Is the Famicom Disk worth buying? I see quite a lot of loose ones going for fairly good prices (equiv to like £50-60 in my country), i'm considering getting one for myself.
>>12497614There is already a "is real hardware worth using over emulation" thread. Please use that instead of making unnecessary spam threads. Thank you.
>>12497614Buy a saturn instead, it's better than anything nintendo put out in that era.
>>12497614If you're gonna grab that, might as well go all-out and get Family BASIC, the keyboard, the Robot, the light gun that looks like a real revolver, and the 3D System. Otherwise, don't bother.
>>12497617Not remotely the same thing, one is asking if owning the real deal is preferable to emulation while i'm simply asking for technicality sake is it worth my money.
>>12497629Is there anything you want to specifically play on the FDS? Most of it's games were released on cartridge later.
>>12497614No. Nintendo had kiosks where you could rewrite game disks, so today when you buy a game you're basically gambling over whether it's actually the game you paid for or if it's some bullshit like tennis. And more often than not it's just bullshit like Tennis even though the label says Castlevania or Zelda or whatever. Also very often the games don't work at all because they're literally just floppy disks which are very sensitive and have a very limited lifespan.Also the only notable games on the FDS were all released in the west with improved versions. This would be Zelda 1 and 2, Mario 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Castlevania 1 and 2. The rest of the library was slop like that shitty Ultraman game, or disk system ports of regular Famicom games like Mario 1 and Ice Climbers.There are a couple of interesting games that were exclusive to the FDS, but you need Japanese to play them. I'm talking about Famicom Detective Club and the Onigashima games. But both of those have remakes which are far better. Onigashima was remade on SNES, and Famicom Detective Club had a fantastic remake on Switch.
They're prone to failure these days and I'm pretty sure any flashcart you get will be able to play FDS games fine. Do you still want one just for the hell of it?
>>12497634Lost Levels and a few other exclusives.
>>12497636I'd like to have one around yeah, I heard of it being prone to failure but that's an easy repair.>>12497635The games aren't that expensive either, I have enough money to take the risk either way.
>>12497640What other exclusives?
>>12497636>They're prone to failure these daysit's mostly just the drive belts breaking
>>12497645Crystal Dragon, Esper Dream, Risa no Yōsei Densetsu
>>12497643>I'd like to have one around yeahThen it's inherently worth it, no? As long as you know what you're getting yourself into. I mean shit, I've considered getting a Satellaview unit even within the last month or two.>>12497653I meant that and the disks getting messed up as the other anon said.
the enhanced FDS sound (which not every game uses but quite a few do) won't work on a US model NES anyway
>>12497614you're just throwing money away.that gen is solved for emulating. plastic hoarding
All Flash carts support FDS so there's no need for the real thing and anyway it auto-switches/flips disk images.
>>12497643The disks aren't expensive, but if you want a complete copy they're expensive. But if all you want is the disk than just get a flash cart because the disk is literally just a rewritable floppy disk. It's not like regular Famicom games where there's actually hardware inside of the game that's hard to emulate. All of the hardware that expands it is inside of the RAM adapter (the black thing that plugs into the Famicom) and the only thing it does is add more RAM.If you want the hardware but don't care about the broken floppies you could just get the RAM adapter and an FDS Stick (like a flash cart for FDS), that would let you bypass floppies completely, but literally any flash cart will have the extra hardware from the RAM adapter built in.I forgot to mention before: the disk reader (red part) has a belt to control the movement and those turn to goo over time. If you pick up a unit that hasn't been serviced than it's guaranteed to not work so you're going to have to clean out the old belt-turned-goo from the mechanical gears and replace it with a new belt.
the first model of FDS had a hardware bug with graphics glitches sometimes appearing. this was caused by the longer signal path in the adapter compared with a normal cartridge and was fixed afterward by installing resistors on the signal lines.
>>12497657Those are all kusoge
>>12497678Used to be an issue with Flash carts as well but newer ones have resistors added as well. The PPU is an NMOS chip so its signal lines are a bit "dirty" compared to more modern chip types and the longer FDS circuit path can cause glitch graphics which the resistors fix by smoothing out the signals.
>>12497686NMOS chips are more like analog electronics compared to how modern stuff works.
