Advantages / disadvantages of the famicom

You might be asking yourself "what on earth is a famicom?". A famicom is a japanese version of the nes. Both the famicom and the nes are made by the same japanese company nintendo. Since the company that made these fine systems is from japan naturally the famicom was released first. The famicom and nes are exactly the same hardware and you can buy cartridge adapters that let you play all nes games on a famicom and vice versa. So the famicom was released way back in 1983.....an extremely powerful system for back then. Graphically it was way ahead of its time.

Okay so let's start with the disadvantages of the famicom.

1: The famicom is freaken ugly. Just for reference...here's what a nes looks like:



Not beautiful but not bad either. Now let's take a look at what the famicom looks like:



.....reject from tron? I think back in 1983 everything looked like that which explains why the famicom looks the way it does. I read that back in '85 when they released the nes they tried to make the system look more like a vcr to fool idiodic consumers into buying the nes. In fact the nes game cartridges use less than half the space inside the cartridge for the game pcb. The reason the cartridge is oversized is so it looks more like a vhs tape than a video game. Also the nes was designed as a front loader to resemble a vcr and not a typical video game system. Even though the front loading system is garbage.

So you might be asking yourself "why would nintendo try to make a video game system look like a vcr?". Well back in 1983 in america there was a huge crash in the video game industry. So many crappy games had saturated the market and made gaming far less popular. So I guess nintendo was trying to fool people over here. I do however have to give nintendo credit for coming up with a quality control system for the games that they allowed to be released on the nes. This was the first time there was a gaming system that had a certain standard for quality of the games being released for it.

2: The famicom has the controllers hard wired into the system. I guess back in 1983 people hadn't yet invented controllers that you could disconnect. Remember the popular d-pad was first introduced on the famicom



Atleast I can't think of a pre-famicom system that came with a d-pad. So unfortunately controllers you could unplug was more of an upgrade introduced 2 years later with the release of the nes.


...
..
.
That's really all the bad stuff I can think about the famicom. Now it's time for the good features of this system

1: Famicom cartridges are smaller. Here's a picture to demonstrate:



2: Famicoms are smaller than nes systems.



even with the controllers!

3: All famicoms are top loaders, meaning the cartridge slot works as long and well as the slot on your snes

4: The model 2 famicom (av famicom) came with a revised pcb where they cleaned up a lot of video interference. The nes 2 came with the first revision pcb.

5: The famicom has advanced audio. You're probably thinking "what on earth do you mean by advanced audio?". Here's a couple of examples:





The model 1 nes (toaster) is capable of playing advanced audio but it requires a lot of modding to be able to play advanced audio. And you also need to use the famicom version of the game you want to get advanced audio from. Since the nes didn't have advanced audio wired up nes games were released without the advanced audio chips inside of them.

So...uhhh....yeah.....the famicom is a great system that really has many good advantages over the nes. :ninja:

i just bought an atari 2600 jr again, and the first thing to go was the controllers. i plugged in my master system ones like i did back in the day. i cant actually think, where my original 2600jr went to though. probably traded it for a nes. haha.

now to get rid of that crappy rf connection. the atari is exactly as i remember it, FUZZY.

mvsfan wrote:

i just bought an atari 2600 jr again, and the first thing to go was the controllers. i plugged in my master system ones like i did back in the day. i cant actually think, where my original 2600jr went to though. probably traded it for a nes. haha.

now to get rid of that crappy rf connection. the atari is exactly as i remember it, FUZZY.

There's some half baked atari s-video circuit floating around the internet. I forget which model of atari this circuit is good for but looking at the screenshots it's not quite properly done. However the mod does greatly improve the sharpness so I'd go for it. I believe the mod has been posted by the longhorn engineer.

Drakon wrote:

mvsfan wrote:

i just bought an atari 2600 jr again, and the first thing to go was the controllers. i plugged in my master system ones like i did back in the day. i cant actually think, where my original 2600jr went to though. probably traded it for a nes. haha.

now to get rid of that crappy rf connection. the atari is exactly as i remember it, FUZZY.

There's some half baked atari s-video circuit floating around the internet. I forget which model of atari this circuit is good for but looking at the screenshots it's not quite properly done. However the mod does greatly improve the sharpness so I'd go for it. I believe the mod has been posted by the longhorn engineer.

i just bought an nice kit for it. has s-video and composite as well as having 2 pots for brightness and contrast. We will see how it looks. havent started on it yet. ill have no problem installing this kit its very straightforward unlike my nes has turned out to be.

and im not even going to bother with hooking up composite. waste of space esp on a jr.

i should be able to use a ribbon cable on the tia side to make everything neat, unless i will cause interference by doing that. any thoughts?

mvsfan wrote:

i should be able to use a ribbon cable on the tia side to make everything neat, unless i will cause interference by doing that. any thoughts?

It's hard for wires to pick up interference in consoles, I mean look at a pcb layout with all the traces next to each other and on opposite sides of the pcb.