American FDS- What would have been?

[Tupin]

Do we know how far the Disk System was away from release outside of Japan? I've always wondered what it would have looked like and how it would have been marketed here, based on how other things were adapted.

Wasn't the American NES able to potentially use both a cartridge and a disk at the same time since the drive would have been underneath the system? I know cartridge pins that connected to the expansion port directly were removed after plans were dropped, but could there have ever been a "super game" that needed both a disk and a cartridge to run something?

[SparTonberry]

Like the Sharp Twin Famicoms, it probably would've contained a switch to allow only one at a time.
Or the BIOS would've been on a cart.

Yes, the FDS contains a BIOS that is used to run games as well as RAM that would've had memory conflicts with a cart.
Probably the only advantage is that maybe because it would've attached to the system, maybe an NESDS would've not needed a separate power supply?
(then again, I thought I read somewhere that most of the power to the FDS is towards anti-piracy mechanisms and if modded to remove that, it could run off only the power from the link cable?)

[Graham Mitchell]

The FDS is a bit of a mixed bag. At it's release, it's 3 main advantages over cartridges were bigger storage, save capability, and a dedicated FM sound chip. However, within a month of the FDS's release, Ghosts 'N' Goblins was released on cartridge format. GNG's program size exceeded the max storage space on the disk already, so there's one advantage lost. Eventually cartridge games started storing data via battery back up, so there's yet another advantage lost. In the end, the main selling point of the FDS is the FM sound chip, which is pretty awesome. (Check out the japanese versions of Metroid and Kid Icarus on youtube, as well as stuff we didn't get here, like Nazo no Murasame).

Many disk games unfortunately don't utilize the FM chip at all (which is shameful), and due to the relatively small storage space, a lot of them are really icky blecch awful. They have cool ideas, but execution is poor due to the limitations of the system. In the end, Nintendo was doing so much interesting stuff with mappers, extra RAM in the carts, etc., and you had developers like Konami putting their own FM chips in the cartridge that the disk system was quickly phased out.

Perhaps a game the spanned multiple disks would have been cool, and I suppose they could have rigged up some way to utilize the FM chip in a cartridge based game, which would have been neat. But on it's own the FDS is a pretty limiting piece of hardware. The US cartridge version of Zelda II is vastly superior to the disk version (more music, more animation) because they simply had more memory to work with. The U.S. release of Super Mario Bros. 2 is also better than Doki Doki Panic, with digitized samples and extra frames of animation (see the "Albatoss"-es for a good example).

Don't get me wrong, I love owning a disk system. I consider that version of Zelda, Metroid, Gyruss and Kid Icarus definitive, and there are a sizeable handful of gems we never saw here which are totally worth checking out (Konami was one of the developers that best utilized the hardware). But there's nothing inherently better about the disk system other than the FM chip (which is not insignificant).

[SparTonberry]

The first 1-megabit (about equal to a double-sided FDS disk) game was Ghosts 'n Goblins, though that was four months later (though Gumshoe was 1.25 and released the same month as Makaimura, though not in Japan), and I think Ganbare Goemon was the first 2-megabit when it released a month after that.

I doubt having multiple disks would have changed things, as games usually contained a sizable amount of free space as it was since they tended to have one large file with the main game engine and then smaller files like level data, to reduce loading time.
The only two-disk games I believe were the Nintendo point-and-click games, which even then I think were released as separate chapters.
Yes, Square once said they were going to make a five-disk Seiken Densetsu, but that was before Square learned they should actually write the game before the advertisement.

[Jorpho]

I think the market at the time wouldn't have really supported a disk system, in light of how Nintendo was trying to get away from the perception of the NES as similar to all the video game systems that died in the crash. It would have just led to more segmentation and confusion.

[Tupin]

So, how far along WAS an American Disk System? Not even beyond drawings?

[BlastProcessing402]

I think the market at the time wouldn't have really supported a disk system, in light of how Nintendo was trying to get away from the perception of the NES as similar to all the video game systems that died in the crash. It would have just led to more segmentation and confusion.

