The Famicom Top 100 List, Brought to you by Famitsu

Number 100: Gradius II - Number 1: Dragon Quest III

To commemorate the Famicom's 20th anniversary, Famitsu released a special DVD celebrating the console and its games. The main feature on the disc is a top 100 countdown, listing the most popular Famicom games. The list is a fascinating look into the tastes of the Famicom's original audience and the only one of its kind. Let's break it down today.

Dai Yakyuu! - The 8-bit Explosion of Japanese Baseball Video Games

Baseball & Famista '94

Baseball (Yakyuu) has had a long history in Japan. Imported from the United States before World War II, Japan built leagues and fielded players that have maintained the popularity of the sport more or less ever since. When video games became accessible to the Japanese in the late 1970s, they tried to mimic a wide range of human competitive activities, not unlike American consoles. Judging by the Famicom's game library, baseball would have been the most popular sport played in Japan by far. Dozens of baseball games were released during the decade of the Famicom's active commercial development, let's take a look at some games and some trends in these titles.

Nintendo Board and Chip Manufacture and Third Parties

I have often read that Nintendo, as of the Nintendo Entertainment System and everything thereafter, made all cartridges for its systems and required third parties to buy chips, board and other raw materials from them in order to have their software run on Nintendo's systems.  While this was often true, the rule was not an absolute one and at times exceptions were made.

Nintendo does not make anything, it does not construct silicon wafers, it does not extrude plastic into molds, it does not own factories or fabrication plants which do these things.  Nintendo designs and patents chips and products, but turning those designs into reality is a function of contractors.  Obviously Nintendo has to work closely with those contractors to ensure its designs can translate into workable devices, but it is not correct to say that Nintendo really "made cartridges".  In this article we will look at instances where Nintendo permitted third party cartridges to be made.

Is there a Doctor in the Game Console? - The Venus Turbo Doctor 6M

Taiwan may or may not have been the birthplace of commercial video game piracy, but it certainly has a strong claim to have been its nursery.  When video games skyrocketed in popularity in Southeastern Asia with the Famicom, it seemed as through the entire island of Taiwan wanted to cash in on the efforts of the Japanese.  Taiwan was the first source of unlicensed Famicom clones and pirate cartridges.  But cartridges were expensive to make, even for Taiwan fabs and the larger games were not very profitable to clone.  Then Nintendo handed the pirates a gift, the Famicom Disk System.  But as it turned out this was a gift that kept on giving.  While copying FDS games was child's play for the organized pirates, they saw in the FDS an opportunity to pirate to go beyond games originally released on disk. They created "RAM cartridges", hardware devices that worked with the Famicom and the Disk System to permit cartridge games put on disk to work.  In this blog entry, I will describe my personal experiences with one such device, the Venus Turbo Game Doctor 6M.

Making Your Famicom into the Best Famicom it can be : A/V Mods Done Right

Modifying the RF-Only Famicom to output separate video and audio is nothing new, people have been doing it since the 1980s.  But many mods I have seen involved video circuits of dubious quality, drilling and cutting into aged plastic and difficult to reverse without replacement parts.  In this blog post I will go over what I believe are the best ways to modify your Famicom for AV output.

Family BASIC - Putting the "Computer" into the Family Computer

Courtesy of Wikipedia (taken by Evan Amos)

When Nintendo released its first console, the Famicom, the full name of the system was the Nintendo Family Computer.  In the early 1980s the line between video game consoles and home computers was a fuzzy one.  Some consoles, like the Odyssey^2 had a full (membrane) keyboard but were more like video game consoles.  Some computers like the Commodore 64 had a full-travel keyboard and a disk drive but could also play games via its Expansion Port.  At the Famicom's launch in 1983, the only software available for the machine were arcade game ports.  By the next year (1984) Nintendo had released a new product for the Family Computer which was intended to do more than just play another video game.  This product was released as Family BASIC on July 21, 1984, but was only released in Japan.  Did it succeed in turning the Famicom into a Family Computer?  

