11:33 A decade or so ago, I got into an ebay bidding war over one of these damn things. The single bid price $80 USD but when I bid, this one other guy outbid. This kept going until I tapped out at $600 USD. I didn't win the item, but hey, at least I made the other guy pay $600 instead of $80. So there's that.
@@spoonhanz the true mario bros 2 would be “the lost levels” which apparently was to hard for people not being Japanese somehow. Which as a kid, I did enyoi more then Doki..
This video also made me remember that, around the year 2000 there was a project to turn cheap FamiClones into "educational computers" by using a keyboard, very similar to the one featured here. That was a very original concept, which might have become a great idea... But then the Raspberry Pi appeared and it became a better platform to teach programming and electronics.
Videos like this are why I love this channel: content not really delivered anywhere else, and not presented in a saccharine over-the-top fashion as seems to be the trend these days. Great stuff!
Interesting I didn't know about this for the NES. There's also the Starpath Supercharger for the Atari 2600 that would load games from cassettes. I have one of those with a few cassettes.
I kind of love the design of the prototype and even the infrared controllers the cassette player also looked very sleek. Probably was decided against due to how easy it would have be to pirate for though.
That was amazing! Just a couple of days ago I was talking with a friend about the time when the line between PCs and game consoles was very blurry, as there were consoles that offered a "conversion kit" to become more akin to computers and computers that eventually tried to be more like game consoles. And this is one of those things!
There were knock-off Famicom systems (aka Famiclones) that were shaped like a typical 8-bit computer system with an integral keyboard. Some of these included educational software beyond BASIC. None of these systems were sold in North America.
the history of why there's so many nintendo-on-a-chip craphandhelds and mini arcades and what have you nowadays loosely ties into this through the jackie chan computer.
I remember seeing a little about that add-on for the Famicom several years ago. I'm not surprised that it was never released here in the US. I'm sure with all the hoops Nintendo had to jump through to get retailers on board with selling the NES in the US in the first place the last thing Nintendo wanted consumers to be able to do is release loads of potentially crappy games via cassette. As a kid in the 80's I would have loved to have been able to program in my own games using my NES but at that time doing that sort of thing was always the realm of home computers like the C64, Amiga and PC. That showed in the games on the NES as well. There were relatively few US developed games on the NES until the early 90s.
Been waiting for someone to cover this. I've been hoping that one day someone will take one of the smaller BASIC listings from another machine and try to re-create it using the tile set
Some of the loading issues you're experiencing may be from your fancy tape deck, it may have things like Dolby noise reduction or bias turned on, features to "improve" tape sound quality for music recordings.
It still blows my mind that the NES was almost a Micro in the west. You can see a lot of MSX influence in the design. It also makes me wonder what kind of mess incorporating the Disk System into it could have been as well.
The FDS wouldn't be usable while FamilyBasic was loaded. The FDS interfaced through the cartridge slot, so there was no way for the cart-based Basic to use the disk drive. Loading Basic via floppy disk wouldn't gain you a lot, as the FDS's PRG RAM was the same size as the PRG ROM in Family Basic 3(which also had 4k of nonvolatile PRG RAM in the cart). Though having CHR RAM available would be a compelling feature(Family Basic only has CHR ROM, meaning you can't create your own graphics assets)
There was apparently some sort of hacked version of basic available for the disk system, but I can't find it sadly. It loaded into the disk systems ram, it must have been cut down to fit. All the versions of Family Basic have utilities or example programs built in, so if you got rid of those you could probably fit the interpreter into the disk RAM with a bit left over for the user. This website mentions it. yosshin4004-github-io.translate.goog/famibe/overview/index.html?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp I would love to see this!
An upgraded FDS RAM interface would have been interesting, on that token. Some form of mapper chip technology probably could have made it possible, but Nintendo was quick to can the FDS thanks to their worst enemy: Piracy and Pornography.
@@nadiaaugustine9798 The FDS was seemingly designed for upgradability from the start. More's the pity. Also, the second stroke wasn't porn. It was a sudden crash in ROM prices making larger cartridges commercially-viable. Though the rampant piracy was a HUGE issue.
