Famicom Disk System - information and diskussion

[BoneSnapDeez]

I've had good luck so far. I buy from reputable sellers and take care of my shit.

[Ziggy]

If a disk suffers from disk rot, I believe you can use an FDSStick to rewrite a disk (the homepage for it says you can read/write to a disk). The hardware seems to be fairly reliable. I think aside from possibly having to change the drive belt, clean the heads and lube some moving parts they seem to have stood up to time. I've thought about getting one in the past, just for fun for a couple of my favorite games, but they're too expensive at this point.

[opa]

The Disk System looks really cool. Were there any games that used both the cart slot & disk (like Sega Cd/32x games)?

[Ziggy]

Nope. The Famicom doesn't have an expansion port. The Disk System actually plugs into the cartridge slot on the Famicom, so it would be impossible to use a disk and cart at the same time. But even if you could (like say, on the NES) I don't believe there would be any reason to do so. The 32x and Sega CD added a lot of capabilities to the Genesis. The FDS, AFAIK, is just a disk drive. Can the FDS do anything that the stock Famicom cannot?

[opa]

Ah, okay. I thought it plugged into the back of the system (I don't own a famicom so I don't have a clue about the input ports).

[BoneSnapDeez]

Can the FDS do anything that the stock Famicom cannot?

At the time of its release the FDS was an absolute revelation. It brought "big" games with legitimate save functions to a console (there were no Fami carts with battery saves when the FDS launched). Just for reference the vanilla Fami cart games released around the same time as disk Zelda include titles like Twinbee, SonSon, Goonies, and Circus Charlie. Zelda (along with Nazo no Murasame-jou and others) ushered in the wave of RPGs and grand adventures.

Looking at everything today, yeah FDS games are basically "Famicom games on disk." There's the load times, disk flipping, and new sound channel, but as I stated on the first page of this thread, the FDS is nothing like the Sega CD or whatever -- there are no Time Gal type games that were impossible to create on cartridges.

Fun fact: even the Sharp Twin Famicom prevents a disk and cart from being inserted at the same time. There's a "mode" switch and when it's flipped to disk the cartridge slot locks up.