Retronauts - 789: Famicom Disk System, Redux

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Jeremy Parish, Kurt Kalata, and the internet's RndStranger converse with patron Ben Hamilton about the Famicom Disk System to dig up new perspectives on the influential add-on, on the (belated) occasion of its 40th anniversary.

This week in Retronauts, we set B-side. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode. Oh, I forgot to look it up. I can tell you, however, that this is the exciting sequel to episode 359, wherein we talked about the Famicom Disc System. And this week, in episode 789, that is a full, what was that, 440 episodes? My God. we are talking about the Famicom Disc System again because it's older now and that means it's more interesting to talk about. Well, also because this is a patron request episode, we haven't done one of these in a while.

We've been remiss and we're in the process of catching up. So you're going to be hearing a lot of patron request episodes in the coming months. This one, we're kind of kicking things back into motion. Patron, please introduce yourself and tell us why you wanted us to talk about this thing, the Famicom Disc System, even though we've already talked about it. Hello, calling from your friendly neighborhood Rocky Mountains. This is Ben Hamilton. You can just call me Ben Coon, because I'm yellow, and you can flip me over.

I am a fan of the disc system ever since I lived in Japan. I worked in Shibuya from 2001 to 2002, and there were the last dregs of the Famicom bits and bobs around. I never saw a kiosk, but I was very excited whenever I saw the yellow and or blue discs poking out of the junk piles. Were you there when Nintendo announced officially that it was going to discontinue repairing disc systems? I feel like it was around that time. Probably, but I wasn't tuned in. I was much more into Beat Mania and Dance Dance Revolution, which it turns out with the rule of FADs lasting exactly three years in Japan, I caught

the tail end of Dance Sats Revolution. I trained really hard throughout university and arrived after the Fad left. So... But you came back to a... America after that, right? Yeah. So you would have been there right at the beginning of the American fad for DDR. Yes. Because there was a lag time on that.

Exactly. So I caught back up when it was popular in the Bay Area of San Francisco where I lived and really fascinated by the staying power it's had over the years. Oh, how long did you live in San Francisco? 20 years. Oh, okay. Are you still there? No, I moved to Boulder, Colorado to start raising my kids.

I guess you're in the Rocky Mountains. Yeah. So I've been all over. I've been a tech guy for many. many, many years. And now I'm slowing it down and focusing on the kids. I'm sure there's all kinds of weird arcane tech for you to work on at the Denver airport. That place is, uh, that's like Chithulu's computer. Yeah, they leaned into the Illuminati, uh, underground.

And now they actually have a walkway opening between the three concourses with like all these Illuminati signs, danger, underground lizard people at work. Uh, it's, it's really great they're leading into it. So it's like a shit post as an airport. Totally. That's amazing. Anyway, so what's the deal with Famicom disc system? I got to enunciate that correctly.

Famicom disc system. Yeah, it's a Famicom, you know, shipped with a paltry cartridge system that could only have, you know, Mario Brothers was basically just 64 kilobytes of storage. And, you know, one frame of one video that I record has many, many times more than that. So they saw, you know, the Colico, the SG-1000, even the Commodore 64. in the early 80s, all made the jump from tapes to discs. And I think Famicom, you know, with Gumpai Yokoi, kind of steering the helm towards a lot more fun toy like accouturement.

They definitely said, hey, what if we had discs for the Famicom to? Sure, but I mean, why did you want to talk about it specifically? I think collecting archaic failed hardware is really cool. You know, the more failure, the better. You know, we chatted a bit. Dreamcast always looks at me longingly. It lasted so, so little, but it left such an outsized impression on my heart that I feel like, you know, keeping bits and pieces of that around makes me happy. And when I got into the Super Nintendo world, they made a thing called the Super Wild Card, which oddly also had a floppy disc.

And that was the closest I got as a young adult to having a Famicom disc system in my grubby little hands. It did have a floppy disc, which is worthless. but you could hatch a zip drive as well, which made playing all sorts of fan-made carts quite easy. Until it started clicking. Yes. There's a lot of failure of hardware and failed hardware that fails. I think is a good theme for me. Yeah.

All right. So to help discuss Famicom Disc System, which we have already discussed, but we're going to explore new areas of discussion for it. Actually, I think one of us besides me was here on the previous Disc System episode. please introduce yourself. I am Kurt Clata. I run the website Hardcore Gaming 101. And roughly nine years ago, we put out a book called The Complete Guide to the Famicom Disc System, where we dealt through the entire library and played everything.

It's something that captivated me back in the 90s when Emulation First started coming out and all the library of Japanese stuff that we never got was sort of revealed to us. And back then, emulation was still very basic, so a lot of that stuff wasn't enabled yet. But since I was a big Canami fan, Canami, they supported the system very strongly for a year or two, especially with the first two Castlevania games. So that's what sort of opened my eyes to the possibilities of the system, which didn't really pan out, but it was a neat idea. Yes.

And I have asked another Famicom Disc System expert to join in for this episode. first time on the show, but I imagine that he's going to be a familiar name to most people listening to this. Please introduce yourself. I am David Mathis, better known online as Random Stranger, and I chronologue video games systems. I did it for the Famicom, and I have done it for the Famicom Disc System. Yes, David's video series has a lot of overlap with my own videos. but from a strictly, this was released in Japan perspective, whereas mine is from a strictly, this was, well, mostly this was released in America perspective. So they dovetail nicely. They're very complimentary. I do not understand how you have the capacity to create daily videos.

People are always telling me, like, you make so much stuff. You're so productive. But then I look at your daily videos and say, huh, that seems difficult. Well, the Famicom was literally the only thing I did for three years straight. So that was its own thing. Then I decided to go to every other day at least, mostly every other day. Giving yourself a break. Okay, yeah. Well, anyway, yeah, I feel like as someone who has actually experienced the disc system in its entirety,

you are uniquely qualified among people in the English-speaking realm to weigh in on the merits and demerits of the disk system. Myself, I am more of a casual tourist. I have a working disk system. I have recorded video from it. It is connected to an analog NT Mini with RGB output, which feels like wild overkill beyond the bounds of anything that anyone who ever worked on the hardware

could have conceived as being possible or necessary. And that's a fun tech trick. but for the most part I stick to you know American stuff so the disc system is there more as a novelty like I want to play a familiar game but with weird sound effects and that's kind of fun

it's nice to be able to play section Z and save progress but beyond that the disc system is more of like a that thing is over there you know the I think the Hollywood expression is well that happened and I like it

it's just practically in my life it doesn't have a a lot of applications. But I feel like together, we are beyond a tri-force of knowledge. We are a tetra force. Yeah, why not? And we're going to talk about the disk system. And again, we did talk about the, what was it, the 35th anniversary of the disc system with Chris Kohler back in February 2021 that was recorded remotely, but we still wore masks because we weren't vaccinated yet. That's how long ago it was. Actually, I don't think we wore masks. But anyway, it's been a while, and I feel like the world has changed a lot. The disc system has not changed a lot, but perhaps we can bring new

and poignant perspectives to our discussion this time. So let's begin by talking a little bit about what happened before the Famicom Disc System. And Ben, you touched on this a little bit, mentioning like the SG-1000, the Clico Adam. So let's go back even further and talk about the 1970s when a man named Jerry Lawson helped invent the mask rom cartridge. Actually, were Fairchild Channel F cartridges mask ROMs, or were they like predating that kind of tech? Were they like T-TLs? Probably not TLSs, but LSIs maybe? I don't know. I actually have never thought to look that.

up? I'm pretty sure they were very similar to Pong in that they were just circuits, circuit boards that were just, you know, wired up. I don't think they really had common e-proms or ROMs shift in the 70s. Okay, so that would be LSI, large-scale integrated circuits. I see that mentioned a lot when you read interviews with tech people about early Japanese consoles and things like Game and Watch. They always talk about LSI, so I had to figure out what the hell that means. But basically, It's a physical object in which a video game is contained. And that was an innovation because before that you had like dedicated Pong, dedicated consoles such as Pong, or you had the Magnovac's Odyssey, which was also basically a dedicated console that had games built into it, and you would stick cartridges in there and that would create circuit jumps that would activate different kinds of pre-baked software. So the advent of cartridges meant, you know, in the early days, they called them programmable cartridges.

And it's not that you could actually program the cartridges yourself, but you used the cartridge to program your console. It was basically like an application that you stuck in your machine. And it changed the game. And that was great because it meant you didn't have to buy an entire new piece of hardware anytime you wanted a different game, which was a change of pace from like the tell stars and the pongs and the, I don't know, TV game 15s and so forth. And it made, you know, it kind of created the razor and blade model for video game sales. I don't know if the razor and blade model existed for razors and blades at that point. Probably.

But that is the term they used to describe it now. You sell the hardware relatively cheap for just a little more than cost, which interestingly, in the year 2026 keeps going up. And then you sell cartridges, which are cheaper to produce, can have more margin, and that's where you make your money. And that's basically been Nintendo's entire corporate strategy for the past 40-plus years. And the Famicom Disc System fits into that in ways we will discuss. And fascinatingly, I have a six-year-old daughter who's obsessed with the TV show, Bluey.

We bought her this soft-sighted box that claims it can tell you Bluey stories and play Bluey games. and you have to set the little characters on top and they kind of magged it in place. And we made the mistake of buying it for a road trip without connecting it to the internet. Turns out these little figures that you put on top to unlock the stories don't actually have the stories in them.

They're just a little unique code that is like a DLC code that downloads them if you happen to connect it to the internet. So it's fascinating how we're reentering the world of physical, quote unquote, media that actually doesn't have any media on it. It's just a code to go download it from the internet. So your blue A-Box

has game key cards basically. 100%. But they're physical. They're like, they're like amoe. But yeah, Nintendo Switch to game key cards are physical, but they don't have the game on them. You put them in your system and then it downloads the game. That's right. That's right. It's like an access pass. So yes,

I feel like the FDS is a touching topic to discuss here in 2026 when physical media is in danger of going away and ownership is being replaced with game publishers as landlords, essentially.

Has Sony walked back their threat to discontinued production of discs yet? No. They're not going to. By all accounts, that was something that they had been working toward for years, and I feel like they worked it out and cleared it with their partners, like, you know, main publishers and third parties. So I feel like this has been baked into their corporate strategy for a long time, and they're willing to take the, you know, 15 to 20% hit of anger

with the assumption that the money they're going to make, you know, basically renting games to us digitally and being able to basically shut out the used games market will more than make up for whatever losses they're going to take on the front end. So, yeah, yeah, good times. And it's interesting because the disc system with the kiosk did kind of,

it was one of the first, consumer-facing download systems, which it just had a very different kind of meaning back then. And we'll talk about that, too. Nintendo had a long history of that with Citeleview offering downloads over, you know, satellite, Sega offering it with Sega Channel. And it seems like the Famicomtea system was kind of the first in the, we have a medium that's cheap. It can duplicate it as many times as we want.