I wonder if it’s possible to break out if the BASIC environment and load arbitrary code off the cassette drive like an SMB rom like the Famicom Disk System.
This is very interesting! I had heard about this keyboard addon, but have never seen any actual usage of it anywhere in a video. I personally would love to see more about this subject. Sharopolis's content among other retro computing/gaming channels on UA-cam is always rather unique and continues to deliver :)
Pretty interesting, always heard about these type of games you could program yourself (mostly for EU computers)...I don't know if I would be patient enough as a kid to type in the code
Fortunately, I went to school with a kid who didn't have the patience to type in the games either. Every month, he'd buy a copy of "Sinclair Programs" then pay me a tenner to type in all the Spectrum programs and save them onto tape for him. I got to keep the magazine afterwards too! Looking back, it was a ridiculous amount of money for a school kid to have, but his family was pretty well-off. They had a telephone inside their actual house, and their electricity meter didn't need coins.
@Damion Manuel The UK. For many families in the 1980s, coin operated meters were the only way we could afford electricity. When Thatcher wasn't busy noshing off Reagan, she was systematically destroying British industry and making millions unemployed.
Sure, these games seem pretty, well, BASIC, but compared to something similar on an Apple ][ like you'd find in a magazine or a set of public domain disks at your local public library, this is some next-gen stuff! Imagine if you had 64K of RAM instead of 4.......
Somebody should get you an S-VHS Time Lapse VCR and a Technics SV-P100, that way you can really cram-pack those programs and get reliable loading. There was also a CD for the ZX Spectrum (which required a CD player of course) which included a custom loader program at the beginning to enable you to more easily select all of the other games, and load them extremely quickly too. Perhaps you could reverse engineer that!
Interesting AF. People who were into these first games had to have thought that this was the coolest $hit ever. Those magazines sharing games via code, and having to type the code in to save it to tape just to load it on to another system to play was crazy!
I've heard mono cassette decks work better for this porpose, should have kept mybnice one I would be tempted to copy SMB3 to cassette but I suppose that would take an hour of tape and a Famicom with 384k RAM.
I wish they'd gone ahead with this. I recall the keyboard back in the day and was wondering how to import it, alongside the diskdrive. Then things just moved too quickly.
Could you use the Family Computer to make music somehow and then burn it to a cassette tape to listen to on trips? It would have been really cool to make NES mixtapes or even to rip game music directly from a cartridge.
note those BASIC programs, of course use the NES PPU (a 5.5 MHz sprite machine) that's why even such simple games have smoothly moving sprites. Otherwise, without PPU they would have been slow, flickering things...
Your best bet would be to use a tape deck with a mono head and not a stereo head. Most, if not so all "hi-fi" systems like the one you're using will be stereo. Those smaller tape players, like the Nintendo one you showed, had mono heads. It will likely be no use to put your hi-fi in mono mode as the head is still a stereo one. This is all assuming Nintendo followed the same method of all the other tape based home computers of storing data in mono format - I don't actually know the method they used.
great video man! those games are great for BASIC programmed stuff. please do more. i guess having the graphics seperate like that makes it so much more advanced. normally ur limited to ascii grafx and text adventures (blah)
Since magnetic tape had been around since before the Second World War, and since it was quite the ideal medium for data storage (at least short term, since it typically didn't last for longer than a couple decades) back during the 70s and 80s, when video game consoles like the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision were pioneering the then fledgling video game industry, I do wonder how the history of video gaming would've gone had there been video game consoles that used tiny cassette tapes for storing much of the data of various games (possibly alongside some traditional ROM chips for quickly loading various assets, such as sprites or core programming data, integrated into the cassettes as part of a convenient all-in-one package, as with video game cartridges), to allow for the development of far more expansive games that, instead of being the typical short-length arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Galaga, were more along the lines of, say, Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Pokémon Red/Blue, or Wolfenstein 3D to name a few.