A disk drive would absolutely get it away from the perception of the systems that died in the crash. They weren't disk based. It would have made the NES feel more like computers, which weren't really part of the crash. Of course if they were gonna do that, they might as well have gone with the AVS design instead of using ROB to trick retailers into thinking they were a novelty toy.

The main thing a disk drive could've done would be keep game prices down, and maybe ward off that "chip shortage" fiasco from around the time of SMB 2 and Zelda 2. It would really suck for today's retro gamers, though. Magnetic media is pretty failure prone in the long term.

[SparTonberry]

Probably not. The amount of retail games for the FDS dropped after 1988, with the few games released after that more often being Disk Writer-only games (that is, you bring a disk of a game you don't want or buy a blank disk, then bring it to a machine at the shop to buy the ROM of a different game).
Supposedly that lack of interest was due to piracy, but also because third-parties didn't like they had to share copyright with Nintendo (giving Nintendo control over Disk Writer selection, I heard) and also felt Nintendo was charging too little for Disk Writer games, leaving small profit margins.
Also, FDS had smaller size (about 1 megabit for a 2-sided disk, the same size as many NES carts released during the "disk shortage", but because of limited RAM in the FDS, it limited how much of that space could be practically used. You know, trying to reduce loading time.

One game called Relics is a bad example of that. It stops to load every time your character moves like three steps. Relics: The Dark Fortress (or whatever the title translates to)? More like Loading, Please Wait: The Game. :P

[Niku-Sama]

So, how far along WAS an American Disk System? Not even beyond drawings?

send Nintendo an e-mail and ask them, since they have gone dormant on 20 yard old hardware and not renewing things they might just tell you.

I think if it were something that they wanted to be viable in the states the discs would almost have to have been modified 3 1/2 inch 1.44 Mbyte floppies instead of modified quick disks like the FDS wound up being.
considering 1.44Mbyte floppies were available in '87 and the lead time of a few years was the norm from something to get to the US from Japan after R&D for the new region its entirely plausible.

[Jorpho]

A disk drive would absolutely get it away from the perception of the systems that died in the crash. They weren't disk based. It would have made the NES feel more like computers, which weren't really part of the crash.

Weren't they? There were a lot of computer systems that sort of bit the dust around then, were there not?

send Nintendo an e-mail and ask them, since they have gone dormant on 20 yard old hardware and not renewing things they might just tell you.

Really now, the CS rep who answers those things won't know anything that hasn't been widely disseminated to the dozens of Nintendo history websites out there.

[Niku-Sama]

theyd have a more educated guess than any body

[Tupin]

Weren't they? There were a lot of computer systems that sort of bit the dust around then, were there not?

Really now, the CS rep who answers those things won't know anything that hasn't been widely disseminated to the dozens of Nintendo history websites out there.

Despite the rampant failure of many computer systems, people didn't look at computers and see them as not commercially viable like they did with console video games.

Nintendo chose to go for the "market it as a toy" thing because the "market it as a useful computer" wouldn't work. An 8-bit computer in 1986? Would have been eaten alive, unless someone can correct me.

[Ed Oscuro]

It would've been nothing - just another cash grab by Nintendo against developers. The only positive I would have seen from it would've been possibly forcing the NES version of a FDS to possibly be plugged in for extra sound channels.

But as we saw with the SMS, the relevant parts simply weren't included (despite software compatibility with FM Sound) because the U.S. and Europe weren't top-tier markets, apparently.

Honestly I don't get the nostalgia for this. FDS games are nice and slim and the profit margin improvement is probably on par with that seen during the N64/PSX debate (funny Nintendo went back on their own history there), but who was going to reap that, especially with Ninty demanding sole production rights for product?

[ColecoFan1981]

It would've been nothing - just another cash grab by Nintendo against developers. The only positive I would have seen from it would've been possibly forcing the NES version of a FDS to possibly be plugged in for extra sound channels.