And now we have, you know, Steam and game cards. So it's kind of a... Figuring out cheap distribution is kind of the history of the video game industry. It is. Do you want to elaborate on that, any? Sure. The whole reason that Nintendo was looking for a new method there is cartridges were expensive to produce. So to make a Famicom cartridge, you had to have the circuit board, you had to have the ROM chips, you had to have the factory workers hand-assemble them because they did.

didn't have the robots or wave-soddering machines yet. And it would cost, oh, maybe half the price, retail price of the cartridge to manufacture it. And Nintendo was really looking to cut that down. That was the entire reason they were making the disk system. And it's also the famous, you know, things like the chip shortage when Super Mario 2 USA came out in the U.S. Zelda 2. I vividly remember that winter and wading in line desperately, Toys R Us, to brush in and see if the slip of paper in the little plastic sleeve actually corresponded to a physical cartridge that they had in stock, which you never knew, right? Maybe they had the game in stock.

Maybe they didn't. That experience was painful, and I can see why Nintendo didn't want to repeat that elsewhere. Yeah, 1988 was rough. It was the year where I spent probably three or four months calling different shops. I would rotate through the local game stores and retailers and discount stores and warehouses and so forth and call and say, hey, do you have Zelda 2 for Nintendo? And by the end of that, they were probably like, oh, God, it's this kid again. But, you know, that was supposed to be out in like spring 1988 and didn't make it out until December

and crazy limited quantities. So, yeah, the chip shortage was a real thing. It affected the U.S. market particularly strongly, but I know it had some impact in Japan, too. But at the time that the Famicom launched, the cartridge medium was a great solution. Like I mentioned, it started with the Fairchild Channel F. And then people spent the next few years trying to figure out exactly how cartridges worked. And you got some weird solutions like the epoch cassette vision, where, you know, it was basically like the innards of a standalone console in a cartridge. And you had plug that cartridge into the console. And the console was just basically a video connector, a controller, and a power supply. So the actual RAM, the CPU, those were in the cartridge, and those ran the console. Not a great solution, very expensive. I feel like the cassette vision was almost a precursor to JAMA.

Kind of, yeah. I mean, it was the same tech as the microvision, or the same concept as the microvision, which came out a little before that in the U.S. But at least that kind of made sense because the microvision just had a rotary dial built into the base, and then every microvision cartridge was not just the CPU and the RAM, but also like the controller.

It was a different arrangement of buttons. So, yeah, I think the idea was, like, it took a while for them to kind of move away from the notion of just let the console be the razor. Let the cartridge be the blade. It's fine. The cartridge does not also have to have razor features to it. It doesn't need its own handle. Just stick it in there. Let a shave.

That was a metaphor. But, yeah, at the same time, as you mentioned, David, cartridge. were very expensive to make, and as they grew in size and capabilities, they became more expensive. And there were a lot of experiments to kind of figure out ways around that. And you did see magnetic media being introduced, because magnetic media is cheap, whether it's tape cassette or discette. It costs much, much less than a physical ROM. But it also comes with downsides and drawbacks, like read access time. and the fragility of magnetic media, you know, heat, magnetism, all these electromagnetic waves do bad things to magnetic media.

And so there was kind of this tradeoff between these different considerations. But you had a lot of systems in the early days did have some sort of magnetic attachment. And this was, you know, this was the era then as now the line between computer and console was kind of thin. And so you had something like the Colico Vision, which was designed with the idea of expandability into a computer, the atom. That was delayed for a long time, but it did come out, and it did give you the option of a discette or a tape drive. My family had the tape drive, and if you wanted to play Buck Rogers, you were going to spend some time waiting for Buck Rogers to load up, but when it did, yeah, you could play it, just like any

other video game. The SG-1000, which was essentially a KalikoVision, was actually conceived, from my understanding, as a computer. And SIGA said, that's probably not going to sell that well. We should strip it down and make it a console in addition to a computer. And also, if you want to turn the console into a computer, we can sell the accessories to go along with it. And of course, it's the family computer. Yes, there is that, although I don't know that they really had that in mind when my understanding is that they did not have the thought of like this is a home computer in mind but maybe they did I mean they shipped the Famicom Basic right Famicom Basic shipped and it had a keyboard. That was like a year and a half after the system came out. But even before that

Sharp made the computer version of the Famicom which is how Sharp got all tangled up in manufacturing those weird specialty Famicombs like the twin. That's why that's why you have the cool all-in-one systems, the twin Famicom. And I think also why, like, Ice Climber was on the Sharp Zaris PDA, golf. It was, it's, there's, there's all kinds of weird entanglements. Yeah, like, you have those Hudson, uh, computer games that are horrible bastardizations of Mario because Nintendo and Hudson were all tangled up. I love, I love that weird history where Nintendo collaborated with stuff and made deals and then kind of, you get the impression that they really wanted to walk it back. leader. But you also had the tomi Tudor, aka the Tomi Puda, which was kind of a home computer,

kind of like the MSX was kind of a home computer, but also kind of a console. And the Tudor was released as the Puda Jr. in Japan, which was straight up a console. But it could be expanded with a tape drive. And there were unique programs on the tape drive. And as been mentioned, you did eventually get Famicom Basic, which to work, you needed a keyboard and a tape drive and the Famicom Basic cartridge. And all of these things together would let you program very, very, very, very simple games and save them to tape. And, you know, it was a time of experimentation and throwing things at the wall and hoping people would buy them. And when people did not buy them, they would pivot and say, okay, let's throw a different thing at the wall. And the Famicom Disc System, I feel like,

was the one where they really, they really stood and took aim at the wall and really thought about their aim for a while. So it did pretty okay. Like, it stuck to the wall very effectively for a limited time. I'd say it hit with a lot of force and then slid down. It did. But even as it slid, you got interesting weird things, like, you know, an improved version of Mario Brothers and stuff like that. I think the ultimate doom of the FDS

was that it had a fixed amount of RAM that it could support. It didn't have fancy mapper chips. And cartridge technology kept evolving and evolving to the point where each cartridge was its own mini-system, as we saw with Castlevania 3 and MMC, I don't remember how high they went 5.

And the FDS never could keep up with that. It was limited to the two, or 264K side disks. I can't remember the exact storage. And it just got left behind, and there was no way to expand it. Well, that's Moore's law for you. The density of transistors doubles every two years. It's held true since the mid-60s, and it always gets cheaper. It just outpaced the Famicom disk system much faster than Nintendo was expecting.

Yeah, I think, so the disk system launched in February, 1986. And I want to say the first cartridge with a memory management co-processor came in June or so, just a few months later. And by the end of 1986, before the year was even over, we had memory management cartridges, you know, the very early type in the U.S. Ghost and Goblins had the expansion capabilities built into it. Believe it or not, that game could not have been done on just bare, bear, bear Famicom hardware. It needed, it needed more help than it got, but it needed help even to get as far as it got. I feel like it could have been done on bare Famicom hardware. It's just, it wasn't. Not by Micronix.

I was Micronics. Yeah, that was Micronics. Yeah, yeah. Ask us how we know. Actually, David, how do you feel about McCronics? I feel like, well, okay, the rumor that I've heard, the rumor that I've heard is that they were one person working out of the college dorm and I don't believe that. No, actually, I think that is a mistruth, an untruth that I accidentally helped propagate. I did see that, you know, just like in passing on a forum somewhere.

and I mentioned, like, some people speculate that. And that's, people have taken that as word of law, whereas I was not saying that was a definitive thing. But I probably bear some responsibility for spreading that. It was a development studio of some sort. There were certainly, it was more than one person. Yeah, they produced too much garbage for it to be one person. They might be the worst. developer technically to ever emerge from Japan.

I have a hard time thinking of one worse. I have played almost every single Micronix game and recorded a video about them. I think there's four left that I haven't done. Two on the MSX, one for the Super Famicom that came out much later, and one final one on the PC engine. and I'm probably when I reached that last one, the PC engine going to do something on the other three games just so I can close the door on my chronics forever. You know, I will say to their credit, they tried to do some stuff eventually. They started to get ambitious with things like Victory Road. They didn't express those ambitions well, but I will credit them for trying.

And I will say that the game that they kind of built their reputation on, elevators. action is probably the, it is the best console conversion of that arcade game to that point. And it certainly crushes the SG-1000 version. You didn't play the Famicom version where you phased through the elevator. Oh, I didn't do that, no. But that's just, you know, futurism, you know. You've got the teleport feature. I was not aware that the Japanese version was substandard.

There's a Micronics disk system tie. even though they don't have, well, if I remember quickly, there's one Micronix game on the disk system, but they were hired by SNK or K development, whichever group, to make some ports of SNK games for the disc system, and then they pulled out of the disk system. So they changed those to Famicom cartridges, but they left in the loading times for the disc system. As one does.

They have to have much of a sales department for them to keep. getting work. If you or that, it just shows how desperate they were for Famicom games. I think during the boom era, it was really just a case of, oh, you can program on 6502 or maybe even, like, just wing it. Great. Make a video game for us and we're going to churn it out because millions of kids will buy it. And they did not.

My favorite 6502 fact is that was a big Commodore 64 nerd in the day. And this was another system where tape drive was what it was planned to always use. And then when disk technology got affordable enough, they shipped the famous 1541 disk drive that just took over. Every Commodore 64 owner owned one or more of these for making home backups of their own software that they wrote in Basic, of course. Well, I think that was, I think the 1541 really only took over the U.S. And the U.K., it was almost entirely cassettes. That's fair. Yeah.

But what a lot of people don't know is the 1541 disc drive, had a 6502 CPU in it just as powerful as the 6501 in the C-64 itself. And these days, when you download demo scene graphical demos for the C-64, some of them actually require you to hook up multiple 1541 disk drives in serial so that you can render, you know, complicated graphics on the disk drive and display them on the Combinor 64 itself, which I love. So I did not know any of that, and that's very, very cool. but it does kind of show that there was this idea of moving beyond the cartridge for the sake of expediency and affordability at the time the disk system came out. It's also worth mentioning that Nintendo Corporation Limited President Hiroshi Yamuuchi was a big believer in the idea that fads last for three years at a time and that you have to be agile and always be ready for the next.

thing, have the next thing in the works. So that that does line up with Nintendo's own timeline to that point. You know, they had kind of a breakout hit literally with their TV game systems in like 1978-ish. And then Game and Watch was 1980-81. And then Famicom was 1983. So three years from that, it's time to do something new. And thankfully, I think they realized that launching an entire new console was maybe not the play. So they decided to expand on the existing console to make it a better offering to, you know, to create a different way to play Famicom games that were better, bigger, more feature capable, more affordable than the cartridges that people were buying. And, you know, the disk system had the benefit of launching really,

kind of right at the peak of Famicom mania. It really, you know, started to have a sort of ground swell in 1984 with the advent of third parties and big releases like Pac-Man and Zevius and Lodrunner and really snowballed during 1985. And in 86, you know, you started to see people in the media say, this is kind of looking like what happened over with Atari in America and saying, There's a lot of shit out here. So this was also a way for Nintendo to kind of keep that momentum going while also saying, hey, here's a new format, and we've got more control over this. This is a way to get the same games you love, but make sure they're good and new and more

powerful and cooler. So it's a pretty compelling sales pitch, and the disk system did very well for itself as an add-on, as expansions to a console go, I think it is the best selling and, you know, had the best install rate, attach rate of any major peripheral like this in history. I think the PC engine CD-ROM winds up beating it in attach rate in the end. Oh, really? Okay. I think it winds up over 50%, but that's also because NEC did the only smart move they ever made in the history of the PC engine and wound up, combining the CD-ROM and the PC engine into one unit. There were so many ways to buy PC engine hardware, just a panoply of options.

