared to the Famicom's 850mA. I think it is always a little cheap when something like this does not include an AC adaptor... Part of the idea was that this made it kind of portable in that you could take it over to someone's house who had a Famicom but not necessarily a Disk System so that you could run it off some National NEO Hi-Tops and play Bomberman or whatever, but surely your friend with a Famicom and a television also had an open plug? If you both had a Famicom, you could bring your Disk System and your Famicom power supply over and use it that way, I guess... The plug for the Disk System supply is a little smaller than the Famicom so the Disk System adapter doesn't fit in the Famicom, but the other way around does work (they probably didn't want you plugging the smaller supply into the Famicom). The batteries last a while because the drive doesn't end up spinning the disk that often, but what if your batteries die before you saved your current progress to the disk...

The disk drive unit can be sat below the Famicom and takes a version of the Mitsumi "Quick Disk" 3-inch floppy disks, although Nintendo called their disks "Disk Cards". The disks fit about 56kB per side. The internal magnetic discs are used elsewhere in 3 inch square packages, but the Nintendo diskettes are three by four with an additional physical hardware lockout protection scheme - portions of the shape of the Nintendo logo inset in the cards engaged with a raised section at the front of the drive, preventing a disk without this section from working properly. The idea was that the Nintendo logo was necessary to allow a disk to fit properly, so a pirate company would have to put the Nintendo logo on their product to make it work, something that Nintendo could very easily defend at their trademark in court and get the pirate software taken off the market, but instead pirate disks were developed that just had large cutout in the appropriate areas that obscured the fact that portions of the shape were similar to parts of the Nintendo logo, which would not have held up in court.

Opening the drive shows that the disk drive itself takes up most of the space in the unit, with the battery compartment covering a circuit board that handles the two power sources and connecting the disk drive out to the RAM pack connector on the rear. The relief of the Nintendo logo can be seen within the disk drive housing.

The Mitsumi floppy drive with its single head. A belt on the bottom spins the disk and moves the head at the same time in sync - part of the simplification of these drives over traditional PC-style floppy drives was replacing the stepper motor system used on most computer drives with a geared system that causes the format to act as more of a tape drive than a floppy drive. Instead of moving the head and out to the appropriate ring or "track" of the disk and then rotating it until the desired data comes around to reach the read head, the head automatically moves in and out in-time with the disk's spinning, causing the head to trace out the same spiral along the surface of the disk. This means the disks do not have random access, and if data at the other end of the disk needs to be accessed the disk has to be spun around until the head reaches the right portion of the disk. This sounds like it would be a bit of a pain, but really it simplifies the drive and drive operations a lot and luckily this is only one portion of the Disk System. This brings us to the...

Family Computer Disk System RAM Adapter HVC-023

The Disk System RAM Adapter is a flat black cartridge that plugs into the Famicom's cartridge port with a cable that plugs into the rear of the disk drive unit to connect the two. The cartridge itself contains 32kB of RAM used to hold the contents of the disk in a cache so it does not have to be accessed as often as well as hardware that adds an additional wavetable sound channel, taking advantage of the Famicom's ability to mix sound generated by the cartridge hardware directly through to the output. The pack also has an unused expansion connector on the back.

When a disk is inserted, important data that will be used to play must of the game like player sprites as well as early level data is loaded into the RAM adaptor, and the disk is only accessed when the game has been played far enough to need to load more level or other data into the RAM buffer (or when writing data like save files).

By the late 1980s, chip prices had fallen and technology had advanced to the point that most companies that had been producing games for the disk system moved back to cartridges. Period piracy of Disk System games was also far easier and more widespread than cartridges and the kiosks were not very profitable for the venders and distributors that operated them. Outside of Japan, where the Disk System was never released, Disk System games like The Legend of Zelda had already been ported to cartridges with save batteries. In 1990 the system was officially discontinued, having sold over 4 million units! Disks could still be written to in kiosks (whichever were still maintained, I suppose) until 2003!