![]() Publishers and retailers complained that the Disk Writer machines, while great for game buyers, were severely cutting into their profits. Thus, the FDS's storage capacity and saving abilities were no longer as appealing to developers. Memory prices went down and battery backup technology improved faster than Nintendo had anticipated. Four months after the release of the FDS, the first 128K cartridge-based game, Ghosts 'n Goblins, was released. Nintendo turned off developers at the outset by demanding partial copyright ownership over any games developed for the FDS, causing many licensees to simply ignore the system outright. However, the machine was not as successful as was hoped. Nintendo pushed the Disk System extensively in Japan, releasing all of its software exclusively on disk for nearly two years. With blank disks costing only ¥2,000 apiece, this approach had obvious advantages over a ¥5,000–7,000 cartridge. Also of note was Nintendo's Disk Writer, a vending machine that charged ¥500 to write a new game onto a blank disk or a disk already written with a game. Because floppy disks were less expensive than cartridges, and because of the additional features offered by the Disk System's hardware, many developers produced titles for the system that were sold cheaply at kiosks in retail stores. Disk-based games retailed for less than ¥3,000, compared to approximately ¥5,000 or more for cartridges. Many of these titles were subsequently ported to cartridge format and released for the NES a year or two later, with saving implemented with password resume or battery-backed memory.Īnother appeal of the FDS was its cost: a disk could be produced for a fraction of the price of a cartridge. The rewritable aspect of the disks also opened up interesting possibilities games such as The Legend of Zelda (the first FDS game), Metroid, and Kid Icarus were released to the FDS with a save feature. In 1986, the disks' 128K of storage space was quite appealing. The Famicom Disk System was capable of running on six C-cell batteries or the supplied AC adapter, even though the Famicom itself was not portable. A few games used two full disks (four sides). Many games spanned both sides of a disk, requiring the user to switch sides at some point during gameplay. The floppy disks used were double-sided, with a capacity of 64 kilobytes per side. The ASIC acted as a disk controller for the floppy drive, and also included additional sound hardware featuring primitive FM synthesis capabilities. ![]() The RAM adapter contained 32 kilobytes of RAM for temporary program storage, 8 kilobytes of RAM for tile and sprite data storage, and an ASIC known as the 2C33. 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. It was announced, but never released, for the North American Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a unit that sat underneath the Famicom and used proprietary floppy disks for data storage. The disks were incredibly cheap and nasty and many were missing the shutter, with inevitably hilarious results involving sand.The Family Computer Disk System (ファミリーコンピュータ ディスクシステム, Famirī Konpyūta Disuku Shisutemu, sometimes abbreviated as the Famicom Disk System, the Disk System, or simply the FDS) was released on Februby Nintendo as a peripheral to their overwhelmingly popular Family Computer console in Japan. ![]() They were used on a few other systems, including Smith-Corona typewriters. Not so great for putting a filesystem on, but perfectly adequate if you're going to read the entire disk contents into RAM. You can rewrite individual sectors but the head always has to traverse the entire disk. From the FDC side of things they have a single track with lots of sectors. When the head reaches the centre of the disk a spring returns it to the outside. They're not random access there's a single spiral track, record-like, with the head in the drive being moved by a cam connected to the single drive motor. I briefly had someone interesting in adding Flu圎ngine support for it so that they could be read and written from normal PCs but haven't heard back from them. Ooh, Mitsumi Quick Disk! I've seen one of these in the wild exactly once, but not operating.
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