But as we saw with the SMS, the relevant parts simply weren't included (despite software compatibility with FM Sound) because the U.S. and Europe weren't top-tier markets, apparently.

Honestly I don't get the nostalgia for this. FDS games are nice and slim and the profit margin improvement is probably on par with that seen during the N64/PSX debate (funny Nintendo went back on their own history there), but who was going to reap that, especially with Ninty demanding sole production rights for product?

Actually, Europe seemed more a dominant market for the Master System than either here (the U.S.) or in Sega's native Japan... but still does not explain the lack of additional sound channels for said PAL version.

~Ben

[Ed Oscuro]

Exactly my point - PAL territories were (and still are) a bastion of SMS support, and look how even Sega repaid that. Crappy advertising hand-me-downs from Tonka and stripped hardware designs. Heck, they cared so little that there's space wasted on the cartridges for sound formats that weren't ever played (but that's a good thing for us today when you can use a Japanese SMS to play some of these old games - I forget if there are any non-Japanese titles that have a FM soundtrack component, though).

Nintendo cared even less about this, although to be reasonable their American staff wasn't a bunch of freeloaders and slouches. They did good things but I don't see that translating into improved hardware for the US in the FDS era. By the SNES era that had already started to change, with extensive English input into SuperFX, and the N64's basic design coming from an American company.

But the FDS is a design based on all Japanese-sourced parts and input. I'm not trying to drum up the '90s trade wars thing, but I do think that the compromised design of the NES would have made that a difficult addition to get right, as they already gave up the game on extra sound channels for regular cartridges.

Perhaps I have this backwards about the FDS - aren't the pins on the expansion port precisely so a FDS expansion would just require the one connector? Certainly they screwed up regular cartridge games, but the expansion connector is a different thing entirely.

[SparTonberry]

Perhaps Nintendo wasn't expecting extra sound chips on Famicom carts?
The FDS was released in 1986, but I don't think the first expansion sound cart games were released until 1988 (the earliest I know of is Erica and Satoru's Dream Adventure).

[Ed Oscuro]

I think you're right there. Perhaps this seems to point to "oh god, be careful what you wish for" more than it supports my usual anti-early-Nintendo stance. But I don't see it as being an especially good thing for retro gamers - especially if it just meant that we got a leg up on the usual "crap games flogged more often because they're cheap" model we see so often in modern releases.

It does seem like a rather startling oversight though - they knew extra mappers were coming, and any reasonable programmer would have seen that those mappers might include (and some do) some extra features for graphics and sound. Using a standard bus, which is essentially what the NES connector is, to connect to different peripherals or even CPUs, was a familiar concept for many hobbyist computer programmers and computer builders in the late '70s and early '80s even. This mistake wasn't repeated, as far as I know, with the eventual removal of expansion ports in later consoles - without removing the ability to interface with the system itself in basic ways. Of course, the rather unique design of not just the NES but the FC also complicate all kinds of things.

Of course, the FDS does have some additional sound generation capability (not especially well used if games like CVII are any indication) and that needs to be handled on the expansion, of course.

[sloan]

Would it be safe to say that a deciding factor to not market FDS to the US would be fear of piracy? Was copying of the disc based games not easily done?

[Graham Mitchell]

Honestly I don't get the nostalgia for this. FDS games are nice and slim and the profit margin improvement is probably on par with that seen during the N64/PSX debate (funny Nintendo went back on their own history there), but who was going to reap that, especially with Ninty demanding sole production rights for product?

Really the best thing about owning an FDS is having access to some awesome games that never got released elsewhere. Nazo No Murasame is just incredible, and it's shameful that it never saw the light of day outside of Japan. Konami released several FDS exclusives, a few of which are fantastic (ie--Nicol al Senshi), and the FDS version of Gyruss with the booming FM bass is awesome.

Other than this, I agree, there's a lot of junk on that system, and most of the compelling games aren't playable to a non-japanese speaking audience.

[TheChristoph]

I feel like the infrastructure at the time wouldn't be able to support the disk re-writing stations, and there goes a big appeal of the system.