July 15, 1983.
Two consoles hit the Japanese market: The Sega SG-1000, and the Nintendo Family Computer.
One was a bit more successful than the other.
Sega’s system survived in its original incarnation for two years and saw the release of about
80 games.
The Famicom, on the other hand, boasted 1,055 titles over the space of 11 years, from Donkey
Kong to Adventure Island IV.
That’s a damn healthy lineup for this unassuming lump of plastic.
Seriously.
This thing’s barely larger than a single NES cart, slightly wider, a couple inches
longer, and maybe the height of two or three games stacked on top of each other.
We’re here to celebrate the winner of that day’s console war... even if it did take
me 2 hours to get it connected and running on an American TV.
Apparently, you have to use the RF switch from an NES, set that to Channel 3, set the
Famicom itself to Channel 1, and then it shows up on Channel 95 for whatever reason.
I’m even further confused, because Felicity in the UK sent this to us, which means she
also had PAL issues to figure out.
I salute her diligence.
The Famicom and the NES, despite being effectively the same hardware, are very, very different
systems.
As you can see, the Famicom carts are tiny compared to NES carts, though the size of
the circuit board in each is about the same.
NES carts also have a 72-pin connection as opposed to the Famicom’s 60-pins, owing
to the presence of the 10 NES lockout chip that seemed like a good idea for a few seconds
in 1985 but ended up just being a pain in the butt.
Also, while the form factor of the controllers are almost identical, the Famicom’s controller
has the wire running out the side rather than the top, and is completely hardwired into
the body of the system itself.
The good news is, the controller can’t get lost.
The bad news is, the cord is only about two feet long, so you’ve gotta be hovering right
over the system in order to play it.
Weirder still, the second controller lacks Select and Start buttons of its own, instead
boasting a MICROPHONE.
Because when’s the last time you remember using Select or Start in a two-player NES
game?
At least the microphone served a purpose in a handful of games, like shouting to kill
Pol’s Voice enemies in the Legend of Zelda and haggling with shopkeepers in Kid Icarus.
With hardwired controllers, the only way to connect another input device - like the infamous
Hudson Joycard - is through this serial port at the front of the machine, which also allows
for strange devices like the Hori Game Repeater.
Look it up.
It’s nuts.
But it speaks to one of the most important aspects of the Famicom: its expandability.
There were dozens of peripherals released, including - as befitting a system called the
“Family Computer” - a keyboard and cassette-based data recorder, for word processing and BASIC
programming (as well as saving Excitebike tracks).
And then there was the Famicom Disk System, which did away with the more expensive cartridge-based
media in favor of rewritable floppy disks.
But we’ll save that magic for tomorrow.