Why no Nintendo Disk System in America?

[pocketmego]

This is what I have a lot of trouble understanding...

 

Nintendo really needed to push the "Entertainment System" idea to get people's minds away from the idea it was a Video Game system. This was, of course, because retailers were still hurting from the Crash.

 

Needless to say they pulled it off and the rest is history.

 

BUT...

 

Wouldn't it have been easier to release the NES sans cartrdige slot and just go with the full on disk system here in the States. After all, the vast majority of games put out for the NES in its first year in America were previously Disk System games anyway.

 

Having the games on disk would have been a much easier sell for Nintendo to retailers who associated disks with computers and not Video Games. They also wouldn't have had to redesign the whole thing to hide the slot.

 

It just seems a bit odd to me to spennd all that money on Rom/cart production when an easier system existed and it would have been easier to sell in America at the time.

 

-Ray

[Dave Farquhar]

I think it was partly because the cartridge offered instant gratification. I know the people who had Nintendos but no computers got fidgety back in the day waiting for disk-based games to load.

 

The other issue was control. If the NES had been disk-based, it would have just been a matter of time before third parties figured out how to do their own titles and get around licensing, and other parties figured out how to copy them. Piracy was a big, big problem with the computer systems at the time. The cartridge didn't totally lock out third parties or piracy, but it sharply reduced both problems.

[Tempest]

The whole reason the disk system came about is because they were cheap to make. Much like the SMS cards, they allowed Nintendo to put out small games rather cheaply. However they were very limited in how much data they could put on the disks as each side only held 64K. This meant that they could not put the larger advanced games on disks without having them span multiple disks (if that was even possible). Rampant piracy was seriously starting to eat into Nintendo's bottom line so they started to shy away from putting popular games on disks.

 

Nintendo did have plans to release the system in the US, but by the time the Nintendo had caught on in the US the price of memory chips had fallen dramatically so 512K and 1MB cartridge games were almost as cheap to make as 64K disk games so they decided against a US release (the piracy issue didn't help either). About this time the system was being phased out in Japan as well due to falling memory chip prices although it continued on in very limited form up until about 1991ish.

 

Tempest

[+Psionic]

Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself, Proto Man.

 

I would also add that given the general unreliability of the Disk System and its disks (broken drive belts and corrupt disks are very common), you should be happy that Nintendo never released them in America.

[Inky]

I do wish they would have released some system to save your tracks in Excitebike.

 

 

Mmmm... Excitebike!

[Tempest]

A little bit of triva: Excitebike was developed using the Famicom Family Computer (keyboard) attachment which was also not released in the US.

 

Tempest

 

I do wish they would have released some system to save your tracks in Excitebike.

 

 

Mmmm... Excitebike!

[+Psionic]

Well, the save feature was included in the cart (Save and Load options) but it obviously doesn't work because they opted not to include battery backup. There was at least one other early NES game that was the same way (I believe it was Wrecking Crew). Most of the FDS games that had disk-save backup used passwords when they were converted to cartridge (except Zelda and Zelda II). I can only assume this was a cost-cutting measure on Nintendo's part. Too bad.

[Tempest]

Well, the save feature was included in the cart (Save and Load options) but it obviously doesn't work because they opted not to include battery backup. There was at least one other early NES game that was the same way (I believe it was Wrecking Crew). Most of the FDS games that had disk-save backup used passwords when they were converted to cartridge (except Zelda and Zelda II). I can only assume this was a cost-cutting measure on Nintendo's part. Too bad.

 

I believe the save/load features of Excitebike and Wrecking Crew used the Famicom cassette recorder which was also not released in the US.

 

Tempest

[pocketmego]

Boy we didn't get much of anything cool in terms of Famicom peripherals.

 

Thanks for the answer to the disk system thing. Apparently it was on its way out even as the NES was on its way into America.

 

-Ray

[Inky]

IIRC, in Japan, didn't Nintendo introduce a set of LCD 3-D glasses, like the ones the SMS used?

[NightSprinter]

Yup, that they did. Not to mention a modem, Mah-Jhong controller, and a bunch of other wacky peripherals (including their versions of Gyromite and Stack-Up, which also go for astronomical prices on eBay).

 

Btw, did you know that for Arkanoid II you needed to have the controller that came with it AND the original Arkanoid for 2-player VS mode? (Same for the MSX2 version)

[Tempest]

IIRC, in Japan, didn't Nintendo introduce a set of LCD 3-D glasses, like the ones the SMS used?

 

Yeah, but only a hand full of games used them. There was also a modem that was used for online banking!

 

The problem with importing all these cool accessories is that the aux port (which the Japanese accessories used) was changed on the US NES. I think an adapter might be able to be made, but I'm not 100% sure if all the needed lines are still in the US port.

 

Tempest

[pocketmego]

IIRC, in Japan, didn't Nintendo introduce a set of LCD 3-D glasses, like the ones the SMS used?

 

Yeah, but only a hand full of games used them. There was also a modem that was used for online banking!

 

The problem with importing all these cool accessories is that the aux port (which the Japanese accessories used) was changed on the US NES. I think an adapter might be able to be made, but I'm not 100% sure if all the needed lines are still in the US port.

 

Tempest

 

Why did they change it? I can see changing the look of the machine to give it a different image, but why remove something like that?

 

-Ray

[JB]

IIRC, in Japan, didn't Nintendo introduce a set of LCD 3-D glasses, like the ones the SMS used?

 

Yeah, but only a hand full of games used them. There was also a modem that was used for online banking!

 

The problem with importing all these cool accessories is that the aux port (which the Japanese accessories used) was changed on the US NES. I think an adapter might be able to be made, but I'm not 100% sure if all the needed lines are still in the US port.

 

Tempest

 

Why did they change it? I can see changing the look of the machine to give it a different image, but why remove something like that?

 

-Ray

Because the port was essentially a big controller port.

The FamiCom had hard-wired gamepads, so this connector was the only way to add devices or use substitutes for the gamepads. The NES... well, you know.

 

Most of the aux pins wound up on the controller ports.

There's some quirks to the setup that make at least the FamiCom keyboard fundamentally incompatable, as I recall.

Edited September 19, 2006 by JB

[Flojomojo]

No FDS for us because we be filthy stinkin' pirates here. Yarrrr.