Famicom Disk System

The Family Computer Disk System, commonly shortened to the Famicom Disk System (FDS), is a disk-drive peripheral for Nintendo’s Family Computer home console, released in Japan on February 21, 1986 at a retail price of ¥15,000 (around US$80).¹³¹⁵ Developed by Nintendo Research & Development 2 — the same team responsible for the Famicom itself — the system replaced ROM cartridges with proprietary rewritable floppy disks called “Disk Cards,” lowering the cost of games while adding save functionality and an extra sound channel.¹⁵² It was sold only in Japan, with a limited later distribution in Hong Kong, and never received an equivalent for the Western Nintendo Entertainment System.³¹⁵

Origins

The Disk System grew out of the Famicom boom of the mid-1980s, during which Nintendo became the dominant force in the Japanese games industry and struggled to keep pace with demand.² ROM chips for cartridges were expensive and subject to supply shortages, pushing even simple games above ¥5,000 and beyond the reach of many children’s allowances.¹⁰¹⁵ The need for cheaper games was sharpened by the Japanese government’s 1984 ban on video game rentals, which removed an inexpensive way for players to access titles and left them facing full retail prices.¹⁵ Looking to the home computing sector for inspiration, Nintendo decided to augment the millions of Famicoms already in homes with a separate piece of hardware capable of running larger games on cheaper media.²¹⁵

The result was a proprietary diskette based on Mitsumi’s Quick Disk format, customized in typical Nintendo fashion.²³ The Disk Cards were double-sided and held roughly 56K per side — about 112K in total — twice the storage of contemporary cartridges and far cheaper to produce.¹⁵³ Crucially, they were writable, allowing players to save their progress directly to disk rather than relying on the cumbersome password systems then common; battery-backed cartridge saves did not yet exist.² Disk System titles retailed for around ¥2,500–3,000, well below the ¥5,000–7,000 charged for most new cartridges.²

Hardware

The FDS comprises two main components: a RAM Adapter cartridge and the disk drive itself, connected by a serial cable.¹⁵³ The RAM Adapter plugs into the Famicom’s cartridge slot and sits atop the console, while the console in turn sits atop the drive, the whole assembly sharing the Famicom’s color scheme.¹⁵ The adapter contains 32K of RAM for caching program data, 8K of RAM for tile and sprite data, and a custom ASIC named the 2C33 that acts as a disk controller, houses an 8K BIOS ROM, and provides single-cycle wavetable synthesizer sound hardware.¹⁵³ This extra audio channel, used for FM-synthesis effects, allowed programmers to add a further layer of sound — often percussion or additional sound effects — over the equivalent cartridge games.²

Nintendo’s adaptations of the Mitsumi design included an embossed Nintendo logo on the casing that formed part of the copy-protection scheme, and a reduction from the two drive-head motors of a standard Mitsumi unit to a single motor.³ The single motor meant data had to be read linearly, more like a tape deck than a conventional floppy drive, producing loading bandwidth of around 12K per second and sometimes prolonged loading times.³ The system could run on the supplied AC adapter or on six C-cell batteries — said to last up to five months of daily play — a battery option included because Japanese homes of the era had few spare power sockets, most already occupied by the Famicom and television.³¹⁵ A common defect of used units is a broken internal drive band, a part Nintendo would replace in Japan for approximately ¥1,000.¹⁰

Distribution and kiosks

The most audacious element of Nintendo’s scheme was a network of “Disk Writer” kiosks installed in toy and electronics shops across Japan.²¹⁵ A customer could buy a blank Disk Card for ¥2,000 and have a game of their choice written to it for an additional ¥500 — roughly one-sixth the price of a new boxed game — and, because the cards were rewritable, return later to overwrite it with another title.²¹⁵ Commentators have described this as a forerunner of modern digital storefronts such as Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and Steam.² Some titles, such as Kaettekita Mario Bros. (“The Return of Mario Bros.”), were available only through the kiosk service.¹⁵¹⁶ From 1987, Nintendo also organized national high-score contests using “Disk Fax” machines that read scores from an inserted disk and transmitted them to the company’s headquarters.²¹⁰

Software

The FDS arrived early in the Famicom’s life and brought a number of firsts to the platform.³ Its standard-bearers were The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, ambitious long adventures designed around the disk’s save feature.² The Legend of Zelda was the very first Disk System game and a Miyamoto work that broke new ground for action role-playing on a console at a time when such games were the exclusive realm of computers.¹⁰ Other notable titles released first on the format included Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami (Kid Icarus), Akumajō Dracula (Castlevania), and the FDS Super Mario Bros. 2, known in the West as The Lost Levels.²³

A particular curiosity was Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, a Nintendo title with Miyamoto’s involvement that was later reworked into the Western Super Mario Bros. 2 released on cartridge.³ Nintendo published more than 30 of its own games for the system, with third parties including Konami, Bandai, Sunsoft, and DOG (Disk Original Group, a label of Square), and the FDS library grew to over 180 licensed and unlicensed titles, approaching 200 in total.¹⁰¹¹ The format was central to several franchises’ beginnings, and it remained the best-selling add-on for any games console despite being a Japan-only product.¹⁶ The system also hosted oddities such as I Am Teacher: Super Mario Sweater, which connected to a printer to produce knitting patterns for Mario-themed apparel.³

To promote the format, Nintendo created a mascot named “Diskun,” or “Mr. Disk”.¹⁵ The system’s distinctive boot screen — a flashing space background with the message “PLEASE SET DISK CARD” or “PLEASE PRESS ANY BUTTON,” after which Mario and Luigi appear and play before a disk is inserted — accompanied an 18-note chiptune theme that Nintendo has reused across later works, including the GameCube main-menu sound and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.¹³

Reception and later history

Half a million units sold within three months of launch, rising to two million by the end of 1986.² From 1986 until late 1987 Nintendo released no cartridge games at all, concentrating its output on the disk format.¹¹ The Disk System’s library underpinned the Western NES launch, as many early NES releases — Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Pro Wrestling among them — were ports of disk titles one to two years old.¹¹

Sharp produced a licensed combination unit, the Twin Famicom, which integrated the Famicom and Disk System into a single chassis; its BIOS screen replaced the word “Nintendo” with “Famicom”.¹⁴¹⁷³ The format’s decline followed the spread of cheaper, larger, and battery-backed cartridges, and the device was discontinued in Japan around 1993, though Disk Writer kiosks operated until that year.¹³¹⁰ Nintendo ended its disk-writing and repair services on September 30, 2003, with technical support discontinued altogether on October 31, 2007.¹³

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