Inside the Family Basic cartridge is some working ram, but also the standard program rom and character rom. This makes me wonder what would happen if you would replace the character rom with one from another game. Would you automatically have access to that games sprite data in Family Basic? Also, what would happen if you replaced the working ram with one with higher capacity? Dammit. I wish I had one of these cartridges so I could try it.
I think the american version wouldve been given an 8k ram upgrsde given the failures of low end micros in the US, 8k wouldve been a minimum to seem modern-esque in '85
@@IcyTorment in terms of a full micro-computer, which this is not... ALL console based computer add ons were at least 1 generation behind. but PLEASE continue to show off exactly how dumb you old fucks still are with tech. Lmao, you even brought up the adam in another comment, which applies the same concepts amd had no chance as well... How ignorant, are you baby boomer or gen x? Either way please hurry and stop existing.
It blew my mind when I found out old computers used cassette tapes before floppy drives. Now I want to release a music cassette where one side is one of my videogames
@@rustymixer2886 Did you bother listening? He said he had to retry many, many times to get those 3 loads. It's a video not live. You didn't watch him load it 3 times in a row. I'm not saying it doesn't work at all, I'm saying it is unreliable and it is. ALL experience has shown it to be unreliable. Whereas a shoe box recorder is highly reliable.
Very interesting! Thanks, champion. - By the way, 'KaniTori Game' (「カニトリゲーム」) might mean 'CrabGrab Game' or 'CrabBird Game' (or maybe something else). What d' y' reckon?
I thought I had heard just about everything and seen just about every peripheral for the Nintendo or the famicom. But I have never heard of a cassette tape player attachment with a keyboard
Have you ever seen the UA-cam channel "Famicom Dojo"? They discuss ALL things Famicom related, including this cassette deck, keyboard, disk drive, modem etc. I know they certainly mentioned about saving game _progress_ to cassette, but I don't remember hearing them mention about actually creating software for the machine (which I believe can save up to 4kb of data).
I really thought you were going to show homebrew on the famicom tape loader. You really need to buy one. The software is very underwhelming, but there is no reason you couldn't make homebrew on it
Well I grew up with the Vic-20 and Apple IIe and I was very well resigned to the idea that "Basic" would never be fast enough to allow one to make a proper game with a framerate greater than about 4fps. Turns out I had been just a couple of years too early.
@@DmitryDaren The machine code helped. But it was not strictly essential to make a basic but playable game. I need to restress: Making a game in Basic on Apple II or Vic-20 tended to give you about 4 fps. The pure Basic (without anything fancy) games on NES are running at perfectly playable framerates.
How about on trying to open Castlevania III or Batman Return Of The Joker, or SMB3, Battldtoads, etc on a Cassette such like this. I guess that it could, but about the loading times will be a real suffering at times.
@@Sharopolis thanks. If that includes everything needed to get going with BASIC coding, it seems pretty good value from what I know of the Japanese home computers. Which isn't that much. But the amount of RAM seems too low for anything other than hobbyist or educational coding.
If they'd put 64kb of RAM and a keyboard on the NES, it would have given the Commodore 64 and MSX machines a run for their money. But I'm sure they saw the failures of the SC-3000 and the Coleco Adam and decided the home computer market wasn't worth chasing...
The original nes is an original mp3 player too! If you had made the music's and samplings and make a good ass tunes with no videogame art or gameplay , wouldn't that kinda beat out the 8tracks ?
I wonder if anyone's figured out how to decode a Nes Rom say like Super Mario Bros and recorded it to tape and load it the same way . That's what i thought this video was about ?
I have either the very same cassette deck (WE something or other, IIRC), or certainly the same family. Bought it new in like 1996 or so. The problem with the "computer add-ons" is they all suck because none of the game consoles with these expansion units contain enough RAM and adding 60k of RAM to this add on would have priced it right out of the market. Being NES based makes this problem even worse because the graphics would have to be loaded twice, once in the program as data statements and once in the character portion of the memory map, which would presumably just be RAM rather than the clunky permanent character ROM as implemented in this computer expansion module.
