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Does it compute? Japanese Famicom and others.

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facattack

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If you're not familiar wit the story, Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It must have not been easy to convince people after the "Videogame Crash of 1983" that they should buy yet another gaming console. And this one from a Japanese manufacturer. To make it seem like an "Entertainment Center" Nintendo modeled their machine slightly after a VCR in that cartridges were inserted into the front of the machine.

What you might not be aware of is that the Japanese counterpart, the Family Computer or "Famicom", was released in exactly 1983. You see the Japanese populace was MORE skeptical of a video gaming machine. That very same year in Japan a standard for gaming was also released and this was called MSX. MSX was a standardization of computers manufactured by various hardware companies. Being American, I won't pretend to understand the complete scope of Japanese gaming or computing.

So the point being, Nintendo's Famicom was an actual facsimile of a running computer. It had a disk drive for some smaller games and the disks were rewritable media and it also had the requisite cartridge slot of a gaming machine. So you see Nintendo TRICKED the consumer to an extent because their main focus was gaming but they had to do some computing on the side.

I decided to write this thread to espouse anyone who has ever owned a Famicom to sing its praises and tell us what kinda computing you could do with it. What productivity software did it have? What could it do that MSX couldn't?

A youtube vido.
 
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A lot of this is pretty questionable. The Famicom was never really a computer system in the way that the MSX was, nor was it disguised as anything but a console; only the NES ever used the front-loading slot design, and the Disk System didn't even come out until 1986. Outside of Family BASIC, I don't even know if anything used the keyboard peripheral, and the main reason for the Disk System's existence was because floppies were cheaper to mass-produce than cartridges (but, as Nintendo soon discovered, far easier to pirate.) It was a game console through and through.

That said, the Famicom (and Disk System) do have a kickass game library, especially when you get into stuff that uses the sound expansion pins they cut from the NES. Castlevania III in particular is just so much better...
 
The two are quite different. Famicom is based on a Ricoh CPU, which is a 6502 compatible with some differences and the PPU for graphics. As stated, while you could connect a keyboard to it, I never got the feeling it was marketed as a computer system even though the name implies so. Also see the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed 2600), Magnavox Odyssey 2 with built-in touch type keyboard and so on.

MSX on the other hand was a standard set in July 1983. Some manufacturers, mainly Spectravideo had released their computers prior to the standard was set. What makes MSX interesting is that is based on an off-the-shelf chipset in form of a Z80, a TMS9918/29 VDP and a AY-3-8910 sound chip. All three already common hardware in computers and video games, sometimes in combination and often combined with other chips. So what MSX added was a concept, ROM with Microsoft Basic and common I/O, not any particular new hardware that only MSX manufacturers could use.

What you really should look into is Sega's first console, the SG-1000 which was released in Japan on the exact same day as the Nintendo Famicom was. The hardware found in a SG-1000 is a Z80, a TMS9918 and a SN76489 sound chip, pretty much the same chipset as you'd find in the ColecoVision console released a year earlier. Now, Sega even made a computer version of their first console, the SC-3000. It has about 0K RAM onboard, so your Basic cartridge will have some RAM to work with. Otherwise it is a full worthy computer with keyboard, cassette interface and so on. Now you might ask why Sega didn't jump onto the MSX bandwagon since they were just as Japanese as Yamaha, Sony (yes, they made a number of MSX computers), Casio and numerous other brands were.

Sega might have had very clear reasons why to develop their own console, make a short spin off into the computer world and then go in their own direction, but when comparing the three, it becomes obvious that MSX has much more in common with Sega SG-1000 than it has with Nintendo Famicom.
 
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Thanks for the input. I wanted to discuss Japanese "computers" / "consoles" in general. I didn't realize that Sega had anything prior to Mega Drive. :D
 
Oh.. they had a long series of which at least the Master System even ought to have been available in your neighbourhoods.

SG-1000 / SC-3000
SG-1000 Mark II
Mark ///
Master System

Also, I have a strong feeling that the "video game crash" to most part was an US thing, possibly also affecting Europe. What was going on in Japan didn't necessarily be affected by what happened in the rest of the world. Also, it was not so much of a crash as a decline as e.g. ColecoVision managed to sell about one million consoles in the span between August 1982 and roughly August 1983. Although there was a Christmas sale inbetween there, they and others most probably couldn't have grinded to halt in e.g. March 1983 and still sell so well. Of course all the crap games, of which some rather sleazy ones for the 2600 helped demoralize the common people's view on the video games. Now again, I find the Japanese to have a different mindset about that so perhaps it would not have been as much of an issue for them. ;-)
 
A lot was in the name. Nintendo apparently did have arcade games from Japan in the US I guess prior to the release of the NES. Since "game system" had that "crash" connotation that's why they named it an "entertainment system" instead implying it could do more or wasn't just a game system like the possibly dying industry had. There's also some story as to why they included Robbie the robot in those first packages. It was pretty much a scam to make folks think that perhaps it can control a robot, it's educational, not just a game console but they at Nintendo knew it was just a marketing ploy.