Life After Death - The Unlicensed Market for NES and Famicom Games after their Lifespan

When Nintendo and its authorized third parties stopped releasing new games for the NES and Famicom in 1993 and 1994, respectively, the established pattern would have dictated a period where no new games would be available until the eventual birth of the homebrew scene.  However, this really did not happen for the Nintendo 8-bit platform, games have been development continuously from the birth of the Famicom in 1983 to the present day.  In previous articles I have taken a look into Unlicensed Western and Taiwanese developers active during the active lifespan of the NES and Famicom.  In this article I will give a brief overview the afterlife of this iconic hardware.

FPGA NES and Famicom Solutions' Mapper Support Matrices

There have been several hardware devices released over the past four decades which play NES and Famicom games.  Any regular reader of this blog will know that the NES and Famicom have many, many different ways in which it supports memory management.  Hardware devices which support a wide variety of games use FPGAs to configure their logic to handle the various memory mappers used by NES and Famicom games.  Below I will give matrices of each device and identify the mappers it supports.  Both iNES 1.0 and NES 2.0 mappers will be identified.  None of these devices support UNIF format mappers and UNIF should be fully deprecated by NES 2.0 now.

Early Efforts at Online Interaction on Nintendo Consoles

We tend to think that Nintendo consoles first entered the online arena with the GameCube, its Modem and Broadband Adapters and Phantasy Star Online.  In the west, this is the case, but every Nintendo home and portable console (except that hunk of eye-straining junk called the Virtual Boy) has had some way to access the non-local world.  Sometimes these methods were first party supported, sometimes third-party exclusives and there was even an unlicensed publisher or two in the mix.  This blog entry will give an overview of the subject.  I will describe briefly each device or method, As this blog entry's purpose is not meant to give a comprehensive review of each of these devices.  I will include links for more information to sites and videos with more information.  

Fixing NES Headers and Converting them to NES 2.0 : Putting Theory into Practice!

In my last blog entry, I announced the creation of an evolving database of NES ROM headers, focused on cartridge accuracy.  However, while I can make a spreadsheet for easy accessibility, spreadsheets are not the best way to organize data for use by other programs.  I cannot expect someone wanting a full set of proper NES 2.0 ROMs to manually edit the headers of over 2,900 separate files!

There has to be an easier way, right?
The task of manual fixing isn't slight.
Well, if you read further now,
I'll be happy to tell you how.

The NES and Famicom Accurate Cartridge Information Database

NES and Famicom emulation has been around for over twenty-five years.  In that time, the internal hardware has become very well documented.  NES and Famicom cartridges, on the other hand, have had a parallel journey of discovery during this time, but emulators and flash carts and FPGA devices have not always been up to date with current developments.  The core games which people enjoy with NES emulation, namely those licensed and approved by Nintendo and unlicensed games released during the NES' lifespan, sometimes suffer in emulation due not to bad dumps but a wrong information in their file header.  The header indicates what kind of hardware the game uses, but if the information in the header is wrong, out of date or missing, the game will not play or play correctly.  In this blog article I will explain how headers work, why they are necessary, the need for accurate information in them and how they have evolved over time.  Then I will describe and link to my database which contains the most accurate and up to date information for the NES and Famicom ROMs most people care about.

Nintendo's 8-bit Obsession with Golf

Golf is popular in most parts of the world with any concentration of wealth.  It is rather popular in Japan, at least for those who can afford to play it.  Green fees and club memberships are extremely pricey in Japan, so it may not be any surprise that many people who enjoy the game may have to turn to less expensive alternatives to get 18 holes in.  Most video game systems have a golf game, or something intended to resemble golf, released for them.  When Nintendo was releasing early titles for its Famicom, a golf game was a natural addition to its sports library.  But Nintendo kept revisiting the sport with its 8-bit systems, so let's explore how its implementation of golf evolved throughout the 8-bit lifespan.