>>12497617Thanks for blessing this thread, my dear "every thread is a spam thread!!!1!one" anon
the FDS was host to the worst Famicom baseball game and the worst Konami game of all time, Exciting Baseball>obviously a beta they rushed out in six weeks to compete with Family Stadium>broken and barely playable mess>the worst part is it's totally unoptimized and you have to swap or flip disks every 5 or so minutes
>>12497635If you buy CIB disks including disks with their original labels, I'd say your odds of them being rewrites is probably reduced. Chances are there aren't too many games that OP wants so as to make buying the titles he wants, risks and all, particularly cost prohibitive (I'd figure most passive FDS collectors are going to want the big first party titles, a few of the bigger Konami titles + FDS exclusives, and maybe a couple other random games).But yeah, FDSs can be a pain, and if you want something that works out of the box, you'd be better off buying one that's already had the belt replaced.In the end, though, if you just want to play the games with expansion audio on real hardware and don't care about collecting or hearing the disk drive make its clicking and humming noises while loading, buy an FDSStick and a RAM Adapter.
the disks look like floppy disks but aren't really floppy disks, they have a single spiral track the drive reads in sequential order from start to end, it's linear and works more like a cassette tape
>>12497705>and maybe a couple other random gamesie. those unlicensed Hacker International and Super Pig eroge games
>>12497712In English "floppy disk" just means the magnetic media part is flexible/floppy, regardless of the data track format, so it's OK
So Nintendo thought 32k was the ceiling for mask ROMs but the industry adopted newer chip processes that allowed cheaper and larger capacity ones a lot faster than they assumed and the FDS was obsolete within six months of launch once 1 megabit ROMs became available
>>12497614Evidently Howard Phillips thought the answer was "no" back in the day so they didn't bring it over here.
>>12497731>cassette tapes are floppy disksNo, you're fucking retarded. Floppy disks are a specific medium not interchangeable with other magnetic data media.
>>12497752next to the piracy issues the NES didn't get started in the US until after they had 1 megabit ROMs so there was no need for it
>>12497614>i'm considering doing something>i ask the looserest losers in the internets for their hot takelegit af woop woop lmfao
>>12497775There appears to have been some confusion regarding the meaning of >>12497731.1) "disk" didn't need to be repeated in the sentence because it's clear from the name that the media must be at least disk-shaped, so there's no need for additional explicit distinction from media of other physical design like cassette tapes.2) "regardless of the data track format" is the key to the sentence, clarifying the actual topic being discussed: the traditional floppy disk track format vs. the Quick Disk spiral format.The sentence asserts that a floppy disk is still called a floppy disc--specifically in the English language--regardless of the way the data is arranged on the disk itself.(In Japanese it's common for people to treat Quick Disk and floppy disk as two different things, at least as a historical factoid, though even there it should be noted that Maxell themselves called their Quick Disk product a "simple-type floppy disk" 簡易型フロッピーディスク)
>>12497679What the fuck? lmao gross weeb
>>12497679>i've never even heard of, let alone played, any of those games>but i'm certain they're all the one japanese word i knowThis board really does suck now.
>>12497626>If you're going to get a thing that lets you play the second legitimate format of Famicom games, you might as well get every single gimmicky peripheral.Where's the logic in this?
>>12497614Whether or not something is "worth buying" is entirely subjective, but I'm going to go against the grain and say the Disk System is really cool and definitely worth picking up if you're a Famicom collector, especially if you regularly import from Japan. Owing to the whole "disks can be overwritten" thing I almost exclusively collect FDS games CIB, but even so, for the most part, the platform is fairly inexpensive to collect for. It has a lot of experimental games and novelties that never saw a cartridge conversion, and for a lot of games that did get a conversion, the FDS version is better (i.e. Metroid, Kid Icarus). Also, this is going to sound silly, but imo if you keep a Famicom on your shelf, it looks naked without a disk system under it. You don't have to keep the RAM adapter plugged in, so once you have a disk system, there's not much reason to separate it from the console.>>12497719Hack International games are some of the most expensive on the system.
a theoretical nice thing about the FDS was that it had an IRQ counter so games didn't have the status bar break up when too much stuff is happening whereas this is an obvious issue on cartridge conversions where they had to switch to sprite 0 hit
>>12497635>Also the only notable games on the FDS were all released in the west with improved versionsException: Section-Z where the US release didn't have the save game feature from the FDS
>>12498040that is ironic because these games are considered crap shovelware in Japan. did you also know that the Atari 2600 porn games are the most expensive cartridges to collect despite them being total crap that contributed to the video game crash?
