FDS Not Responding to Controller Button Presses

[kryptonaut]

I recently bought a refurbished FDS drive off eBay along with the disk for Zelda. The drive seems to work fine and the game loads as it should, but it won't respond to any inputs from either controller (original Famicom).

For now, Zelda is the only disk game I have so I can't test it with other games.

Normal carts work fine.

How would I go about t/s'g this?

[P]

Zelda won't respond to any buttons on the title screen. The Japanese text there tells you to flip to side B, and the game doesn't start until you do that. The same is true for Yume Koujou Doki Doki Panic, Otocky, Roger Rabbit and maybe other games.

[MushroomZeroArt]

Zelda won't respond to any buttons on the title screen. The Japanese text there tells you to flip to side B, and the game doesn't start until you do that. The same is true for Yume Koujou Doki Doki Panic, Otocky, Roger Rabbit and maybe other games.

Why exactly was this? Is there any real reason why they used an entire disk side just for the TS when cartridge games had no trouble displaying them all at once?

[P]

The entire game isn't on side B, I hear it fills almost the whole disk so both sides must be used. Besides the title screen and intro scene, the entire final dungeon is on side A if I remember correctly. The rest of the game along with the save data fills side B to the brim.

All games loads on side A, but many games has the save data on side B so they prompt to flip the disk when accessing the save file screen, Zelda works like this. Other games may save on side A and Metroid is said to be writing to both sides for some reason, not sure how that works. Some games use side B to load most of the game data and put whatever is left on side A, others works the other way around. A few games fill an entire disk (128 kB) and spans two disks.


If you are going to compare disks to ROM cartridges you must be careful of the time period. When Nintendo was developing the FDS, ROM cartridges was never larger than 32 kB. FDS disks (128 kB) was 4 times larger than that if counting both sides. Since a game could span multiple disks there is technically no space limit at all if you have an infinite number of disks. Besides the disks were much cheaper to produce than ROM cartridges and was also fully writable. Putting backup RAM in a cartridge to allow saving was just too expensive at the time and was only done with Family BASIC. This is why Nintendo thought the FDS was such a great idea. Zelda is the first game for the FDS and it was larger than any ROM cartridge game before it.

But when the FDS was released, there were already cartridges that could map in 128 kB ROMs and larger, and as mask-ROMs became cheaper and cheaper, ROM cartridges soon became more attractive than disks for developers. Besides a cartridge could switch its ROM mapping instantly, while the disks required you to flip the disk or insert the next disk manually to gain access to more data (for not mentioning having to read the disk and send the data to the RAM Adapter). RAM also got cheaper and more games could use battery-backed RAM for saving player data on, making the FDS technology almost obsolete.

I don't think ROM cartridges ever became as cheap as the disks though as you could get an empty disk for just around 2000 yen and it was 500 yen for a write. Pre-written retail versions was also just a bit more expensive than that (2600+ yen), so it was never completely obsolete and Nintendo kept the disk writing service until the early 2000s I think.