So many platform choices and variants. But, yeah, the duo was, to me, kind of like the gold standard. Sorry, super graphics. I mean, that three-year cycle that you talk about, it was based on the novelty of the gadget, right? You know, going from, you know, the super claw, whatever it was called, that Yokoi made in the 7-N. Ultra-hand. Thank you. Yes, the ultra-hand. And they found a gimmick, which was... We're grabbing your ultra-potatos. They found a gimmick. Super potatoes? That's it. Yes. They found a gimmick, which was, you know, what if you could continue without typing in these impenetrably long passwords, which for Dragon Quest was nutty. I mean, I don't remember how long the Dragon Quest passwords got, but I know it was like 50 or more characters. Dragon Quest, too, I think, was 54, if I remember correctly. And I'm not going to bother looking it up. It's not as bad as Maniac Mansion.

That's over 100. I remember weeping as an NES child trying to distinguish my, you know, cues and O's, my ones and L's. And it was just, I lost so many saves that way. And this also came at the time where Potopia had come out, and there was a big boom in adventure games. And that was a cartridge game that also had very long passwords. I think I heard that a lot of people just left the game console on.

So there's no way to save it. But that also meant that there were quite a few adventure games. that came out for the Famicom disc system. Oh, yeah. And some of them were, you know, they were bigger than the disk system could hold. So they came out on multiple disks. I know Nintendo had, they had a couple that were. Yeah, they had the Famicom Mukashi Banashi series, which were all, like, Japanese fairy tales.

They had the detective club series, which were obviously based on Portopia. Sunsoft put I had a handful of them, square put out a handful of them. Capcom put out at least one for the Famicom disc system. And don't forget, Onigashima was definitely a double disc. I think that might have been released in two parts, if I recall correctly. They had to buy them separately. They were separate disks. Yeah, but you needed to, like, beat the first one before you could even do the second one because it's the same, you know, second part of the same game.

What happened if you tried? What happens is it tells you you cannot continue unless you have save data from the, from completing the first half. So you'll put in the first, you'll put in the second disc, which was released about a month after the first one. Boot it up. It'll tell you to insert the disc from the first game. They'll load your save data, and then you switch back and start playing. So kind of like the stop and swap, but less likely to fry your console.

Yeah, so the disk system did, you know, it did offer something, I think, pretty compelling at the time. And Nintendo made some good calls with how they launched it. They launched it with a bunch of existing Famicom. games, including Super Mario Brothers, and I believe that the price on those discs was lower than the cartridges were. About half the price. Yeah. So there you go.

Basically, they put the value proposition right there like, oh, yeah, you've played pinball in Super Mario Brothers, but here's a way you buy this hardware. It's a little expensive, but look how cheap the discs are, and it's the full-ass games. And also, a lot of those early, you know, the Famicom ports had a blank backside so you could take those to a disc writer and you could put another game on the back side for like 500 yen or something. And, you know, it was kind of doubling your value right there. And they also launched it with The Legend of Zelda, which you could not have done on a cartridge. That was just not possible at that time for any cartridge system to create, to, you know, to play host to. So that right there is kind of the definition of killer app. Here's an experience that is kind of like, you know, to play a host to. So, that right there is kind of

like, you know, the action RPGs and RPGs that are on trend right now, but bigger and seamless, and you can just save your data right there, no passwords. And also, when you play the flute at the flute monsters, it sounds like a real flute because we sampled it. It's so cool. We're awesome by this disc system. But don't forget, you have to scream into the second controller to beat the enemies that were weak to sound. The pose voice. Full's voice, yes. One of many reasons that the gold cartridge is superior. The superior way to play Zelda. They didn't even fix that with the release on cartridge for Zelda in Japan. After the AV Famicom was out and it didn't have a microphone,

they still released Zelda in 1994 with that enabled. So was there no alternative way to get around the Paul's voice? You hit them with your sword something like 16 or 20 times. I like the American version, which you just shoot them with an arrow when they die. It works. Because the arrow makes noise, right? Pugh! Right?

I remember they kept the hints. The hints actually still said, Paul's voice is weak to noise, and I was befuddled by that. I don't remember if it was in the manual or in the game. And I'm like, the arrow makes noise? I don't get it. Yeah, localization was a little sketchy back in those days.

But nevertheless, the Legend of Zelda, we've talked about it once or twice on here, a pretty good game and a pretty good reason to buy a disc system. I think it was the major reason to purchase a disk system. If every person who, well, Legend of Zelda wound up selling around 2 million copies on the Famicom Disc System. And the Famicom Disc System sold 2.2 million copies in that first year.

So that's a lot of people buying it. It is pretty easy to find the Zelda Disc System disc at used game shops in Japan. So that's a good sign. But there were lots of other cool games that followed immediately in its wake. Super Mario Brothers 2 was a great choice. That came out like three or four months later after the launch and was really kind of timed perfectly. Super Mario Brothers had come out in September and was basically the best selling thing ever in Japan. And the kids loved it.

They tore it apart. They mastered it. they just dug into its innards and got everything out. And so Nintendo said, all right, you like that. Here's a version for you to spend even more time mastering it. And it doesn't like you very much. So you're going to have to work for it. And my understanding is that's all pretty well too.

How many times in a row do you have to finish the original Super Mario Brothers 2 before it unlocked the four additional World's A3Ds? Like four or eight times in a row, you have to win the game? You have to beat it eight times, but it saves every time you do it. so you don't have to leave the system on and beat it every time. No, I think they couldn't be done in cartridge. It couldn't be done yet, but we'll get to that. So what did the Famicom disk system do, beyond have disks?

The sound channel, which we touched on very briefly, maybe somebody else can fill in a little in the technical exactly what a wave table is, but it just sounds really nice. It adds a little bit of an extra sound shout to the music. Not all games use it. I don't think very many actually use it too much, but it's very distinct when you do hear it. It makes the sound effects much richer in the games that use it too. Well, WaveTable was one of the early ways of handling digitized sound.

So you've got the way that a computer or a system would make noise is playing a particular frequency, basically cycling the magnetist speaker on and off at a certain rate. wave table says do it at this rate for this period of time and you have to have a whole list of values like that. If you look at your waveform as you're recording right now, although I guess the listeners can't do that, then you would see almost the same thing. It's just compressed a lot. I think the main difference with Wave Table synthesis is the samples themselves are preloaded into memory. and instead of having to write logic to actually say,

now play a sound this loud, now play a sound that loud, it was loaded into hardware, and you just said one instruction, play this sample that's already loaded into the wave table at this volume, and it would just play it or loop it. And that was very, very CPU efficient on such a meager CPU system like the NES Famicom systems were. That's the gist of it, basically copying that process

from memory very quickly. It did take a lot more memory than trying to, than other methods of generating sound for video games at the time. And we wouldn't really see that later until the Amiga came out with a powerful enough CPU that would let them do things like mod trackers in software, where you could play four sets of wave tables all running in CPU at the same time. And games could even run at the same time as the mod trackers. So this was unheard of back in the Famicom days. So that's why they had to have the extra hardware lift. There were a few people who were doing things with it, but not many. And the Famicom was, I think, the first time you really saw that in a Japanese video game console.

I remember when I lived in Japan, I bought a CD of the Metroid soundtrack and remember being befuddled that it was so different from the one I grew up with in the U.S. And finally I figured out much much later that was the Wave Table on the FDS. And watching some videos of it in preparation for this episode, when Sammikov. gets hit. She goes like, oof, with a very distinctly feminine sound, and I think that was one of those early clues before you finish the game, and she posed in her, you know,

taking off her helmet and her bikini armor, whatever that was, that she was actually female, and I thought that was really cool. She just goes... Oh, there you go. Just waving. A few disc system games have digitized voice thanks to that

wave table synthesis. Dead Zone from Sunsoft, a really boring adventure game, but it has a few lines of spoken dialogue. Hmm. You know how the, there's a lot of famous Nintendo sound effects like the ho-ho-ho and the sound that is a punch out in Zelda 2. There's a whole bunch of those that are, I think, very distinct for the Famicom DeS system. Like the way that the bosses roar in Zelda 2, it's cool sounding.

Zelda in particular sounds a lot richer. And Metroid, it just the way the enemies explode. just sounds really cool. Yeah, the title screen music in Zelda is really nice in the Japanese version. And Zelda 2's title screen music sounds a lot less shrill than in the American version. On the other hand, Castlevania 2, I think sounds like ass on Famicom disc system. Yeah, I'm the other way around. I mean, that one seems to really use those sound channels.

Like, they completely redid it for the cartridge version. It does sound a lot richer. Yep. So I think to understand the Famicom disk system, like the physicality of it, first you need to understand that the Famicom itself was different than the American NES. It was a much smaller, more compact machine, had a very tiny footprint. It was very kind of cute and toy-like. It was white with some black and some like maroon trim.

And the maroon joystick control pads would store in the side of the system. system. So it was very contained, very, very compact. And the disk system was designed, designed to sit directly underneath the Famicom and basically be a base for it that lifted it up about, I don't know, four inches, but really didn't expand its footprint any. And the system itself actually plugs in through the cartridge port on the top of the Famicom, even though it's sitting. it. And there's a large, black, square, it's not really a cartridge. It's, it's kind of hard to describe. It's just like a box that sits in the cartridge port. It has a cartridge connector, but then it sits flat on top of the Famicom. And that contains, I believe, the extra RAM

that, you know, the disk system offers, and you can use that to expand the game's capability. that runs on a disk system over the Famicom basic, you know, RAM allocation, which is pathetic. And that's connected by a cable that plugs into the back of the disk system. And the disk system is larger than it needs to be, I would say, because you have the option of putting, I think, C-cell batteries, like six C-O-D. Okay, six C-cell batteries, yeah, into the... the machine, which probably runs it for like an hour. It's probably like game gear level. I've never tried that in self.

I used one set of batteries in my disc system for over three years. Keep in mind, it only has to run that motor for a couple of seconds. So it works fine. I have a boxed AC adapter for the disc system that I still haven't opened. It's new in-box, new old stock hardware. I just haven't bothered with it because it runs so efficiently off batteries. I haven't bothered. But remember, in Japan, space was always at a premium,

and your television and your Famicom were both plugged into the only outlet in the living room. And the, you know, what they call Rongotap, the power strips, were not very common. And if they were, they would probably take up too much room to use them in an average Japanese living room. So the C-cell battery solution was a pretty good one to not require a third AC plug or a Rondu tapu. Okay, comment retracted. It was exactly as big as it needed to be in order to help it to take up less space, if that makes sense. My thing that was always assumed the Famicom DIST system, because I grew up with an American NES with that mysterious expansion port on the bottom with that little cover that you could pull off, I just assumed the Famicom was the same way and that the DIST system clicked into that. And I finally learned that you don't have to put the disk system underneath the Famicom.

