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?

[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.

[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

[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.

[Graham Mitchell]

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.

I disagree. During the nes era, Nintendo was EVERYWHERE. Even drug stores and grocery stores were carrying it, and these places no longer carry video games, despite the industry being even larger now. Also, disk copiers aren't all that big, they could easily fit on a shelf somewhere. I think retailers would have gladly carried them, considering how much revenue they could have potentially brought in.

[Ed Oscuro]

I've been wanting a copy of Arumana no Kiseki for a long while. Too bad most of my FDS games (including Mystery of Murasame Castle) are sealed...seems kind of a waste to open 'em after so long when I can just emulate. Plus, I paid way too much for them...