Exciting Developments for NES ROMs

When it comes to the NES, everybody at one point or another has emulated the NES.  NES emulation has been around for a long time and has improved so much that often the experience of playing a game on an emulator is indistinguishable from playing the game on real hardware (accounting for video improvements via emulation.)  But NES emulation is continually evolving as we find more games to dump and understand better the hardware found inside previously-dumped games.  In this blog post let me share some recent developments regarding NES ROMs.

Investigating the Games on the NES, Famicom and SNES Classic Editions

Nintendo's latest efforts to "cash in" on its retro properties, the NES Classic Edition and the SNES Classic Edition, have gone very well.  The hardware is inexpensive to make and the games, for the most, part, are held in high regard.  The consoles sell very well, sometimes too well.  All across the three major markets, they were in high demand at launch.  One interesting thing about these devices for me is the software included on these devices.  These are emulator boxes and they run ROMs, just like the Virtual Console for the Wii U and Wii and previous releases for the GameCube.  Let's see what kind of ROMs they use.

Product Review Potpourri

In today's blog entry I will review three inexpensive products for your retro gaming consoles.  If you are interested in getting HDMI-only consoles to play on a CRT, splitting HDMI signals for capturing and playing without copy protection and a name-brand NES to Famicom converter, read on.

Famicom & NES - Simple Tweaks to Restore Audio Balance Levels

Audio balance levels in the NES and Famicom can cause some consternation and official hardware is not always consistent.  Here I will discuss some simple modifications you can do to your console to restore the balance between internal audio channels and internal audio channels and external cartridge audio.

Unusual Famicom Saving Methods

In the United States and Europe, if you wanted to save a game on your NES, you generally had two options.  If the game supported password saves, you had to write down the password (accurately) and enter it back when you wanted to play the game again.  Some games had rather lengthy passwords, and if you confused a 0 for a O or a 1 for an l, your password would be unusable.  A relatively few NES games also had battery backup saves where the contents of a RAM chip inside the cartridge would be saved with a coin-style battery when the power was shut off.  Early games required the problematic "hold reset as you turn the power off" method, and if the battery ran out replacing it was no easy task in the early days.  Japanese Famicom players had a few more options, and as these can be rather obscure to westerners, I would like to talk about them here.

Famicom Expansion Audio Overview

The Famicom was constructed with a feature which was not available to the NES.  The Famicom always sent its internal audio to the cartridge port.  For most games, the audio was sent back to the system without modification.   26 (of 1,054) licensed Famicom games contained hardware that could produce additional music and mix it in with the internal audio.  In this article, let's take a look at the methods that were used and the games that used them.

Official Variations of the Nintendo 8-bit NES/Famicom Console Hardware

Nintendo tried to get its 8-bit system into homes across the world.  It was most successful in Japan, the United States and Canada.  But it also distributed its hardware in many other countries, usually with the assistance of a local distributor.  Some of these systems are rather rare, but have been documented to exist.  In this blog post let I will attempt to identify every officially licensed variation of the 8-bit hardware Nintendo ever released.

NES and Famicom Controller Compatibility Issues and AV Famicom Microphone Mod

Prior to the NES, most controllers had a joystick and one or two buttons.  The Atari joystick was wired in parallel, where one wire corresponded to one button, and pressing a direction or a button completed a circuit with the common (ground wire).  The program would read these button presses in parallel, where reading from a single memory location would give the state of each of the five buttons at one time.

Nintendo's controllers were to come with a D-pad and four buttons.  These were originally hard-wired in the Famicom but would have required at least nine wires if wired by the traditional parallel standard.  Moreover, if they wanted to use other kinds of peripherals, they may have found that difficult.  To cut down on wires, Nintendo decided to use a serial method for reading buttons.  This also allowed for more varied expansion, as will be discussed below.