It's just connected with a flexible cable. And you could do them side by side. You could do them any way you want. And in fact, as far as I know, the American NES expansion port was not ever used for anything official. Is that correct? Yeah. It was, yeah, that's a whole thing. The Famicom, it was built to be expandable.

Like Masayuki, Uyamora, when he designed the hardware, I was fortunate enough to speak to him about the NES design and launch 2015. And he said, you know, like we, I specifically wanted this to be a future proof console. So it has like, you know, it's innate capabilities,

but there's a lot of expansion options in the cartridge slot. And, you know, those options allow you to pump all kinds of extra data and connect to other basically external processors. And it took a while for those to actually happen. And we'll talk about that. But that potential was there from the start by choice. And so that's why it plugs into the cartridge port because that is where all the

Famicom's basically added capabilities are. And when they brought it to the U.S., I don't know why. when they stuck the cartridge slot inside of that cover and added the little spring thing to it, they also said, we should take a bunch of these connections and put them on the bottom side of the console. So there are fewer pins in the actual cartridges,

but also all the things that cartridges do in Japan that have the expansion capabilities, you can't do on the NES. So even Nintendo's own official MMC-5 chip has the ability to host extra sound channels, but that's something you can't do on the NES because you can't access those pins in the cartridge slot. They no longer exist.

They're on the bottom of the machine. So kind of a weird mangling of the intended purpose for the console, but the disk system was really maybe not the first, probably Famicom Basic was the first real use of those expansion capabilities because the, you know, the cartridge that it came with

had a battery backup with double A's and could, I think it also had RAM in it, so it could do extra things. But it was kind of the first real mainstream, like, widespread use case. I don't think Famicom Basic was something that every kid was like, oh my God, yes, I can't wait to program my own primitive Famicom games.

So the disk system took advantage of that. and it's not the disk system's fault that cartridges came along soon after that took even better advantage of that. I'm shocked that Glob never found a way in the U.S. to use that expansion port. Like, you've got the Game Genie in the top. They've got to have had a cable that plugs in the bottom and called it the Game Genie bottle or the, you know,

rub it three times and it plays extra sound channels. Yeah, but I mean, I feel like that's a very arcane use case for something that would have been very complicated. So I can I can kind of see why they didn't do that. It would have been cool. Like, it's ridiculous that we had this expansion capability in the hardware that Nintendo was just like, eh, nah. So is it not physically possible even with a cartridge adapter to plug in the FDS unit

into an American NES? Like, I know the pins don't quite line up, but is it not physically possible? I always wonder that. I've never tried, and I suspect it is. but who knows, people do weird stuff with this stuff. I'd imagine you'd probably have to do something with it. Because, I mean, hey, it's not going to fit just because of the shape. Like, the first time I got a Famicomptus and anything was from a garage sale of some guy that was moving overseas and was getting rid of all this stuff.

But he didn't have the RAM cartridge with it or the AC Dept, which doesn't really matter, as we just discussed. I always wanted to try it. But, like, I've tried other games to, like, try to get them to fit. Like the Go-Amon Guiden games are too large to use an adapter just physically doesn't go in there. And I tried to run it through a game genie so at least it fits, but it would never boot. So if it couldn't do something as simple as just a regular Famicom game, I had assumed that something like a RAN adapter would just be unfeasible. Yeah, there are lots of Famicom games that use some of those expansions for their own chips.

And so wind up not working on an NES. But I also don't want to say that it's impossible to rig up some kind of Frankenstein NES made of tubes and wires going everywhere that wouldn't be able to run it. It would be interesting project for somebody. Challenge issued. Yeah. I mean, you can do some really wild things with that hardware if you're willing to jury rig something. So a few years back, you know. know the the Famicom Carts, A-bit Music Power, Kira Kira Star Night Deluxe, et cetera,

Aster Ninja Man, the guy who designed those Riki, I went to interview him for one of the limited run releases of his games and went to his studio. And the first thing I saw when I got in there was this amazing contraption that was a Famicom. And then there was in the cartridge slot. It was kind of like an expanded, exploded version of the Famicom Disc System RAM adapter. It was a device sitting flat on top of the Famicom, and there were like six cartridges plugged into it. And if I looked at them and realized, each was a cartridge with a specialty audio chip in it. So there was like the Sunsoft chip, the VRC6 from Konami, one of the Namco chips. It was like cartridges that had those specialty chips.

And he was using that. He had somehow worked with someone to construct this device that allowed him to basically create the ultimate Famicom music sequencer, where he could pull audio capabilities from each of those chips and create like these, this incredible symphony of sound just from original Famicom hardware and cartridges. So if he can do that, I would say 100%. You could absolutely rig up something that would take a Famicom cartridge and, you know, run the appropriate pins into the NES cartridge slot and then run the other pins underneath to the bottom to the expander slot. Would the NES actually make use of the audio? Would you be able to take advantage of like the extra visual capabilities?

I don't know. but in theory, yes, you could absolutely do that. But again, there is the question of like, what the hell is the point? And in the case of Ricky, the point is that he likes to design games centered around like maximizing Famicom hardware and getting amazing music out of the hardware. So yeah, like there is a use case for the rig that he created. But if you're just wanting to play like the disk system version of Zelda on NES, I feel like there are better ways to go about that than building some sort of contraption. But I also realize that for hackers and modders, just the possibility that you can do something or just the question of can I do this is sufficient motivation.

So I would love for this conversation to spark someone to actually embark on that Odyssey or better yet to say, oh yeah, I did that already. Check it out. Here's my YouTube video. Share it with us. I'd love to see that. That's the kind of stuff that I really, I could never do myself. I don't want to do myself, but I love when I see that people have done it. I was very lucky to see our friends Anamonaguchi perform live at Meow Wolf, Denver, and all of their bits and bobs of crazy hardware. I would not be surprised if they had, you know, NES mappers and other chips that they ripped out of cartridges. I'm sure I saw Commodore 64 sit. station on stage where they use the Commodore 64's amazing synthesizer to create their music. And so this is a whole world now. So other features, in addition to more music or, you know, expanded audio channels and additional RAM offered by the disc system where obviously expanded storage capabilities at the time been, how big did you say Super Mario Brothers was, 64K? Was it 32 or 64?

Somebody here knows that. I feel like it was 32, but I could be wrong. I thought it was 32, but... Sounds right. And then the disk system is closer to 64, right? 64 per side, yeah. Yeah, by side. And you could have multiple discs.

So, you know, if you really wanted to, you could, like, you could put ribbon on there. And it would be several, you know, not just 20 CDs, it would be several thousand Famicom discs, but you could do it. And, you know, each screen would be a please set side 7,000.3. And each disc side was 64 kilobytes, and you could load half of it roughly into the RAM of the FDS RAM adapter. So, you know, you might have to, you know, reload or be clever about which 32 kilobytes you loaded at any given time. And that's why you had to, you know, flip it or reload it from time to time. We're going to talk about quick disks later, I'm sure, because that's going to be a fascinating chunk about how that impacted the game.

Yes, you put all sorts of stuff in the notes. So we should talk about that in a moment. But I didn't realize the amount of. RAM that it contains for holding data is the size of Super Mario Brothers effectively. Pretty much. So is that where kind of the hacking systems and programs and customization for that game came from? Oh, yeah. Well, what happened basically is Nintendo discovered that once you release magnetic media into the wild,

you no longer control any of it. So the initial release of the Famicom Disc System let you write whatever to the disk using the drive. Later on, because of this, they wound up restricting the right capabilities to certain parts of the disc, but the cat was out of the bag, and so some people created a hex editor, a program that could load in a chunk of memory from a computer and let you make any modifications you want to it.

and the first one to be released like this was the Tonkachi editor. It's a very rough program. It would be a nightmare to use. It basically is an entire screen of hexadecimal numbers, and you can very slowly using the Famicom GamePad change each value. But included on that disc, if you went to an option from the main menu, you could, it would play a message that was basically insulting Nintendo and then tell you to insert a copy of Super Mario Brothers. And then it would load Super Mario Brothers and rewrite it with a completely different set of levels.

Interesting. I was just reading an article about this like a couple of weeks ago about what an arduous task it was, but how it kind of created this this cadre of. of very determined programmers who went on to do interesting things. I mean, if you watch awesome games done quick, you see them do arbitrary code execution exploits in Super Mario World, where they're rewriting the code of Super Mario World from within Super Mario World. And that's what this was, right? A hex editor is the simplest way without exploiting glitches to rewrite the code. And they could make Super Mario brothers do whatever they want.

And I think Tonkachi, Mario, was the first game. game that had like the troll-style kizo effects where you jump expecting to be able to make it across a gap and oops there's an invisible coin block there and you fall to your death and i'd love that that start the whole culture there's only one of them in the game or maybe two but they're in the same place uh what they really did that's weird with it is the version of super maria brothers that it writes is basically somebody figuring out how super maria brothers works So every stage has some weird trick or gimmick that Nintendo would never put in Super Mario Bros. Or Super Mario Brothers 2 because it's kind of broken.

But you have to do things like hit a power up and turtle simultaneously in order to get a power up. And that's on the first stage. That's the very beginning. You have to grab onto a flagpole top that's floating off by itself and use that to phase through a wall. You have to ride a platform while facing left, and Mario will slide through surfaces that way. There's another stage where you have to jump at just the right points to cause Mario to advance on the screen further than the scrolling normally goes, and that breaks a pipe later on to let you continue the game. It is absurd and broken, and if Super Mario Brothers 2 is for experts only,

only, this is for crazy people only. So basically, they took Metroid and it's wall walking and said, what if the entire game were this, but deliver it? It is all speed running tricks all the time before anybody knew what they were. And that's very cool. And also, that's also kind of the spirit of Super Mario Brothers, too, the official game, just maybe not quite to that degree. So it seems like the disc system was kind of a home for, weird things happening and people deliberately and unintentionally really kind of twisting the boundaries of video game design in weird and interesting ways, which, you know, that's not something they

invented for disk system, but, you know, a device that has that much of an install base and that much of a market penetration that kind of puts that sort of thing in the mainstream, which is what makes it interesting. It was the first place that you found unlicensed software on Nintendo hardware. All of those sexy games. I think that was something Ben wanted to talk about, but I think that's kind of its own separate episode. Not necessarily just the sexy games, although maybe.

But we can talk about body conquest some other time. I feel like that's a discussion all its own. It's a very boring game. Retronauts After Dark. I mean, you even got an official ROM hack for Super Mario Brothers on DiscSys system with the all-night Nippon Super Mario Brothers, the prize that was given away that was just the game, but they hacked in like effigies and caricatures of the radio hosts as Gumbas and that sort of thing.

