Mitsumi quick disk transport famico7/15/2023 Seeing its potential, Nintendo began work on a disk-based peripheral for the Famicom. ![]() Floppy disks were cheap to produce and rewritable, allowing games to be easily produced during the manufacturing process. It turned towards the home computer market for inspiration Nintendo specifically looked to floppy disks which were quickly becoming the standard for storage media for personal computers. To satisfy these requests, Nintendo began thinking of ways to potentially lower the cost of games. Chip shortages also created supply issues. Retailers also requested for cheaper games the cost of chips and semiconductors made cartridges expensive to make, and often cost a lot of money for both stores and consumers to purchase. Because of its success, the company had difficulty with keeping up demand for new stock, often getting flooded with calls from retailers asking for more systems. Its final game was released in 1992, its software was discontinued in 2003, and Nintendo officially discontinued its technical support in 2007.īy 1985, Nintendo's Family Computer was dominating the Japanese home video game market, selling over three million units within a year and a half. The Disk System's lifetime sales reached 4.4 million units by 1990, making it the most successful console add-on of all time, despite not being sold outside of Japan. 2, and nationwide leaderboards and contests via the in-store Disk Fax kiosks, which are considered to be forerunners of today's online achievement and distribution systems.īy 1989, the Famicom Disk System was inevitably obsoleted by the improving semiconductor technology of game cartridges. This includes the vast, open world, progress-saving adventures of the best-selling The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Metroid (1986), games with a cost-effective and swift release such as the best-selling Super Mario Bros. However, this boost to the market of affordable and writable mass storage temporarily served as an enabling technology for the creation of new types of video games. It uses proprietary floppy disks called "Disk Cards" for cheaper data storage and it adds a new high-fidelity sound channel for supporting Disk System games.įundamentally, the Disk System serves simply to enhance some aspects already inherent to the base Famicom system, with better sound and cheaper games-though with the disadvantages of high initial price, slow speed, and lower reliability. The Family Computer Disk System, commonly shortened to the Famicom Disk System or just Disk System, is a peripheral for Nintendo's Family Computer home video game console, released only in Japan on February 21, 1986. I learned all that stuff by asking it on nesdev forum so I'm fairly sure we can find the original thread about this topic.1 extra channel of wavetable synth facilitated by Ricoh 2C33 So quickly that it's US release was cancelled. Even though there was no IRQ and no extra sound, the fact larger ROM sizes became cheper still made the FDS quickly obsolete by the end of 1987. However soon mappers appeared which allowed cartridges to have larger ROMs with the use of bankswitching, and finally in 1987 the MMC1 was released which allowed games to use large ROM sizes and battery-back-up for saves, which was much faster than the FDS. This was a tremendeous improvement over a NROM cartidge. ![]() ![]() As already mentionned saves were possible, and so was expansion sound, and IRQ timer for raster effects. When the FDS was released in early 1986, only NROM cartridge existed (*), which means most games had to fit in 32kb PRG-ROM and 8kb CHR-ROM on a disk you could fit 64kb per side. To make thing clear, the sound hardware, as well as the RAMs are in the FDS adapter cartrige, not in the FDS drive itself. Also if I'm not mistaken, the external audio chip that could be found in some Famicom cartridges was built into the FDS itself.
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