Rare famicom with av and mic and turbo

[Parodius Duh]

I wouldnt call it a flop really, the system held on for a long time and the disk writing kiosks were super popular cause ANY disk could be written over, so a lot of kids had an FDS for the sole purpose of beating games then just going and getting a re-written disk with a new game for cheap. If you ask most Japanese vintage gamers they will definitely rate the FDS as one of their top systems. Sure it wasnt as popular or as convenient as carts, but it definitely did not flop.


A Flop would be like, Master system in the USA....now thats a FLOP 

[satoshi_matrix]

A more successful flop is still a flop. The master System was also a flop.

[Xious]

A more successful flop is still a flop. The master System was also a flop.

That's an interesting consideration: At what point is an accessory a flop?

I would never say this about the FDS, which sold over 1,000,000 units; probably a few million, with a library of more than 200 games, some of which the most popular on the system, an was also sold by a third-party (Sharp) and in other countries and markets, where it was also immensely popular (even if this was due to easy piracy). .

The 3-D system, sure, that died a quick and undeserving death; the gun was a larger flop even than the 3-D system, and the robot was a farce, with a two-game library, but the FDS is not a flop by my standards. How do you mark it as such, and by what guidelines?

If you sell 14-million Famicom systems, and one FDS for every ten, then even that is a huge success for an game system accessory. Compare that to the Famicom Network System, or any of the other gadgets, most of which sold to one-in-a-thousand users, and were still considered worthwhile by NCL.

In all actuality, the FDS is capable of more than is commonly considered, but it required multiple disks to achieve more extensive and more graphically detailed games. This is one of the limitations that dampened its later development cycle, as people simply expected more than a double-sided diskette could hold. Piracy also shelved some FDS games, or moved them to ROM format, after the surge of copy devices in 1986-88.

The Mitsumi format, for the record, was not that uncommon at the time for low-end (low-cost) diskette storage. It was more rugged than 5'25"/133mm diskettes, and cost far less than the newer SONY format diskettes used on the Macintosh (as well as some other Apple, Atari, and Commodore systems, then later on DOS PCs). The same 3" disks were used on many word-processor systems, MIDI devices and other systems that did not require fast file access, hierarchical filesystems, or other direct user-access. Amstrad systems also used either the same, or a very similar diskette...

I have a CPC somewhere, but I don't recall if the media is identical; I think the mechanism was by another company. In any case, the 3" diskette format was not unusual for the time.  Remember that this was in a time when a box of ten 3.5" 400K diskettes cost somewhere around US$25-35 (as I recall, maybe a bit more), and a 20MB hard disk drive was around US$2,500; the drives alone for the SONY 3.5" format were somewhere between US$250 and US$400.

In the end, despite modern misgivings, I think it was a very wise decision: The choice of media kept the accessory affordable, and it allowed small developers to produce games that otherwise they could not afford, as the cost of production mask ROMS and other components was completely prohibitive.

[crade]

It's simply factual that the FDS was a flop.

Whats simply factual is that it's only your opinion that the FDS was a flop.

[Xious]

Correction: The FDS apparently sold 2-Million units in the first year of its release, probably double that amount by the end of its lifespan, and in theory, more including international sales. Certainly nothing close to a flop, IMHO. 

[satoshi_matrix]

No guys, the FDS was a flop.

For anyone who doesn't think so, I suggest you read this article.

http://retro.nintendolife.com/news/2010/11/feature_slipped_disk_the_history_of_the_famicom_disk_system

Basically, the FDS was designed to augment the Famicom so that new games could be manufactured without expensive silicon chips that the cartridges needed. At first, it will a brilliant idea - the disks were low cost, had larger storage capacity, allowed the player to save their game and even were rewritable.

The problem was that the FDS never really saw any significant number of exclusive titles. Sure, there's a good handful of some of the best games of the era on it, but compared to the library the cartridges saw it was pitiful. Then, when chips became cheaper and larger capacity, the FDS was completely outclassed by the very format it was intended to replace, especially when bankswitching techiques were introduced in cartridges which the FDS just couldn't do. A perfect example of a game made better on cartridge is Jackal vs the FDS Final Command. The cartridge version totally destroys the FDS build by sheer complexity alone. 

And then there's the problem of reliability. In all of the hundreds of NES and Famicom cartridges I've ever bought, only 4 have ever been completely dead. On the other hand, I have more than a dozen FDS disks with bad sectors that renders them doorstops. To add to that, we all know about the reliability woes of the hardware itself, from the drive motor to the snap-prone special disk belt the system requires.