@@IcyTorment It was also like $600. Funny thing is, it doesn't use any of the Colecovision's parts. Not the CPU, not the video controller, not any of the RAM. It is all reproduced inside the Adam. I don't think anything could have saved the Adam. I think it was doomed no matter what they did. There were already too many 8 bit computers.
5:08 Those damn data commands are inscrutable for trying to figure out what a program does. It’s just a list of integers! Are they graphics? A routine in assembler? who knows! 6:02 yay we crammed a forloop into a single line, so it fits on a page. anyone who would have to maintain or fix bugs would be ripping their hair out. Not as bad as obfuscated JavaScript. Still, all my basic experience was on the Apple II so it’s neat to see the NES specific commands for palettes and sprites. Unlike the Apple II games in basic seem halfway viable 9:24 oh wow instead of base64 this dev used kana which can get you more bits. But, Ow my eyes. There’s no disassembler in this environment either, so it’s basically a read only inscrutable binary blob. Aaagh.
It would,ve been cool if more software titles were released for it,also it would be cool if the disk system and keyboard could,ve been uaed atonce as well😁
That is a great idea, though I'm not sure whether it would be possible since the Disk System plugged directly into the cartridge slot, and the BASIC system ran off of a cartridge... You might get by with a disk that starts up the program, then you would swap out the disk, but that sounds very cumbersome and probably would have disadvantages. Also, I can't remember how much RAM the Disk System had.
@@BeefJerkey mmm i suppose the disksystem does 32KB of ram to store program data on it while it also does contain 8KB of ram for tile data., now i do wonder how that modem inside that famicom keyboard handles data,if it sends and recieve data to and from the famicom basic cartride,it makes me wonder how much ram inside that famicom basic cartride is left for the user to be used.
11:33 A decade or so ago, I got into an ebay bidding war over one of these damn things. The single bid price $80 USD but when I bid, this one other guy outbid. This kept going until I tapped out at $600 USD. I didn't win the item, but hey, at least I made the other guy pay $600 instead of $80. So there's that.
I just recently got in a bidding war with someone over a sealed PS2, ended up tapping out at $1200, which was absurd.
Props to you. I imagine finding “new” content on the NES is not easy.
Thanks. It does take a bit of digging these days to come up with stuff that hasn't already been done 10000 times.
@@Sharopolis but did you know super Mario bros 2 is actually a re-skin of a Japanese game called doki doki panic?
@@spoonhanz the true mario bros 2 would be “the lost levels” which apparently was to hard for people not being Japanese somehow. Which as a kid, I did enyoi more then Doki..
@@ClosestNearUtopia not sure if missing the joke or best reply ever
@@Sharopolis Well there is some of the strange bootleg stuff.
I remember typing in Basic games from magazines line by line on my TRS-80, but I had no idea you could even do this on an NES. Pretty amazing stuff!
This video also made me remember that, around the year 2000 there was a project to turn cheap FamiClones into "educational computers" by using a keyboard, very similar to the one featured here. That was a very original concept, which might have become a great idea... But then the Raspberry Pi appeared and it became a better platform to teach programming and electronics.
Videos like this are why I love this channel: content not really delivered anywhere else, and not presented in a saccharine over-the-top fashion as seems to be the trend these days. Great stuff!
Interesting I didn't know about this for the NES.
There's also the Starpath Supercharger for the Atari 2600 that would load games from cassettes. I have one of those with a few cassettes.
Those ASM based shooters show an incredible amount of projectiles on screen, they are no joke.
Sir Clive Sinclair was clearly a fan of that (first prototype) keyboard!
I'm pretty sure the Famicom keyboard was first, and the NES prototype keyboard was an adaptation for the western market.
Spirit of Satan is a pretty badass name for a game.
Wow, games on tape? That's amazing! Just imagine if they ever get games on CDs!
Amazing. I SO would have bought one in the US if it ever were released. YOU IS WINNER.
Outside of Japan, we is loser since we never got family basic 😟
I kind of love the design of the prototype and even the infrared controllers the cassette player also looked very sleek. Probably was decided against due to how easy it would have be to pirate for though.
