American FDS

[boye]

I've heard around that Nintendo had plans for a NES version of the FDS, but it was canned due to piracy. Does anyone have more info on this?

[adori_12]

Yes, Nintendo had plans to release a Disk System equivalent in North America. The best proof of those claims are two United States Patent and Trademark Office patents: Patent No. 4,860,128, filed one month after the FDS release,which included the disk copying protection,among showing the FDS itself and stating that it may have been used with "the well-known Nintendo Entertainment System or NES"; and Patent No .4,783,812, filed in August of the same year, 1986, which showed the FM sound modulator included on the RAM adapter of the FDS.
Somehow, the filed patents were approved until November 1988 for the FM chip, and August of 1989 for the Disk System itself, the latter date being pretty close to the Super Famicom's initial launch.
Even though an official explanation of why the Disk System was never released in North America was never given, it's easy to see why. The Disk System was, way before those patents were approved, obsolete.
All of the advantages the FDS first had were quickly achieved by cartridges later on: Space storage was no longer a problem when larger games were coming out thanks to new chips like the wonderful MMCs (something the Disk System lacked) and still making good profits, cost issues weren't a problem anymore when semiconductor chip prices came down sooner than Nintendo expected, saving progress in games was now possible with now cheaper than before Lithium batteries, and the extra audio chip was also obsolete due to games including audio enhancer chips which actually offered more channels than a single FM sound modulator. And don't forget piracy, which was a big issue. The only real benefit the FDS still somewhat had was slightly cheaper games, but considering disks were very fragile compared to carts, and also considering American kids wouldn't take care of disks as much as Japanese kids do, sticking with cartridge-based games was the best idea for Nintendo of America.
All of this is just speculation, but it makes sense when looking on how quickly the FDS came obsolete.
Here are the two patents I talked about, in case you wanna look at them.

[P]

Yeah the biggest reason for the disk system's rise and fall was storage space. Nintendo made the FDS mainly because they thought it would be a cost-effective way to increase storage space. When they noticed that a quickdisk could store a whole Famicom cartridge on just one side and has two sides, was much cheaper to produce and was also fully writeable (during this time cassette tapes was still the main way to save data and battery RAM was not common) it was almost too good to be true. Part of the program can also be in the BIOS, leaving even more room on the disk. Super Mario Bros was first supposed to be the final cartridge game, and was the first game to use the whole ROM space of an NROM cartridge.

But when the FDS was released I think Konami had already made a ROM cartridge that was bigger than an FDS disk. The first FDS game (Zelda) also used up the whole disk so Nintendo realized that the disk space wasn't that great after all. The only way to increase it was to make the game span more disks.
Nintendo quickly realized that ROM cartridges had already overcame the problems they tried to solve with the FDS, so there were little reason to make a NES version of it.

Sure FDS made piracy easier (especially in Hong Kong), but I really don't think piracy was a very big factor at all. Piracy was big in Asia outside Japan, but that goes for ROM cartridge piracy as well.

[Flying_Phoenix]

Yeah, somehow I had been thinking that the argument that the FDS died because of piracy doesn't make much sense... carts were pirated just the same, and cds later on.

[Flying_Phoenix]

sure but there are way more pirated carts all over the world and that never stopped FC/NES and SFC/SNES from being a success, that's what i meant, while the fds was discontinued very early, for reasons that the previous posts theorise pretty good i think

just like cds have been pirated quickly and cheaply but that didn't stop sony from making a big success with ps/ps2 who had a long life (especially the ps2)

[adori_12]

there are way more pirated carts all over the world and that never stopped FC/NES and SFC/SNES from being a success, that's what i meant, while the fds was discontinued very early, for reasons that the previous posts theorise pretty good i think

There are way more pirated carts than disks because, well, the Famicom and Super Famicom managed to actually be successful outside of Japan. Pirated disks were also pretty common, but only in Japan and some parts of Asia obviously, and had the Disk System been released in North America, those pirated disks would also came here, although it is true that piracy was never that much of an issue in North America, because of Nintendo including lockout chips for NES carts and overall being very protective on what was published for their system.
An important factor as well for the Disk System being discontinued so early are the strict licensing terms for publishing games on disk cards back then. If a company wanted to publish a disk game, Nintendo wanted 50% or copyright rights, and charging hefty fees, which is pretty ridiculous, not only because of them wanting copyright rights of each game, but because of charging fees on a format that didn't even see as much money as carts.

[boye]

The cheaper price of disks and the ability to rewrite disks at special Disk Writers for a small fee, however, was very pro-consumer.

[adori_12]

It was a great way of playing more games for less money, that's for sure, but it wasn't a good business model for game companies; you could overwrite disks for only ¥500, so if you bought a first-party Nintendo game and then you went to a Kiosk to overwrite it with, let's say a Konami game, how much money did Konami make from disk overwriting "sales"?
And it's not like that case was very unlikely: That was the biggest advantage Nintendo advertised for disks back then, and as you can see, it wasn't as great for publishers.
Now that I think about it, after looking on how many flaws and problems the FDS developed so quickly, it amazes me that there were still some games released in the early 90's...

[boye]

I guess video game companies were in a pro-consumer phase during the FDS era.

[P]

The FDS was seemingly well received by consumers, but yeah it was obviously not beneficial in the long run for both first and third party companies.

Still the FDS library isn't that small, it's no 64DD.

[adori_12]

I agree, it was quite popular on its launch and first two years or so, I think the downfall came when all of the problems we discussed earlier became very notorious, but by that time lots of newly developed games had already been released for the system.

[boye]

Also, adding a mapper chip add-on to the FDS would just complicate things for the consumer.
(I wonder if the MMC3 could be substituted for hardware tricks to create an FDS port of SMB3.)

[P]

Yeah adding extra stuff to a format that already was being overtaken by cartridges makes little sense.

SMB3 used the MMC3's scanline counter interrupts to make the 8-way scrolling with a status bar. I know it is possible with just the stock Famicom hardware by using a trick with the broken sprite overflow flag in combination with the sprite 0 collision flag. There is also some trick you can use with the DPCM interrupt if you need additional raster effects I believe, but you might not be able to use samples in your music if you do (mostly only used for drum samples or speech samples).

BTW is there any FDS game that use 8-way scrolling with a HUD status bar? I can only think of 4-way scrolling, and alternate horizontal and vertical scrolling like Metroid and Paluthena.

Chou Wakusei Senki Metafight use MMC1 (so no scanline counter) and do use 8-way scrolling.

[adori_12]

Well, I'm sure SMB3 was planned to be a Disk System game before the system flopped, so they should have thought about hardware tricks in order to make the game, but maybe, and this is just my own speculation, the SMB3 they intended to release on disk format was radically different from the cartridge version we know, a version lacking 8-way scroll and a separate HUD bar, probably because they knew a game like the final SMB3 wasn't possible on FDS without a lot of clever programming, if at all possible, and then, when the Disk System was put out of the way, and they moved all of their projects from the FDS to the regular Famicom, they added all of those things now that they were more easily doable with the MMC3.
I don't think there's even an 8-way scrolling game on the FDS without the HUD bar alone, but let's see if someone else can think of a game with those characteristics.

[Jedi Master Baiter]

Almana no Kiseki?