The FDS outsold systems like the Neo Geo Pocket Color, but even so, the system was a flop.



With all that said, although I hate the format because its horribly unreliable, I do enjoy playing several FDS games via my Powerpak, eliminating the hardware issues entirely. Metroid, SuMari 2 and Kaettekita Mario Bros. are all exceptional.

[UglyJoe]

I disagree, and I hate to drive this thread even further off topic, but that article states:

"Nintendo wanted half of the copyright for every single FDS title published"

I've read this before in a few other articles, but not a single article cites a source for it.  Does anyone have anything substantial to back up that claim?

[satoshi_matrix]

I too didn't intend for this topic to become so off topic, but eh such is the nature of forums.

I'm curious though, what do you mean you "disagree"? It's not an opinion that the FDS was a failure, its a historical fact. As a retro gamer I own one along with a TWIN Famicom, but I'm simply talking about sales figures when new. I mean just run though a checklist.

three year life - released in 1986 and abandoned by Nintendo in 1989
Sold somewhere around 4 million units
Library of around 200 games not including unlicensed hentai junk

Assuming that number of sold FDS systems is correct (4 million) that means that even the Sega-CD outsold it at its mere 6 million - and the Sega CD was not what anyone would consider a success then or now. I got one only when it was discontinued and the price fell to next to nothing in order for stores to clear inventory.

Now granted, the FDS was region specific to Japan where the Sega CD saw release in all regions, but even so I don't understand the sheer opposition I'm seeing to the FDS. I'm not saying that the system was terrible (though it was plagued with problems) I'm just saying that historically, the FDS was to the Famicom what the N64DD was to the N64 - a failed attachment. That statement is totally independent of my opinion of the FDS. As for my actual opinion, the FDS is a must-have for collectors.

[UglyJoe]

Well...

That's an interesting consideration: At what point is an accessory a flop?

It comes down to exactly that.  You're saying that 4 million units sold and a library of 200 games is a flop?  I cannot accept that.  I don't know exactly what my definition of a "flop" is in regards to a game console accessory, but that surely is beyond my flop threshold.

[Jamtex]

One half arsed article should not be seen as why the FDS was a flop, any article that does not have some official Nintendo quote or source can not been seen as reliable.

The discs are in fact modified 2.8" Mitsumi Quick disks, the major difference is that the Nintendo Logo part means the disc is longer then standard discs but they are physically the same media. There were a few other things that used this format most notablely the Smith Cronoa electronic typewriters and a few MSX computers.The Amstrad machines used the Hitachi 3" drives as basically Amstrad bought a huge job lot of them for peanuts.

One thing that people critise nintendo for was the lack of disc shutters, however it should be noted as no one that writes these things bothers to spend 2 minutes researching that the Mitsumi Quick Disk format did not have shutters anyway. The blue discs did but it seems that most of them could be used in Nintendos disc fax service so I suppose they might have did this to protect the machines.

The FDS was quite successful, given the 4 million units it sold and the fact it was around for just under 4 years. The machine did have a number of exclusives for at least the first couple of years. The discs did start to look quite small as ROM prices started to fall and games that took up 256K were coming more common, compared to the 112K the discs could store.

However the thing that did kill off the FDS was piracy, you could buy units to back up disks, there were interfaces to hook up the FDS to a personal computer like the PC-8801, FM-7 or MSX so you could read and write your own discs. Mitsumi QD in FDS compatable cases were easy to get and sales of nintendo FDS games did go down. Cartridges were harder to copy especially with custom chips like the Mappers so Nintendo moved to them. The Game Over book by David Sheff does mention this.

How anyone could say the FDS was a flop need to look at data again. The Colecovision sold 2 million units and no one said that was a flop...

[Xious]

One of the reasons the SEGA/MD-CD is often seen as a flop, is due to when it was released in the system lifespan, and the rather bad usage of FMV in its titles, or the point-and-click PC CD-ROM style games that were released.Few companies took advantage of what it could do, and thus from a gaming perspective, it is seen as a failure. Note that SCD/MDCD games were often liquidated toward the end of the 1990s, which greatly enhances this perception.

Quoting the opinions of an author with little credibility, not to mention someone who has probably never been to Nippon, or interviewed anyone who owned or sold the console when it was new, or even knows of its sales figures,isn't exactly evidentiary support.

The agreement that they were easy to damage is also pointless, as until 2006, NCL would repair them, or replace or re-record your disks at no cost. That means that despite it's six-year lifespan (of new titles), it had 20-years of support. It also has a comparable library to other game systems; ~200 games isn't exactly peanuts, even if there is some slight duplication, as many of them were original titles and never saw a ROM release.