Well, it was just one host that replaced all the enemies and the other hosts were captured by Kupa. Okay. Takeshi Miki. That's what bent him. That's what turned him evil. I mean, to be fair, even on the switch, the NES online classic versions have like the original versions and they have the ROM hacked versions which can make them more approachable, easier to play.

I think Fantasy Star was re-released that way where it was like I had a map that they hacked in. Oh, the M2 version of Fantasy Star, that is, that is its own phenomenal thing. It is maybe the best classic game remastering I've ever experienced. Beautiful. That's something beyond the bounds of like, here's a ROM hack. It's incredible. The SP editions that I'm thinking of on the... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some of those are hacked, and some of them are just like, basically, here's a save stated and interesting part of the game. Go for it. One thing about all night Nepon Super Mario Brothers is that it was not solely a prize. The night after they announced the contest, they said there was too much response, and so they were going to sell copies. It was only available through one retail store. So you had to go to the, I think it was the Fuji Broadcasting store in Odaiba to buy a copy for the very short time that it was available in December of 1986.

So really, Nintendo's always been this way, is what you're saying. Always. Okay. Yeah, but, you know, the way Super Mario Brothers works on disk system, the way data is stored, is different than, you know, on a cartridge, on a cartridge, you have like the two programs, like the two chips basically. You have the program and the character ROMs and those both kind of dump into memory. But the disk system did not work that way. So the way

levels are structured, the data is different, which means the minus worlds are wildly different in the disc version of Super Mario Bros. than the cartridge versions, which is interesting. So, yeah, there were lots of interesting kind of side effects of the fact that this was a different way of handling data for the console. And also, you know, the other benefit is that it was rewritable. So you could save data, but also you could do, you know, intended game data, like your progress in Zelda or Metroid or Section Z.

Or if you want, your hacked version of Mario where you tweaked the hex code. I mean, speaking of failed hardware, you know, I was a slobbering. Nintendo fanboy and reading every word in Nintendo Power about the 64D rewritable expansion for the Nintendo 64. They promised what if you could play Zelda, but the whole world would stay exactly as you changed. If you cut down a blade of grass, the 64D will remember and that blade of grass will remain cut. And like, none of that ever happened with, what was it, magneto optical storage? I mean, what a failure of an expansion system that was. I mean, it was a zip drive, basically.

And they made a lot of promises from other three about how it was like a generational game and you could plant a tree and it would grow as you experienced the game. And then Microsoft said the same thing for Fable. I think a lot of developers were obsessed with planting a tree and eventually coming back to find it grown. It is a weirdly common promise. Has a game ever actually done that besides Animal Crossing? I guess you can do it in Minecraft. Yeah. I think we touched it briefly, but in addition to low times, depending on the game, you'd also have to swap the sides of the disc a lot.

What I have to imagine is maybe not that big a deal with the Japanese version because the Famicom is quarter controllers and you were never really that far away anyway. Compared to how it would come over if it came over in America where everybody has these enormous living rooms and having to sit up every time you enter a new area in Castlevania, too. would, I think it'd infuriated a lot of people. Most developers tried to minimize that, at least. In Castlevania 2, the side flip is when you pass through the cliff. That's why you have, that's why every kid got super confused there. It's because they had to put in a side flip. Hmm. Interesting.

But I guess I can see, based on the way the world is structured, how that makes sense. I mean, if you think about it, every expanded piece of hardware, the mappers that came later, the FDS. It just tricked the Famicom hardware into thinking it had a different set of 32 kilobytes of ROM available. And so it was just kind of swap back and forth. And that's what the, you know, please set side B was about. It was, okay, now let's swap in a new 32 kilobytes.

Let's swap in a new 32 kilobytes. It costs six to eight seconds every time you did it. We tried to minimize it. But the later mapper tips were able to do that in, you know, microseconds or milliseconds. It was the same thing. They were setting side B. It was just there are a bazillion side Bs on one car. I do love the little click-clack noises.

I've seen some Amiga emulators that do that, just like a digitized sound of it. I wish that Nintendo would build that end of Switch Online when you play Famicom DIST system stuff. There's some Commodore, I guess they're flashcards essentially, but they play the 1541 drive sounds when it loads. I love it. Indelibly stained into my brain at the sound of the 1541 disc head crashing against the repeatedly. Was that the disc drive that you could program to create music? Yes.

Oh, yes. Well, you could do it with a lot of different disc drives, but the 1541 was especially good at it. Not so much with the disk system. It's just, oh, well. So one thing to understand about the disc system is that it was a semi-unique medium data format. Ben, would you like to walk us through this? you've made extensive notes to talk about what the heck a QuickDisc is. Yes.

So Nintendo's had a friendship with Mitsumi, another manufacturing company corporation. They were the ones that made the Famicom controllers, and they continued that through the Super Famicom GameC. And I found out they made one of the 3DO controllers, even. But they partnered with Nintendo after they had already developed the system called QuickDisc. Quick disks were not like standard floppies that you might know on the Apple 2 or Commodore 64. Traditional floppy disks have data recorded in rings, and each ring is a track, kind of like a ring in a tree. And so the disc head can know it can jump forward or backward to read data anywhere on the disc. It's called Random Access.

Mitsumi QuickDisc was not like that. It was much more like a vinyl record where the data was recorded in one long continuous spiral. And what that meant is it was not a random access format, random access media at all. It was much closer to a fancy tape drive. You always had to read the data from the beginning to the end. What you did with that data was up to you. And so because there was about 64 kilobytes of data, but only 32 kilobytes of ROM, it would do a single pass, which took, and I'm sure David and Kirk can correct me.

I think it's like six to eight seconds. Is that correct? I think it's a little bit longer, but it's probably variable dependent on how well upcapture. system is. Right. But not 30 seconds or a minute. Relatively quick. Yeah. And so it would read that 64 kilobytes of storage, store some amount of it in RAM and character RAM and get up and running. But that's why you had to do multiple passes because it couldn't always seek directly to the data that it needed

like the systems on the Commodore 64 or the Apple 2 where you say, I need to jump to track 17, read sector 4, and now I've got my, you know, of a flower. It had to read the whole thing every time I needed to change anything. And yeah, so Mitsumi made this. The only change Nintendo made is they stuck on this piece of plastic on the end that spelled out the word Nintendo. And we'll talk, I'm sure, very, very soon about what they did with these letters. But that was their very weak attempt at A, making it so their disc couldn't fit in a typical Mitsumi quick drive, quick disk drive. And B, that, because they didn't want people to just have their home Sharp PCs with QuickDisc drives,

be able to read or write to the Nintendo disc system, sorry, the Famicom Disc System media. Shockingly, QuickDisc was used more than just in the Famicom Disc system. Besides Sharp using it in their early home computers, it was using a bunch of synthesizers to store samples because it was a good use case. It's nicer than tape. It's cheaper. It's quicker. And you don't need to jump around.

You can just read all the samples into memory. I heard it was also commonly used in word processors, which are different from computers, I'm afraid. It might be a little bit confusing to people who weren't familiar with the concept in the 1980s, but there were weak computers that only did typing. Basically a strict replacement for the typewriter. And yeah, so you needed, since you didn't have paper, you needed something to put your letters on, and the Mitsumi Quick disks were very popular because you just store it the whole do. document. And I believe the

WordPress is just overwrote some or all of the disc each time I wrote the document. So I'm not, I don't know for sure, but I believe that they didn't have the ability to say, like, let's have a file system with file names and multiple disks that are, multiple documents that are

organized differently. It's just a quick disk didn't have that capability. When I've done some hacking, don't tell Nintendo that, on the disc system, I have found that there are some organized structures, but they're probably just linear blocks divided up for people to keep track of what's where. Much like with cassette backup medium.

Many years ago at a video game store in New York City, I found a couple of those. They're definitely not Famicom disk system disks, but in the picture you put in the document to say they're gray. They don't have the little Nintendo spot there actually. And the guy just gave them to me because he didn't know what they were. there's some Chinese writing on them that says like pretty girl battle or whatever, something like that. They did not work in my Famicom disk system, and I was always curious to see what I would need to actually read them. I'm assuming they are Famicom games in some way, but just bootlegs. There's a really cool blog about a gentleman who bought some brand new Mitsumi Quick disks that were not Famicom Discs.

and he 3D printed the Nintendo logo and glued it on and was able to completely from scratch copy over a Nintendo Famicom Disc System Disc onto his homemade Mitsubi Quick Disc, and it works fine. Very cool. I knew that the Nintendo logo at the end, running along the bottom of a Famicom Disc System disk, is a copy protection measure, but I didn't realize that it was also designed as kind of like

a physical tab to keep it from working in other devices. That's interesting. It's a hardware interlock that physically prevents the disc drive from closing on the disc. If it can't push down enough into the first eye and the second or third end, the third end. The third end. And so obviously the pirate ones, you folks listening at home can't see this, but pirate disks just cut out the notches where the eye and the end with the dough. Oh, is that what those are. Okay.

Yeah. And that makes the whole big enough that the hardware interlock. is satisfied. But there's no software like on the NES. I've seen ones where people wrote different words into them.

And these were vintage ones. So back in the 80s, just chatting weird, I wish I could think of what words they used, but just different words that they placed at the end there and it still worked.

I've said that if it took hackers more than an hour to defeat the copy protection on the disc system, then they weren't worthy of the title hacker. I've seen those, I've seen those discs

myself when I lived in Japan in Akihabara, I remember seeing them with words like, you know, uh, hip mon or something, anything with an I and N in it. And they would, they would just use the I and the N as of middle finger to Nintendo. Because I'm assuming Nintendo was thinking it was some sort of legal protection as well, like, oh, they can't write the word Nintendo if we don't give them permission, but obviously they didn't do it. Much like how Sega thought that you, if the header of the ROM had to have the word Sega in it, then nobody could make Genesis games.

And it turns out that did. not work as legal protection. It's like how you look and how companies would check for bootlegging. Like they would check to see if their company had been removed from the title screen, the name. And if it had, then that was what would trigger the anti-piracy measures. Maybe this will be my next Patreon request, Jeremy, will be the history of the arms race between, you know, anti-piracy and pirates, because it's fascinating. It's still ongoing. It'll be interesting to see if our post-physical world, if the hackers can continue to get the upper hand.

I'm sure they will, and then there'll be pushback, and it'll be the war will continue. I think as David has mentioned, because there's so many unlicensed and non-legal copies of these floating around, collecting them is fraught with danger. You never know what you're going to buy when you buy a disk system game. It may be what it is labeled as. it may be nothing. And I always wonder how much lost media is out there. Because I know it took them forever to reconstruct some of the Citeleview games that were transmitted over satellite.

I'm assuming maybe David or Kurt, do you know? Is there at least one known lost episode out there of a Famicom Dissystem game that just hasn't been recovered and distributed widely? Not official, but I mean, there's no catalog of all this pirated stuff. So there's been, you know, dozens that have been dumped over the years. I mean, you have to assume there's something that probably nobody found, but there's no real way to verify it unless you can, you know, grab somebody from Hacker International and ask them. It's amazing that people are satisfied with the Famicom disk system, you know, it might be a 47,000 copy of something, but they would not be satisfied if it was a copy of an Atari 2,600 cartridge. There are a couple of Famicom Disc System games that don't really have good dumps. They tend to be the very late releases that are just copies of Famicom cartridges.

