NES/Famicom Disk System



"From the age of the cartridge to the age of the floppy disk."

The Famicom Disk System was an add-on for the Famicom (the Japanese NES) that loaded games from special floppy disks.

Its selling point was that the disks allowed larger games (up to 112KB, while early NES games like Super Mario Bros had only 32KB), at a lower cost. Other than buying the disks with games, you could buy blanks and record the games from kiosks for a fee. A neat feature was that the disks could be used to save your progress. Also, it added some improved sound capabilities. On the other hand, it had some downsides: long loading times, very poor reliability, and rampant piracy.

Not long after the system came out, falling prices of ROM chips and the introduction of memory mappers allowed cartridges with even greater capacity, making the whole thing pointless. So it was never released outside of Japan and received modest support from developers: only 200 games were made for it—many being re-releases from cartridges, and some like Zelda and Metroid getting cartridge re-releases afterwards. But a few gems remained exclusive.