Famicom Disk System Battery Life

[2A03]

I'm planning to run my FDS on batteries, and I want to know how long the battery life is. I'm guessing somewhere between 5-10 hours?

[JC]

That's an interesting question. I've never tried batteries. I hope we get an answer to this question.

[satoshi_matrix]

Indeed. The thing takes those giant C cells so if I was to pop those things in there I want to know how long they last too.

[kite200]

use the ac?

[2A03]

use the ac?

I would prefer not to plug in another AC adapter or share one from another system for the FDS, which is why I asked this question.

[133MHz]

I think the batteries are a waste of money, maybe splicing a power adapter, putting two power outputs on it (one for the Fami and one for the FDS) would be a better solution.

[manuel]

If you want to know you should just do the experiment.
And please tell us how long it works.

[Doc]

I used my Disk System quite frequently. Like daily for five months. After that I stopped, so atleast the battery life is pretty long, considering the size. So atleast five months.

[manuel]

That's an amazingly efficient power use.
I wouldn't have expected that.

[satoshi_matrix]

holy shit, I was expecting something more on the order of 5 hours instead of 5 months.

[Doc]

Yeah, I was initially shocked, too, and I only stopped after five months because I had to put the FDS away for awhile.

Of course, this doesn't mean that they last for five months with 12 hours a day of gameplay.

[Kreese]

What kind of batteries does it require? And how many?

[kite200]

a rediculous 6 c cells

[Bobinsky]

I was thinking about buying a a famicom disk system with an ac adapter. the ac adapter is 20$, so i  want to know how long the batteries last on it

[Trium Shockwave]

I would think the battery life would be pretty long. Most of the magic is in the RAM cart, which requires no power aside from what comes through the Famicom's cart slot. In fact, the RAM cart will operate without even having the FDS attached to it. The FDS drive itself should only need power when it's actively reading or writing to disk. So, you fire up your Famicom, and it loads the game into the RAM cart. You probably then need to flip to side B to get into the actual game. At that point, the FDS goes silent and uses no power until you either go into another area or level that requires it to load from disk again, or you save your game. It's a lot like how an MP3 player will cache music ahead, then shut down its hard drive to conserve power. Now, personally, I hate spending money on batteries, so I just bite the bullet and plug the FDS in. If you want to run it off battery though, I don't think it would be too often you need to replace them.