So you'll have a real struggle finding a good copy of the Disc System release of Twin Bee, but nobody cares because it's identical to the regular cartridge version of Twinby. You know, I know that there's, like, when it comes to the PC world, like, preservationists really want games in their factory form. And usually in these disc games, you know, data got written to it. So any data that got written to it is not considered, like, the original version. So I don't know the rompsets that are floating around. It's obviously very difficult to find a new disc of anything at this point. So it's worth kind of explaining what we're talking about here and why it's difficult to find some of these later Famicom Disc System releases.

And that's where the disc system, the disc kiosk, comes into place because a lot of the later releases were never given proper physical distribution. Nintendo or their partners never actually manufactured like TwinB as you mentioned or some other games that were, I believe, kiosk. only titles. I know Squarespace soft had a couple of them. Roughly a third of the library was kiosk only releases. Okay. So I didn't realize there was that much. But yeah, you could only acquire these games

by taking a blink disk to a, generally a convenience store, right? That's usually where they set up the kiosks or maybe at electronic shops. Yeah. And like inserting that blink disk in there, and

and saying, here's some money, put this game on my disc. And, you know, they were, there was a system here. This was, this was a, like, an official distribution system. So those games came with, you know, unique sticker sets for you to put labels on your disc. I was a long time ago shopping with Chris Kohler in Akihabara, and we ducked into some random bookstore underneath the train tracks. He might have mentioned this on the previous FDS episode.

And I was there when he came across, I can't even remember what the name of it was. It was one of Squares' disk kiosk only games. And it had, you know, the stickers and stuff, like a brand new label sheet that was not applied. So it was kind of like a rare and precious gym. He probably spent 20 bucks for it. You know, it wasn't like crazy expensive at the time. I'm sure now it would be hundreds. But at the time, there just wasn't that much awareness and that much hunger to acquire.

things like that. But they were out there and, you know, they are this kind of borderline somewhat ephemeral part of Famicom Nintendo history because they were games that had physical components to them that were official, but not an actual packaged release. And the instruction manuals were optional. If you wanted an instruction manual for the games that you wrote at this kiosk, it was another 100 yen. or so. So I wonder how many people went home and puzzled over their copy of their game

until they went back and said, I do need that manual after all. Some of these, they released a lot of, you wouldn't think of it for something else sort of like aimed at kids. There are a lot of complex strategy games on the Famicom disc system. Well, there were a lot of, I should say, strategy games were becoming kind of a big thing at that point. Coe was making their move, although the disc system got the kiddie ones. In particular, I'm thinking of the first SD Gundam game, a name that plagues any collector of Japanese games. My favorite thing about the disc kiosk was, of course, Disc Koon himself, the gugly-eyed yellow fellow who greeted you when you went up to it. And when I lived in Japan in 2001-02, there were still remnants of Disc Koon in various shops.

You know, he's kind of dingy and faded looking, but it struck me as kind of a, Gen X early millennial symbol of like I'm cool and hip and retro kind of like people who use those inserts for 45 RPM records as like a little three leg symbol of I'm hip and cool

disc cocoon kind of became this like I'm retro and cool because by the time I lived there DVDs and the internet were already pretty big and disc cocoon was sorely outmoded I miss him he was very cute. The disc kiosk had a television on top of it and it laid a

continuous loop with audio of Mario and Luigi playing around with the discs. So to demonstrate for you, don't bring a magnet to the disc and things like that. Eventually, the looping video got a DVD release. I got a copy of it, and you can find it online because of that. I also understand that retailers wound up kind of hating the disc kiosk, both for that annoying loop and for taking up space in their place and not getting much money

from it. That little Nintendo Mario Luigi loop is something that lives on through not only Nintendo products, but for a long time, when you rode the JR line

around the Yamonote Loop, there would be like little videos that played out and it was Mario and Luigi kind of doing the run-around thing about like, you know, train safety and that sort of thing. So that is clearly baked into sort of the collective conscious of a certain age of Japanese gamers. And we mentioned it in the last... You know, probably just not non-gamers who just happened to see those kiosk at the store.

We mentioned in the last episode, but the yellow discs that were the most common had no shutter over the magnetic medium. So Mario and Luigi had to tell you, don't put your grip grubby fingers inside the disc because it will be ruined pretty quickly. That magnetic dust cannot really handle your oily fingers. And as I understand it, the blue disks that came later did have a shutter, but those were used for more specific purposes. Right, David? Yeah, they were particular games.

They were the last batch of games. Well, okay. Let me back up here. The blue discs were initially for the contest games, the ones that Nintendo ran some kind of contest for and then you'd bring in your golf score or the

fact that you managed to date the idol in their romance sim. You'd take it into the store and rather than putting into the disc kiosk, you'd put it into the fax kiosk and it would send the records off to Nintendo and enter you into a

contest. Apparently initially these did pretty well. The first golf game which had a prize of the original punchout cartridge had 100,000 entries. I will say Japan as a nation has been living in the year 2000 since the year 1980, and the fax machines that were very popular in the 80s were still kicking it in the 2000s, and everything official has to be. We're still kicking it now in some places.

Oh, yeah, my first trip to Japan, I had to fax all of my information over, and that was in 2012. Goodness me. Okay, so I think we've done a pretty good job of explaining what the hell the disc system was. Now, to kind of wrap up this episode, I would like to talk about what the notes say is Chapter 3, the legacy of the Famicom Disc System. And this doesn't have to be a super detailed discussion, but just kind of the shakeout and the fallout of the disk system. You know, obviously it was very successful for a peripheral with, I believe you said, David, 2.2 million units eventually sold across Japan? Well, 4 million finally.

2.2 million in the first year, but then it quickly fell off to 750,000 in the second year and then down to 250,000 the next year and 100,000 after that. So it fell off pretty sharply and presumably the final million just got remandered. Yeah, I mean, I bought a new old stock disk system in like 2020, 2021. And it wasn't even that expensive. So they're around. And it's a great way if you can find one to get one that probably has an intact rubber band, which is always a rare treat. One of my biggest mysteries, and I know this isn't specific about the legacy, was I remember as an 80s consumer of any

that games like ExciteBike had a save and load feature in them that as far as I know did nothing. It was intended for the cassette player. But to use the cassette player, you had to hook that up through the keyboard and hook up the keyboard. You had to go through the Famicom expansion port. And guess what the NES didn't have. That's fascinating. I always assumed it was a Famicom Disc System feature, but I'm assuming ExciteBike was a versus game for FDS. Is that right?

There were. Yeah. There were Famicom Disc System. games that were some of those and then turned that feature into disc writing. So versus Excite Bike is one, but so is Wrecking Crew. They modified wrecking crew so that instead of saving to the cassette, it saves your levels to the disc. Yeah, there's a, there's a bunch of interesting variants of black box Nintendo games that showed up just on the FDS. And some of those have trickled their way into the U.S. I became aware of them myself with Animal Crossing when the

The first game that I unlocked in Animal Crossing, the first NES game for GameCube, was CluCluLand D. And I was like, what, what is that? And it turns out it's just like a fancy add-on to Clu-Clu-Land. But then you have Versus ExciteBike, which is effectively a new game. It has a two-player competitive mode, which ExciteBike did not have. And I don't seem to recall the red tint version of it having that either. It's been a long time since I've seen that.

But, you know, there was, I mentioned earlier, Mario Brothers Returns, which upgraded Mario Brothers to have graphics that looked much more like the arcade game, as opposed to like little miniature sprites that flickered and also had advertisements for rice toppings in it. Those advertisements made it the cheapest Famicom Disc System game. Oh, no kidding. So it's subsidized. Exactly.

It only cost 400 yen. Is that the one that you bought if you needed to overwrite at the disc writer kiosk with a new game? Very well could be. Because I think, Jeremy, you mentioned that you know, you would bring a blank disc to the disc kiosk, but really it was much more like the VHS, where if you were tired of watching the same episode of Inspector Gadget over and over again, you would record on top of it and get a new thing, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and, you know, that spirit lived on for the Game Boy and Super Famicom with the Nintendo Power kiosks,

which had flash cartridges, and you could write things on there. So one of my favorite things to do at Japanese retro shops in Tokyo, Kyoto, whatever, is just dig through all the Nintendo Power Game Boy cartridges, because sometimes you find interesting things. Usually it's just like the same old things. So here's Solar Striker again. Hooray, oh, it's Aliway. But you do find interesting things,

and there were a couple of games that were distributed only through that system, like Balloon Kid. I think it was called Balloon FightGB, which was the colorized version of Balloon Kid. That was only released as a Nintendo power cartridge. So, yeah, Nintendo kept that vibe alive until they discovered, I guess, we could replace this download technology

with paper cards that you scan through an optical reader on your Game Boy. The E-reader, yes. That was a stopgap until a virtual console came along. And then it was basically the disk system kiosk, direct to you. I mean, Nintendo really kind of stumbled when they started with the FDS, and I think that did impact the legacy a lot. From what I did some research in Game Machine magazine, Namco claimed Nintendo wanted to own copyright on all third-party games released for Famicom

Disc System. I'm assuming for piracy worries, and a lot of third-party developers that give them cold feet, I mean, David probably knows better, but I think it took a little while for third-priest to even appear on that. the FDS, right? No, they occurred pretty quickly. Okay. My guess is that it's not a piracy thing. It is a Nintendo control thing. Prior to Famicom third-party titles launching, all console releases on Japanese consoles were published by the console manufacturer.

So if you look at things like Namco's game on Sega SG-1000, those are all published by Sega. Konami published a few games on SG1000. Those were published by Sega. So the idea was that, you know, like the original Atari license, not a licensing scheme, but basically manufacturing scheme where the console maker controlled everything. And Nintendo started out that way. From what I understand, Namcoe and Hudson basically said, we're going to publish our games.

Like, we understand this hardware and we're just going to do it. And kind of, you know, the same way that EA forced Sega to open up the Genesis later, just kind of did it. And Nintendo kind of had to go along with it and sort of embraced third parties out of necessity, which ended up being a good thing. Those third party games did a lot to lift the popularity of the Famicom and to expand its library beyond what Nintendo could produce itself. So it was good. But then, like I said, things started to snowball. The game quality started to taper off. And I think Nintendo said, there's no quality control.

And also, we're not making nearly enough cheddar off of this. So it was too late for them to put the genie back in the bottle for Famicom. But this was around the same time that the NES launched in the U.S. in Europe. And they had the TEN Nest chip in there, which required third parties to essentially use Nintendo for manufacturing. And they couldn't force third parties to work with that scheme on Famicom because it was kind of out in the world already. But I think they really wanted to do that with disk system.