Of all the 'Nintendo' titles, only 'Zelda no Densetsu' was re-released in ROM-format, to coincide with the release of the 'New Famicom (A/V); and even his has nothing to do with the FDS being a failure. It was to accommodate for the lack of a microphone on the New FC, as the more popular FDS version was made far more difficult without this hardware. This is why the other games, especially 'Metroid' saw no ROM release in Nippon. You could still buy the FDS in 1993 and a new copy of 'Metroid', so releasing a ROM version was not only pointless, it was also a needless expense to produce one.

The ROM version of 'Zelda no Densetsu' is also often seen as a downgraded version, which is often the case for FDS-->ROM re-releases.

Programming new (homebrew) games for the FDS is not seen because almost no-one on NESDev or in the development community is in a place where they can both buy the HW and read and understand the (very scarce) system documentation. I have toyed with this idea, but I need more docs before I can do anything fancy, not to mention the time to dedicate to making anything. Others have expressed the desire to do the same, but they don't want to go through the trouble to import bulk disks for distribution.

Actually, there are many excellent dev-tools for the FDS, and you can in theory program directly on original HW using them. I would love to find all of Sunsoft's developer tools.... As an interesting side-note, some ROM games were developed using the FDS, and converted to ROM format, and the attachment also helped keep the Famicom library strong through the earlier periods.

Rather than comparing the FDS library to the Famicom ROM library, compare it to other systems entirely. The Intellivision has a library of only 125 authorized games.  There are 318 games (internationally) for the SMS, and there are 180 ColecoVision games, including homebrews and known prototypes (unfinished).

The CV also did sell far more than 2-Million total units. I think the figure is over 6-Million, but that may include the ADAM; the ADAM had further releases on tape and on diskette. The 1984 crash and the lack of funds killed that system, which could have provided an even more exciting library of games that was is commonly showcased, had the Super-attachment been released as planned. (A new SGM is being developed that will add to the system capabilities, which is purely brilliant.)

Still, you can't compare console sales to attachment sales figures on the same scale. When an attachment outsells other consoles, or comes close, it isn't a flop. It may be considered to be less desirable to gamers int he future, but that can be true of anything. I think the SEGA-Cd had around 160 titles in North America, 220 in all regions, and only a fraction of these were sold in Europe. The most common titles were often poorly designed, and the main killer of the attachment was its price, as well as the price of the games, which was about the same as ROM-based game pricing at the time.

All-in-all, it is like stating that the original 'Star Trek' was a flop because it did not have as many episodes of the much later 'Star Trek: The Next generation', or because it only lasted for three-years versus the 26-year original run of 'Doctor Who'.

What killed the popularity of the Mega-CD was the lack of developer commitment, as the cost of making a good title for the system was far greater than the cost of making a much smaller ROM-type game. The attachment cost was also a problem, as it was originally $299 in North America and ¥38.000 in Nippon, compared to the launch price of the mother-console of $189, which was lower by the time the CD attachment was made, thus making the accessory twice the price of the main system. Games for it cost around US$30-$60 per game, an were not re-writable. If you didn't like your CD-game, you were stuck with both it, and a $45 average expense, meaning you were less-willing to go out and buy another game for the system, as you lost confidence in the console.

On the other hand, the FDS sold for ¥15,000 at a time that the Famicom was ¥14,800, so they were about the same price, even in 1986. FDS games were always less-expensive than ROM games at the time, and you had the ability to change your disk to a new game for only a few hundred Yen, making the games both far more popular and making it easier for a gamer to recover if they disliked their purchase.

Comparing it to the 64DD is absurd, as that system was essentially canceled as soon as it was released. It didn't sell because it couldn't sell, and I think that it would have had a fair market if given the chance. and released on time. NCL killed it because there were developing the next system already, which would use optical media, and decided not to waste funds developing for an attachment, as they wanted third-party developers to be happy. The system was also mostly life-support to the UFC/N64, which makes it an analogue to the 32X, and most of its scheduled releases were updates to already existing games.

Between being delayed into oblivion, and being unable to keep up with SONY systems, the device was dead on arrival. The UFC/N64 has 387 North American games,  in case you are wondering.

I am sorry to hear that you had so many problems, however they are not analogous to my experiences. How many disks do you own that a dozen are bad, and from where did you buy them?  Have you checked them on other systems to ensure that the disks are actually defective, and have you tried re-recording them to check that the media is in fact damaged?

If they are only doorstops, I will gladly buy them from you.