You can also save courses in games like Excitebike, Mach Rider & Wrecking Crew to tape using the Family Keyboad's cassette input.
yeah, i'm pretty sure lode runner and nuts & milk also have that feature
That was amazing! Just a couple of days ago I was talking with a friend about the time when the line between PCs and game consoles was very blurry, as there were consoles that offered a "conversion kit" to become more akin to computers and computers that eventually tried to be more like game consoles. And this is one of those things!
There were knock-off Famicom systems (aka Famiclones) that were shaped like a typical 8-bit computer system with an integral keyboard. Some of these included educational software beyond BASIC. None of these systems were sold in North America.
Excellent video, as always. 👍✨🎮
*YOU IS WINNER*
the history of why there's so many nintendo-on-a-chip craphandhelds and mini arcades and what have you nowadays loosely ties into this through the jackie chan computer.
I remember seeing a little about that add-on for the Famicom several years ago. I'm not surprised that it was never released here in the US. I'm sure with all the hoops Nintendo had to jump through to get retailers on board with selling the NES in the US in the first place the last thing Nintendo wanted consumers to be able to do is release loads of potentially crappy games via cassette.
As a kid in the 80's I would have loved to have been able to program in my own games using my NES but at that time doing that sort of thing was always the realm of home computers like the C64, Amiga and PC. That showed in the games on the NES as well. There were relatively few US developed games on the NES until the early 90s.
I'd say the bigger problem for Nintendo would be competing with the c64 in it's home territory
I'd have shit my pants in anticipation for a nintendo home computer back then. Would love to see more videos on this / similar.
Been waiting for someone to cover this. I've been hoping that one day someone will take one of the smaller BASIC listings from another machine and try to re-create it using the tile set
Some of the loading issues you're experiencing may be from your fancy tape deck, it may have things like Dolby noise reduction or bias turned on, features to "improve" tape sound quality for music recordings.
This is something no one I know has covered. Great job finding something so different for a console that I thought I knew everything about.
It still blows my mind that the NES was almost a Micro in the west. You can see a lot of MSX influence in the design. It also makes me wonder what kind of mess incorporating the Disk System into it could have been as well.
The FDS wouldn't be usable while FamilyBasic was loaded. The FDS interfaced through the cartridge slot, so there was no way for the cart-based Basic to use the disk drive.
Loading Basic via floppy disk wouldn't gain you a lot, as the FDS's PRG RAM was the same size as the PRG ROM in Family Basic 3(which also had 4k of nonvolatile PRG RAM in the cart).
Though having CHR RAM available would be a compelling feature(Family Basic only has CHR ROM, meaning you can't create your own graphics assets)
There was apparently some sort of hacked version of basic available for the disk system, but I can't find it sadly. It loaded into the disk systems ram, it must have been cut down to fit. All the versions of Family Basic have utilities or example programs built in, so if you got rid of those you could probably fit the interpreter into the disk RAM with a bit left over for the user. This website mentions it.
yosshin4004-github-io.translate.goog/famibe/overview/index.html?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
I would love to see this!
An upgraded FDS RAM interface would have been interesting, on that token. Some form of mapper chip technology probably could have made it possible, but Nintendo was quick to can the FDS thanks to their worst enemy: Piracy and Pornography.
@@nadiaaugustine9798 The FDS was seemingly designed for upgradability from the start. More's the pity.
Also, the second stroke wasn't porn. It was a sudden crash in ROM prices making larger cartridges commercially-viable. Though the rampant piracy was a HUGE issue.
Bloody lovely to see actual retro.
This is exactly the geeky retro content i subscribed for. Good stuff.
Wow, that was so cool to see some of these Family Basic games in action! Awesome video Sharopolis!
I wonder if it’s possible to break out if the BASIC environment and load arbitrary code off the cassette drive like an SMB rom like the Famicom Disk System.
This is very interesting! I had heard about this keyboard addon, but have never seen any actual usage of it anywhere in a video. I personally would love to see more about this subject.