But third parties were like, you know, we've already got this setup on the cartridges, so maybe we'll just stick with those. That's probably why one of the reasons why the Dragon Quest games never showed up on disk system. The first Dragon Quest game really should have been a disk system game, but it was not, and I think that was a big part of it. They went directly to battery backup, right? What's that? They eventually went directly to battery backup.

Was it DQ4? That was three. Three? Three, yeah. But that was, what, 19888 by that point? So that was kind of in the either, you know, the save system to replicate the disk system save feature with the static RAM that had already. you know, been around in the U.S. for a year by that point. But I think, you know, as of the legacy of what was possible with the disk system,

it did impact the later, you know, ways we were confident that, yeah, people want to save their game. That just became, you know, a de facto assumption for any game that was longer than, you know, an hour at a sitting was that you would be able to save your game. And passwords just didn't exist after, like you said, 88 or so. And that was a huge impact, I think. And that's not been my experience playing 1989 in any other. games, but yeah. Oh, no.

Yeah, they were still, it cost money. So if they cheaped out, like, yeah, I can't remember where the Guardian legend came out, but that was a big one. Yeah, so used passwords. Yeah. Legacy of the Wizard. There's a lot of 80, 89 games, at least on NES, not necessarily Famicom. But Castlevania 3, that was 90.

That's still a password system. Very simple. The Mega Man games never went to a battery save. So, yeah, like, there were some games. where it really didn't matter. Like, is it really that hard to punch in some little red dots on a grid for Mega Man? No, it's fine. Like, it would have been stupid

to pay an extra $10 for the cartridge just so that they could have the static RAM in there. But, you know, for something like CoA's games, or even baseball stars, you know, there's so much data being saved and so much variety, so much, you know,

flexibility to the data, that it did make sense to have a more expensive cartridge. And it was just a better experience. Did any of the Megadrive Genesis games have passwords? I only remember even Fantasy Star 2 had battery backup at the very beginning. And I can't remember if any had passwords. So I think Sega just jumped on it wholly after the Mega Drive came out.

There must be some that had passwords. I just don't remember. I'm sure there are, but I have not experienced enough of the Genesis Library at this point to say with confidence, why yes. It's got to be pretty obscure. Because even like I remember the first time I heard of a battery backup game was Fancy Star for the master system, and that was 88 when that came out here, I think. So, yeah, action games, something where it wasn't mandatory, but RPGs, unless there's something that they really cheaped out on, I can't think of any.

Yeah, I mean, RPGs, you don't want to have to punch in a password. That's just, that's bad times. I love the idea of Onigashima requiring the first disc save system to be read to allow you to play the second game, the second disc in the series. Were there any other FDS games that required you to link the progress in one to the next one? Because that was such a cool feature in later games. PlayStation did that. Pretty much all of the two-disc games had some kind of lockout like that.

So if you wanted to solve the mystery in the Jengoku Subaru series, I forget which one has a two-disc game, but one of them was, then you had to have insert the first disc and switch to the second. But would we have Metal Gear Solid, you know, Psycho Mantis reading your save card and saying, Ah, I see you a friend of Castlevania. That could have happened. No, it was just the adventure games that they did. That one, Yuki, I think, was one of the other ones.

Time Twist, which is a weird time-trip. Definitely does. I had to jump through some hoops to get that to work. Um, there was one, Square was planning an epic RPG called Saken Nensetsu, and that was supposed to be a multi-disc game. And that got canned before it went anywhere, but I imagine it would have worked similarly. All right. So, um, there are some interesting notes in here. Um, let's see. Oh, yeah, just kind of recapping what we were talking about with, um, the copyright issue. Uh, you said Namco was the one that pushed back, which makes sense, uh, because Namco was definitely creating a lot of static with Nintendo. They really felt, my understanding is that they felt like their early Famicom releases

did a lot to cement the popularity of that system. And they didn't deserve to be treated like every Johnny Come Lately Third Party. And Nintendo was like, no, it's our console and you're just kind of showing up there. And you've got to follow our rules. So that's why you have things like Namco games, not showing up under the Namco label on NES until 1993, and Namco disc system games not appearing until disc writer titles appeared on kiosk in 1990. So, yeah, they definitely were pushing back, and they gave a lot of love to the PC

engine and turbographics. Yeah, if Namco and Sega were rivals, Namco and Nintendo were enemies. When it comes to legacy, though, I think the biggest legacy of the Famicom Disc System was because the piracy was so rampant, I think a lot of other future game manufacturers really leaned in hard to anti-piracy mechanisms and avoided getting copied. I mean, the next big obvious failure was the Dreamcast, where their GDROM system was trivially, you could just plug in the drive to a PC and then read and write whatever you wanted with it because it was basically a Windows PC on their funky microprocessor.

And so other than that mistake, I feel like a lot of the arms race between pirates and manufacturers really accelerated hard after the FDS kind of made it so easy to pirate and really impacted the popularity. I mean, if the department stores aren't getting money from these copies, right? They're getting just pennies from the disc kiosk writers. They're not going to get anything from pirates. And I think people really got cold feet with rewritable media after that. Yeah, magnetic media, we really don't see it again in consoles until the Xbox. And, of course, the 64DD, which is its own really restricted format boondoggle, I would say.

Yeah, well, also, we didn't need rewritable media because, like, a year, two years after the disk system came out, we move along to the world of optical media and the PC engine CD-ROM, which launched in, what was it, like December 88. So, you know, I guess that's like two and a half years after the Famicom disk system. But right around the time that the three-year fad started to fade, you know, you had Game Boy as Nintendo's answer to the three-year fad cycle and PC engine CD-ROM as Hudson's answer to the Famicom disc system three-year fad cycle. Yeah, one's problem there was that, at that, as much as the Famicom Disc System was the cheap option. The unit costs as much as the Famicom, and then the media costs nothing effectively. The CD-ROM, not so much.

It costs two or three times as much as the system, and then CD-ROM duplication in 1988 was very expensive. That is definitely a problem, and that's something that I've been talking about a fair amount in my turbographic videos, because there's so much cool stuff on turbographics for 1989, 1990. But God damn, it was so expensive. And I know that, you know, there was more of a stomach for investing in pricey electronics and pricey things for among Japanese consumers, partially due to the economy. But I think also just there's kind of a mindset kind of collectively within the culture there that if something is worth, you know, doing, it's worth doing well, it's worth investing in. You don't have to own everything.

It's just like invest in the things you really want and the quality is going to reflect the investment you make. I could be misreading that, but that's certainly the impression I've gotten through the years, whereas Americans are like, give me a lot of things cheap. So I think the disc system actually would have been a good format for Americans, whereas the CD-ROM,

It had to come down in price quite a bit before Americans were like, yeah, that's my lifestyle. Funny enough, with the disk system, I found a lot of the people who had nostalgia for it were mainly nostalgic for the fact that games were so cheap. I always thought, like, since I was a kid at the time, I always had to go through my parents. And my parents, like, they would have never bought an additional upgrade. They were like, we already spent 100 bucks in this Nintendo. we're not going to spend $100 bucks on another disc system. So my understanding is always

framed through stuff like that. I do kind of wonder if the legacy of some of its more important titles were maybe damaged a little bit just because they weren't as widely accessible because I knew at the end of its life, Zelda and Castlevania and a couple of other Konami games got re-released on cartridge.

But Metroid and Kidegaris and Zelda 2, Castlevania 2, those were disk system only. So I wonder if it just never proliferated the same way, you know, up until emulation and especially, you know, the Game Boy Advance Free Releases in the week. Virtual Console brought those games back.

But like, you know, Kid Eccrace and Metroid were both games that a lot of kids had, so they were popular compared to, you know, you wouldn't have the same penetration over there. I love that. Yeah, I wonder. Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead, Jerry. Oh, I was just going to say, I wonder if re-release's Fed Potipers. popularity or popularity fed re-releases. Because if you look at the games that were reissued in the U.S.

as part of the Players' Choice Series or, you know, the original. You had Zelda and Zelda 2, but you also had Punch Out. You had Metroid. So those games were not reissued in Japan. I feel like Metroid, Kidikaris, Punch Out, like they just fared better here. They resonated more with the American audience. And clearly, Cadicorus didn't resonate as much as Metroid because they didn't bother to put it into like, you know, a blue box or something. It was just the silver box that disappeared. No child could beat the first level. It's why.

It was a backward difficulty curve, yes. But that's the role-playing influence for you. I love the note from David earlier in the doc here about that the Hudson approached Nintendo to license their hue card to use as a rewritable medium for the Famicom. And Nintendo kind of ran with it for a while and then said, nah, we change our mind. Peace out. And that's kind of foreshadowing for what obviously became the PlayStation later that, you know, Nintendo's dabble with optical media said, yeah, we can't control it enough of Sony is actually developing it. So peace out.

We'll see you later. Nintendo seems to have a pretty long history of that. That is Yamauchi for you. Yeah, I actually did not know that anecdote. I've never come across that before, which I find absolutely. fascinating. It's interesting that Sega beat Nintendo and Hudson to the punch with the MyCard format in 1985, though that was not rewritable. Yeah, these were B cards for the MSX that they were trying to adapt. And from what I found in Japanese sources,

Nintendo backed away because it would end up being too expensive, but still don't have your partner develop 75% of a new console and then tell them to go away. Yes, well, fortunately they would never do that again, and they would be great partners to all of their potential collaborators forever and ever. That was sarcasm, by the way. So just to kind of wrap up here, I did have a few questions to spur some final conversation. First of all, how do we feel, if at all, disk system shaped or influenced game design as a whole? console game design specifically. Zelda.

I mean, like, again, Dragon Quest was already, like, when did Dragon Quest come out? May 86. So this, it was a couple of months old by that point. I mean, I really feel like they were spurned on by the success of PC games like Xenadu, that they really wanted to make it more than just a Donkey Kong playing console. So that was their first evolution in that. The same thing with adventure games. Just more complex games at the time, more mature games.

I mean, I like David's comment that, you know, game design will expand to fill whatever the platform can do. And so that's why you see all these CD-ROM games that came out with all the Red Book audio that didn't really need it. And the 50th time in Return to Zork when I heard the old guy say, They want some rock, of course you do. The grainy full motion video on Sega CD. People just force the use of whatever the platform can provide.

It's more than that. The storage space actually is a huge influence in it. I'm not the one who came up with that phrase, but somebody in the 90s, and I wish I could remember who at this point, but it's been 30 years, and I'm sorry I'm stealing that developers joke. game design is a gas and it expands to fill the available space. So if you've got 64 kilobytes, then you expand to fill 64 kilobytes. And then if you've got, you know, the two sides there, 140 kilobytes total for the disc, then your game expands to fill that space.