One of my favorite stories I saw in a documentary recently was from the CEO (i think) of Nintendo while they were trying to come out with the English releases of the games. "Donkey Kong" he named mostly from a lack of understanding correct english which is funny (odd how normal it sounds today). He had heard Donkey was American slang for dumb or stupid, and Kong I guess over there is a term for big monkey/gorilla so it was supposed to be somewhat titled "Stupid Gorilla" for the translation.

From what I recall the famicom also didn't have any region coding or modified cartridges but the NES did. So famicom can play Japanese or US titles while I think the US version NES you can't fit a famicom cartridge in which was one of those stupid sales tricks to keep other countries behind the curve.

The MSX is a neat story, I wish I was more aware of them back in the day. I only know a little about them other than a bunch of manufacturers coming out with their own look but the cartridge and internal coding was standardized. The funny part was I'm pretty sure it was an initiative from Microsoft so there's the US market invading the foreign market without much notice. Oh another tidbit was Metal Gear Solid I think was actually first made on the MSX. I think there were a few other games that were there first too before getting ported to other consoles.
 
In China they did make some Famicom-clone-based, ridiculously cheap (< $20) "computers" with a keyboard, mouse, and parallel port:

http://133fsb.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/famicom-compatible-printer-port-interface/

In the USA, the Nintendo Entertainment System was disguised not as a computer, but as a piece of home video equipment, with colors and styling to blend in next to a family's VCR, and controllers similar to the wired VCR remotes that were common in the early '80s. And of course it often came packaged with the toy robot that made it vaguely "educational".
 
Kind of off-topic, but isn't the whole video game crash a little exaggerated? A lot of people seem to think the video game industry wouldn't exist today without the NES. Contrary to this belief, the computer game industry was booming at that time in the US, and the video game "crash" in general really wasn't seen outside the U.S.
 
barythrin said:
Oh another tidbit was Metal Gear Solid I think was actually first made on the MSX.
Click to expand...

Vanilla "Metal Gear." In the Famicom version Snake parachutes into the jungle from an air plane. In the MSX version its via scuba gear. Also the NES had a "sequel" called Snake's Revenge which was made by an American team because there were no plans to port the second game on MSX (Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake). Hideo Kojima since then praised the SR game and incorporated several things from it into the design of Metal Gear Solid on PSone.

TanruNomad said:
Kind of off-topic, but isn't the whole video game crash a little exaggerated? A lot of people seem to think the video game industry wouldn't exist today without the NES. Contrary to this belief, the computer game industry was booming at that time in the US, and the video game "crash" in general really wasn't seen outside the U.S.
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Certainly devices released in the USA that could only play games would have seemed a luxury people didn't want to have if it werent' for the NES taking the world by storm. It was a superior product to many of the non-computer videogame consoles released by Americans prior to it. (We already discussed that somewhere.) With the use of tiles and dynamic scrolling, they blew Atari out of the water.

But keep in mind that computers are computers and gaming is only a side business for them.

In 1990, many hits from the NES library such as Punch-Out! (sans the Mike Tyson license) & Metroid (new box cover) were re-released. I bought into it at this time and was a gaming addict for many years since.
 
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TanruNomad said:
Kind of off-topic, but isn't the whole video game crash a little exaggerated? A lot of people seem to think the video game industry wouldn't exist today without the NES. Contrary to this belief, the computer game industry was booming at that time in the US, and the video game "crash" in general really wasn't seen outside the U.S.
Click to expand...

There were two trends overlapping in North America at the time: the flood of cheap Atari 2600 video games in 1982-1983, and the flood of cheap home computers in 1983-1984. There were so many competing products on the market that people didn't know which ones to buy, so they just avoided them all. (Remember, this was also when Betamax was still fighting a death match against VHS.) And just as Atari turned out some real clunkers like Pac-Man and E.T., the home computer industry turned out clunkers like the Commodore Plus-4 and Coleco Adam, both of which ended up on the discount rack at Toys-R-Us, alongside all the crummy Atari games.
 
Yeah, it's funny you mention that TanruNomad. I (although was a child and not in charge of purchases) never heard of any video game crash at the time. Only now reading I hear about the mythical crash which did seem to affect marketing strategies although I'm not sure what real effort came out of it. I don't consider NES particularly historical but I do give them credit. Take a look at an average Atari 2600 game.. while I enjoyed them as a kid, you can only have so many block shapes objects firing bullets and making the same explosion sound before it becomes quite boring. Compare that to Mario and really .. that is a damn impressive game for it's time. Apparently it was an arcade game before being released for NES which I never knew.

I don't think it was particularly related to any crash but I never had any game "console" as a kid. My folks were smart and frugal and saved money for better things but that's when kids were supposed to play outside .. sitting in front of a TV was frowned upon and "bad for you". What we did get eventually instead of a gaming console was a home computer so my father could do some work stuff at home, etc. That we of course found games for and always wanted time on the computer if it was available.