Sharopolis's content among other retro computing/gaming channels on UA-cam is always rather unique and continues to deliver :)
Pretty interesting, always heard about these type of games you could program yourself (mostly for EU computers)...I don't know if I would be patient enough as a kid to type in the code
Fortunately, I went to school with a kid who didn't have the patience to type in the games either. Every month, he'd buy a copy of "Sinclair Programs" then pay me a tenner to type in all the Spectrum programs and save them onto tape for him. I got to keep the magazine afterwards too!
Looking back, it was a ridiculous amount of money for a school kid to have, but his family was pretty well-off. They had a telephone inside their actual house, and their electricity meter didn't need coins.
I've spent many, many hours typing in games from books and magazines. (And even more hours getting them to work because of misprints. LOL)
@Damion Manuel Thatcher-era England was ROUGH, man.
@Damion Manuel The UK. For many families in the 1980s, coin operated meters were the only way we could afford electricity. When Thatcher wasn't busy noshing off Reagan, she was systematically destroying British industry and making millions unemployed.
The "crab game" is actually titled "crab bird game", which is why the crab is flying.
Must say, those games are fairly better than what I'd have expected for magazines BASIC listings, and I mean even the pure BASIC ones.
Sure, these games seem pretty, well, BASIC, but compared to something similar on an Apple ][ like you'd find in a magazine or a set of public domain disks at your local public library, this is some next-gen stuff! Imagine if you had 64K of RAM instead of 4.......
that was an extremely _basic_ pun
they're more like game construction kit games compared to most 80s micros basic games.
Impressive, nice did not know
Somebody should get you an S-VHS Time Lapse VCR and a Technics SV-P100, that way you can really cram-pack those programs and get reliable loading.
There was also a CD for the ZX Spectrum (which required a CD player of course) which included a custom loader program at the beginning to enable you to more easily select all of the other games, and load them extremely quickly too. Perhaps you could reverse engineer that!
Interesting AF. People who were into these first games had to have thought that this was the coolest $hit ever. Those magazines sharing games via code, and having to type the code in to save it to tape just to load it on to another system to play was crazy!
Impressive and unheard of!!! :O
Those shooters are incredibly impressive.
Congrats dude keep up the good work and I'll definitely be watching
Is it live?
Or is it Memorex?
Pirates ftfw! Yarrrr! 🏴☠️
Well there was always a tape loader for the famicom. It is for learning language kinds of tapes mostly.
I only knew about this because of a certain Red Birb.
To answer what you said, yes, I would be interested in a video on the Advanced Computer System.
This is incredible to discover, an unknown or largely unknown game featuring Mario.
Great video mate. Tape is the ultimate storage format. I'm joking, but it brings back some memories.
5:00
5 Cls
10 Print “fuck this programme”
20 Goto 10
Great graphics and colours in those games
I've heard mono cassette decks work better for this porpose, should have kept mybnice one
I would be tempted to copy SMB3 to cassette but I suppose that would take an hour of tape and a Famicom with 384k RAM.
Man, I wish a keyboard and BASIC was standard on the NES. Imagine how different things would be today.
this garnered a follow. this was amazing!
I wish they'd gone ahead with this. I recall the keyboard back in the day and was wondering how to import it, alongside the diskdrive. Then things just moved too quickly.
I love your videos man, awesome find!
You'd be surprised but the no frills Nintendo tape player probably would work better than your fancy unit that's optimized to play music.
Damn, we used to call them "Nintendo tapes" but this gives it a whole new meaning
If you thought Squid Game was awesome, no man, CRAB GAME is where it’s at.
Could you use the Family Computer to make music somehow and then burn it to a cassette tape to listen to on trips? It would have been really cool to make NES mixtapes or even to rip game music directly from a cartridge.
Would love more. Subscribed.
note those BASIC programs, of course use the NES PPU (a 5.5 MHz sprite machine) that's why even such simple games have smoothly moving sprites. Otherwise, without PPU they would have been slow, flickering things...
Your best bet would be to use a tape deck with a mono head and not a stereo head. Most, if not so all "hi-fi" systems like the one you're using will be stereo. Those smaller tape players, like the Nintendo one you showed, had mono heads. It will likely be no use to put your hi-fi in mono mode as the head is still a stereo one.