That's the way it's always wound up working out. So I feel that the Famicom Disc System did. have an impact for sure. You know, a lot of the things that resulted from disk system were inevitable evolutions in video gaming, but I feel like a lot of the direction that game design took, especially coming from the Japanese console side, really reflected, even on cartridge, the capabilities that the disk system introduced. If you look at, you know, we kind of touched on this, but the disc system quickly became

obsolete because people started realizing, oh, the expansion capabilities of the Famicom aren't just limited to the disk system, like they're built into the cartridge slot. So we can add all of these extra features, you know, co-processors and more memory and things like that into the cartridges and basically have little computers running inside in parallel to the Famicom CPU. But if you look at the expansions, the added capabilities, of those cartridges, they tend to mirror what you saw in the disk system, the ability to save data, the ability to incorporate more expansive, better music, and of course, you know, greater amounts of data. I can't really think of that many Famicom games and NES games that made use of

expansion capabilities for something weirder and more unusual in that. The things that the Famicom disk system brought to the table for Nintendo ecosystem developers carried back over into cartridges even after the disc system became obsolete

and really had a huge impact on game design within the Nintendo world. And it took a while, I feel, for the Sega universe to catch up with that. If, you know, I've been playing Famicom or Master System and early Genesis games. And, you know, as technically impressive as they are,

they do feel much more arcade-focused, much more simple and action-oriented than you were seeing at the same time on Famicom and NES. And I feel like, you know, the developers just weren't dealing with those specific capabilities that they weren't necessarily reflected in the master system and Genesis universe for a while. And so you had kind of two parallel tracks of game development and game design philosophies happening where Sega was more like, here's the classic console arcade style.

And Nintendo with, you know, the, here are games that aspire to be closer in nature to computer adventures and, you know, go beyond just the mere limitations of arcade action. And I feel like that really, I feel like that really had a big impact on kind of the shape and nature of those libraries. And then you had Hudson kind of walking a line in between the two, really great arcade-style games, but also games that had a little more to chew on than stuff you saw on Sega systems at the time. So, yeah, that's kind of where I stand on the disk system. Like, games would have evolved without it, but it sort of spurred evolution and technical innovation and also the way developers thought about how they approached software.

Going into this, I always wondered, if Nintendo could see two years into the future, would they have bothered with the disc system? Like, if they would have known that cartridges would have become more advanced, Like, was there still a point? Yeah, you know, I think, like I said earlier, they wanted to rebuttal the genie of licensing and control over third parties. So I think they probably would have taken the swing anyway. I think they really kind of, yeah, it's hard to say. Nintendo does a lot of things that have a very short shelf life.

So I don't know that it would have been out of character for them to have pushed the disk system anyway, just to kind of, kind of create, you know, some avenue to get a little more control over Famicom licensing, but maybe not. I don't think the disc system was a failure financially for Nintendo. They probably weren't happy with it. You can tell because Nintendo kind of retreats from it pretty quickly after 1987 ends. But they certainly, it's a situation where Nintendo would probably probably be a situation where Nintendo would probably probably do it again just because, yeah, it worked for us for a little while. We've got our

money out of it. We're happy. Let's move on. I think the biggest impact I see from the rewritable media on game design itself is it gave games time to breathe in that you didn't have to lean so hard as a game designer into. Let's make this game hard as balls because it's only got about two hours of content because ram sizes are so small. Ram is tiny. Let's just make it Teenage Ninja Turtles. and you have to struggle to complete this. And I think games like Zelda, sure, they were hard, but they let the game take its time to reveal what it had to you

without leaning on just difficulty level. And that was a very lasting impact, I feel like a lot of later games through the early 90s said, yeah, let's not make the game super, super hard. Nobody's going to say, link to the past was super hard, or Final Fantasy for easy type for US was very hard. And they didn't know.

they could give consumers time to breathe, and the game would still be fun, even if it wasn't an arcade-style difficulty gauntlet. Final question. Did we miss out by not getting the disc system in America? No, I don't think so. I mean, there's a couple of interesting games there, but when you look over the stuff that, like, Nintendo or Konami or any of the companies chose to port, I think we really did get most of the best ones. And there's a couple that I think that would have done well if they had brought over here. Like Nintendo's the Castle of Mora Morsamei. Well, yeah, Mysterious Moresame Castle. That one was always a little baffled that they never brought over here. I guess they thought maybe it was too Japanese, but like I don't think it would have mattered to the fan base.

As far as the Canami games, like I like the Miracle of Almana game, very Indiana Jones. It's kind of janky, but it's not like it was out of touch for any other similar game at the time. But when you go through its library, there's not a lot that's super duper interesting. There's a couple of okay titles. If you're interested in just like the history of games, there's a lot of neat adventure games. There's a lot of very strange ports of American PC titles. But when you're talking to just like somebody who grew up on the Nintendo wants more like cool games to play, There's not really a whole lot.

From the piracy perspective, the U.S. was still just recovering from the video game glut and market crash of, you know, 83, 84. And I think we're almost lucky that the disk system never came out in the U.S. Because I'm certain that the fact that the NES games were not widely pirated was one of the reasons why they were able to swoop in and take over the market so effectively. If it was trivial to pirate stuff, why would retailers have taken a gamble when they were already struggling from the 2600 glut? I mean, when I was a kid growing up, there's a couple of other people

knew that had Commodores and Atari 400s. And yeah, we had a couple legit games, but most everybody had just like big bins full of copied stuff. Yeah, I know. But yeah, it's just kind of the way that it was. Granted, the fact that there was only a limited number of games.

Like you couldn't, oh, you could hack games, I'm sure, the smaller ones to fit on disc. Like, I'm pretty sure that happened, right? There were a couple of games that went from cartridge to disc, but not that many. Yeah. I think it's only two or three. So, like, it would have been, you could have that piracy in the early days of the system. But, no, I think there were a lot of things that were kind of working against it.

Like, again, the side slipping isn't a big deal, but it's a number. annoying. Like, everybody, there was, everybody's Nintendo games were always dirty. There's just so much more sources of failure of those discs. They could break a lot more easily. The low cost, like, yeah, games were expensive here too, but also game rental was legal in North America. So, like, we didn't really buy a lot of our games.

We painted a couple dollars to rent them, so there wasn't quite that service gap. Like, I think people would have been happy to go to a. store and pay $510 for a new game. I remember reading British game magazines for the time and seeing ads that you could get, like, you know, R-type on a cassette tape for eight pounds, which is like such a gap at having to pay like $50 for it here. I think it would have been nice, but there are also just a lot of things that were working against it. Yeah, I'm sorry, I brain farted with that last line, so, because obviously there's a lot more than two or three games that went from cartridge to disc in Japan. I mean, I know that there's the official ones that came out later on, like, you know, the Goonies or TwinB like you mentioned. But, I mean, there's probably some way that you can hack some of those early games to work on a Famicom disc system.

Like, it's not trivial, but hackers could do it, right? My thinking on if we missed out on the disk system in the U.S. is not really, it would have been nice to have cheap distribution. everybody wants it, but we also got the NES kind of at the exact right moment when Nintendo had outgrown the disc system. So by the time they were really starting to gear up the U.S. stuff in 87 and really starting to expand, it was too late for the disc system to work in the U.S. So we didn't really miss out, but it still would have been nice. My trivia question for you guys is, we're 100% of Famicom come to system discs double-sided or did they ever make single-sided ones?

100%. There were single-sided games that are single-sided, but every disc is manufactured double-sided. That's the question I was asking, because I remember vividly as a Commodore 64 youth having to get out the forbidden disc nibbler to, like, cut a notch into the single-sided floppy to make it double-sided and stick it to the man, forget and half-price discs that then inevitably failed because they didn't have enough magnetic dust on the underside. So I'm glad all the FDS went through double-side. Yeah, and that was actually intentional because they wanted people to write a new game to that blank side if they purchase a single-sided disk.

That's cool. Makes sense. All right. I feel like we've said a lot about disk system and most of it had not been said before on Retronauts. So that's very exciting. We managed to not just retread familiar ground and provide a great 40th anniversary perspective on a weird little peripheral. that looms large in video game history, even if most Americans have never experienced one firsthand. We've certainly felt its effects and played most of its best games. So that's good.

Thank you, people who courageously converted disk system games to ROMs. All right. Well, this has been an episode of Retronauts, an episode made possible by Ben Hamilton in here. If you would like to hear additional episodes of Retronauts, the fantastic news that I have for you is that you can go to Retronauts.com or pretty much any podcatcher or streaming service besides Spotify, I guess we're not on YouTube either, that we should be. You can find us there. You can listen to us. You can then go and say, this was so good. I want to support these people and have a better experience. You can go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts and you can, subscribe to us for a few bucks a month. And you will get episodes early at a higher bit rate quality

than on the public feed without advertisements. It's very exciting. You can also do like Ben. I think we have a slot or two open for patron requests. And every so often, I think every six months, we will make a vow. We will make sure to put together those request episodes. Like I said, we're catching up with a backlog right now. But we're getting there. So, however you choose to support retronauts, even if it's listening to the free feeds and telling your friends, damn, that was a good podcast. That's great too. We appreciate your support. It makes it possible for us to make videos. Oh, no, podcasts and videos, I guess. Sure, there's videos out there somewhere. I don't know where I was going with that. Anyway, this is my terrible sales pitch.

Thank you for listening to it. Ben, where can we find you on the internet if you have things that you want to share or promote. If you don't, that's okay, too. As we used to call in the old days, my handle is B Hamilton CX, that C isn't Charlie, X as an X-ray. If you figure out the joke in my handle, ping me on one of those socials and tell me and I'll reward you handsomely. Fantastic. David, how about you? I'm on Blue Sky as Random Stranger, and you can find me on YouTube as R&D Stranger. My series on the Famicom Disc System is the year of FDS and the Famicom was FAMI Daily. And your current series is...

DC Engine Power, and also Jaguar Math, because I'm crazy. Oh, yeah, okay. That's nuts. I have the opportunity to, like, tackle that library, but I don't know if I want to. Even though I paid $0 for my trash Jaguar, still, it's a bridge too far, so Godspeed. It started out as a filler because I, I... accidentally doubled up one day and now I am doomed. You can always just say, whoops, that was a mistake, but... No, never back down. All right, and Kurt.

Hardcore GameB101.net is my website for 20-some years on Blue Sky at HG 101. Again, we have a book on the Famcom DIST system that goes out on all the officially released games and a bunch of the other non-official ones. We also have a podcast, the top 47,000 858 games of all time. We're slowly making our way through that long-promised number of games to cover. And finally, you can find me on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish. What are in Parrish, thank you. You can find me.

Where else? Oh, yeah, YouTube. You can find me there as Jeremy Parrish. My current project, although I think by the time this comes out, I'll have moved on to something else. because I'm kind of cycling through different steps, but I'm working on TurboWorks, which is the American version of PC engine power, I guess. I'm about to get to the Turbo CD.

It's very exciting. I can't wait. And then also you can find me here on Retronauts quite often talking about old games. Anyway, thank you, Ben, for making this podcast possible. And thank you, Kurt and David, for adding so much insight and also Ben, into this discussion of the disk system. this was a great episode.

I really, I feel like I learned some things. And I like that feeling when I come into Retronauts and I'm not the smartest person in the room. Actually, that's most of the time. But when I'm not the best prepared person in the room, which is what I'm supposed to be when I'm making the notes. Anyway, I'm going to stop talking now because it's just getting worse. So good night, everyone. See you again next week. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.