I remember my friend had an Atari 2600 which I thought was fun (liked the tank games). My other friend across the street, her parents eventually bought her a Nintendo for christmas which was pretty fun to play on too. One year (I was still just a kid.. hell I dunno maybe 10 or something) walking to a friends house I saw a garage sale so I stopped in. They had an Atari 2600 with a game holder full of games (12 games?) and like 6 controllers. I think they were asking $2 for it all. I must have run home and grabbed my allowance and picked it up. Funny as the same thought of today was in my head at that age "there HAS to be more than $2 of electronics in this alone! what a great deal for something I always wanted but couldn't afford!". I still have it.. ironically I think it's in the same brown box I bought it in my old closet at my folks place lol. Not sure what year it was but I think the gaming industries problem was a lack of new content and lack of better graphics/systems.

My computer could play games that matched or beat the graphics of any Atari game. NES/Sega on the other hand those were impressive and at the time I didn't feel too left out but the computer games were definitely different styles than graphics and music on the consoles.

It isn't a stretch though to understand as a parent, if you saw two similarly priced items. One is a $300 game console with one controller and $50 games, the other is say $300 computer with typing applications, work things you could do, but also can play games or program it's a pretty easy choice which one most folks would say would be better for a child to have access to. Given I lived in a small town so I don't recall ever seeing a computer that cheap either but still.. a computer in the household was becoming almost practical while a dedicated game system wasn't.
 
barythrin said:
I don't consider NES particularly historical but I do give them credit. Take a look at an average Atari 2600 game.. while I enjoyed them as a kid, you can only have so many block shapes objects firing bullets and making the same explosion sound before it becomes quite boring. Compare that to Mario and really .. that is a damn impressive game for its time.
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The Atari 5200 and ColecoVision could both match or exceed the graphics and sound of many early NES games, but both of those systems were expensive, huge, ugly, poorly designed, and came with terrible controllers which were difficult to use and broke easily and often.

And ironically, the NES was originally supposed to be sold as an Atari in the USA, because Nintendo was looking for a U.S. distributor for their console design and of course at the time (1983), Atari was still #1. But negotiations between Nintendo and Atari fell apart after Atari saw a trade show demo of Donkey Kong running on the Coleco Adam computer, a violation of Atari's exclusive rights to home computer releases of the game. So Atari decided to go with another company (General Computer Corporation) to design their new video game console, which eventually became the Atari 7800.
 
They didn't pull that sleek Commodore copyleft and sell Konkey Kong? Nothin' but net.
images
 
barythrin said:
They didn't pull that sleek Commodore copyleft and sell Konkey Kong? Nothin' but net.
images
Click to expand...

Oh sure, there were plenty of Donkey Kong ripoffs... some of which were actually better than the officially licensed version, such as "Donkey King" for the TRS-80 CoCo.

Coleco had the official license from Nintendo for releasing Donkey Kong to video game consoles, while Atari had the license for home computers. But when Coleco introduced their Adam home computer, the fact that it could play ColecoVision games blurred the lines between these two categories, so Coleco released their own version of Donkey Kong for it, instead of going through Atari.

Regardless of the legal issues, the Adam version was perhaps the best official home computer version of Donkey Kong ever released, since it included all of the levels and cut scenes:

 
facattack said:
All I know about this subject is that there apparently was an official Mario Bros cart on Atari.

Not "SUPER" Mario Bros but the game which eventually became a mini-game in Super Mario Bros 3 two-player games...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros.
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Yes, the original Mario Bros. was one of the Nintendo games which Atari had the rights to distribute in North America. They released versions of it for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, the Atari 8-bit home computer series -- including the XE Game System, which was Atari's idea of repackaging their 65XE computer as a video game console to try to compete with the NES.
 
I just played a rather arduous game of Castlevania on DOS. It has side-scrolling levels. And the music is played via the PC spearker which basically just butchers the damn thing! Ugh. Bland but colorful visuals, strange play control....
 
The music's better on Tandy, but yeah, the control leaves something to be desired (add that to the fact that Castlevania is a pretty damn tricky game to begin with, in places...) Still, it's a whole lot better than the Amiga version.
 
The Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom, did have potential to be used as a real computer with certain peripherals. First, the Family BASIC package came with the cartridge with the BASIC program and a Keyboard. It also supported the Famicom Data Recorder, a cassette recorder, for saving and loading programs. Second there was the Famicom Disk System, which used 3" floppy disks to store games. The drive can be written to for save game information. Unfortunately, Nintendo never released disk software to allow a player to access the drive directly. Family BASIC cannot be used at the same time as the Disk System because both use the cartridge port, but the Keyboard can be used with the Disk System (no released software ever took advantage of that). The Famicom has the hardware and most of the software to be a true computer. The NES has none of these things.
 
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