Mega Man 1 was supposed to be a FDS game but they switched it to cartridge at the last minute, likely because it was meant for simultaneous US/Japan releases so they didn't have to modify anything for the US version aside from the title screen.
>>12497785I don't know how they would have gotten the thing to work on a toaster NES anyway with how oddly shaped the cartridge adapter is, plus you couldn't use the enhanced sound.
>>12498035If you're going to collect, why not go all the way?Might as well emulate if you don't.
>>12498478it has the IRQ counter and soft mirroring select, but it doesn't have the extra PRG RAM at $6000-$7FFF like MMC1/MMC3 can use.
>>12499682There's an expansion port on the bottom of the console that was put there explicitly for supporting a disk system. The plans for it never materialized, though, so it just went unused. The reason the NES doesn't support expansion audio is because the audio I/O pins on the Famicom's cartridge connector that enable cartridge audio were moved to the unused expansion port. There's a very simple mod to restore expansion audio on an NES by connecting a resistor from the audio pins on the unused expansion port to an unused pin on the NES cartridge connector.>>12499696>but it doesn't have the extra PRG RAM at $6000-$7FFF like MMC1/MMC3 can use.lol, what are you talking about? The whole thing is RAM. That's the entire point of it. From the nesdev wiki:All Banks are fixed>PPU $0000-$1FFF: 8k CHR RAM>CPU $6000-$DFFF: 32k PRG RAM>CPU $E000-$FFFF: 8k BIOS PRG ROM
>>12499707'Hol up there and re-read carefully. The RAM just takes the place of the normal ROMs in a cartridge as they map into those addresses. However MMC1/MMC3 could support additional RAM at $6000-$7FFF usually for battery saves but sometimes other stuff.
>>12499713kind of. the PRG space on FDS occupies the normal space that ext. RAM would go in (on a cartridge, PRG ROM is $8000-$FFFF)
>>12499713RAM is RAM. You're free to write to it from the CPU. There's no difference other than you need to share the space with files loaded from the disk, but that's balanced by the fact the RAM region is an extra 24 KB.
>>12499713SMB3 uses the PRG RAM to keep track of destroyed blocks.
>>12498478On LOZ the scroll up routine had to be changed from fine scrolling to a rough block scroll where the tiles are shifted around because you can't scroll up into the status bar without the IRQ counter.
>>12499696Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle looks like it could have worked as UNROM but they used an MMC1 cart for the cartridge conversion because it switches the mirroring direction for the H and V scrolling levels.
>>12497626It's pretty disingenuous to categorize the FDS as just another peripheral, considering it allows you to play several significant, fully realized games that are only available on the platform. No different from the likes of the PCE/TG-CD or the Sega CD
How hard would it be to mod an NES to make it compatible with a FDS?
>>12499776Front loader or toploader? For a front loader, simply not worth it. For a top loader, you would need a 60>72 pin adapter and mod your toploader to support expansion audiohttps://consolemods.org/wiki/NES:Expansion_(EXP)_Audio_ModBasically, if you have a toploader, it isn't a big deal. If you have a frontloader, it is absolutely not worth the effort or money, just buy an actual Famicom (and mod it for composite, if you don't want RF which without tweaking the RF tuner will default to channel 90-something) or an AV Famicom and use that.
>>12499776https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_NN6d4O2FEModding is only necessary for expansion audio, which not every game uses. See https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_expansion_audio (not sure if this is complete; I haven't played every FDS game).Otherwise, all you need is a 60-to-72 pin adapter that's long enough to let the RAM adapter stick out of the console. Note that what this guy says about the Everdrive emulating FDS audio is outdated. It sounds great on the latest firmware, at least on the Pro.
>>12499798Say what? All you need to get exp. audio from a toaster NES is getting one little resistor and soldering it to two pins.
