NES/Famicom Disk System



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

The Famicom Disk System is an add-on for the Famicom that loads games from proprietary 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, the system added some improved sound capabilities. On the other hand, it had some serious downsides: long loading times, very poor reliability, and rampant piracy. Also, Nintendo's third-party licensing terms for it were even more draconian than with cartridges. And retailers hated the bulky kiosks, which didn't make them enough money to justify the space they took.

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.