This is all assuming Nintendo followed the same method of all the other tape based home computers of storing data in mono format - I don't actually know the method they used.
YOU IS WINNER
Yeah, pretty stupid. Everybody knows it's "a winner is you".
great video man! those games are great for BASIC programmed stuff. please do more. i guess having the graphics seperate like that makes it so much more advanced. normally ur limited to ascii grafx and text adventures (blah)
Yeah I've been interested in the home computer kit for the Famicom
Nintendo could and should,ve also release nes games on cassette tapes as well,what a misoppertunity from nintendo for never doing that,ouch.
Interesting video. I had no idea that nes had cassette deck you could run programs/games from.
Since magnetic tape had been around since before the Second World War, and since it was quite the ideal medium for data storage (at least short term, since it typically didn't last for longer than a couple decades) back during the 70s and 80s, when video game consoles like the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision were pioneering the then fledgling video game industry, I do wonder how the history of video gaming would've gone had there been video game consoles that used tiny cassette tapes for storing much of the data of various games (possibly alongside some traditional ROM chips for quickly loading various assets, such as sprites or core programming data, integrated into the cassettes as part of a convenient all-in-one package, as with video game cartridges), to allow for the development of far more expansive games that, instead of being the typical short-length arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Galaga, were more along the lines of, say, Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Pokémon Red/Blue, or Wolfenstein 3D to name a few.
Inside the Family Basic cartridge is some working ram, but also the standard program rom and character rom. This makes me wonder what would happen if you would replace the character rom with one from another game. Would you automatically have access to that games sprite data in Family Basic? Also, what would happen if you replaced the working ram with one with higher capacity? Dammit. I wish I had one of these cartridges so I could try it.
Wow, I had no idea bullet hell looked that good running on old hardware.
I'm thinking any errors you may have run into may have been because your cassette deck is too good a quality.
Of course I am joking.
That prototype silver keyboard 😍 👌
I think the american version wouldve been given an 8k ram upgrsde given the failures of low end micros in the US, 8k wouldve been a minimum to seem modern-esque in '85
@@IcyTorment in terms of a full micro-computer, which this is not... ALL console based computer add ons were at least 1 generation behind. but PLEASE continue to show off exactly how dumb you old fucks still are with tech.
Lmao, you even brought up the adam in another comment, which applies the same concepts amd had no chance as well...
How ignorant, are you baby boomer or gen x? Either way please hurry and stop existing.
It blew my mind when I found out old computers used cassette tapes before floppy drives. Now I want to release a music cassette where one side is one of my videogames
That isn't true floppy predates cassettes
Good stuff
Thank you for sharing!!!
Bruh crab game on the nes
That amazing, so many nes games like on sub category.
The tapedeck you are using is too high quality for this. These work best with shoe-box recorders. They tend to be mono and have DC biasing.
It works
@@rustymixer2886 Not well. It's why he had to reload over and over. Everyone with experience loading tapes knows this.
@@tarstarkusz watching the video he did it like 3 times in a row...like I said its doable...I dont care if you had 1984 mono cassette to c64 players
@@rustymixer2886 Did you bother listening? He said he had to retry many, many times to get those 3 loads. It's a video not live. You didn't watch him load it 3 times in a row.
I'm not saying it doesn't work at all, I'm saying it is unreliable and it is. ALL experience has shown it to be unreliable. Whereas a shoe box recorder is highly reliable.
@@tarstarkusz i understand and agree with what you are saying , but in a pinch it can work which from the video is proof.
Very interesting! Thanks, champion. - By the way, 'KaniTori Game' (「カニトリゲーム」) might mean 'CrabGrab Game' or 'CrabBird Game' (or maybe something else). What d' y' reckon?
Or use the tape as USB mass storage, place rom on tape. Use emulator and boot from tape recorder.
I have a clone system from the 2000s that has a keyboard and the corresponding BASIC program
That cassette player probably sounds too full.. Sometimes a cheap player works better
I thought I had heard just about everything and seen just about every peripheral for the Nintendo or the famicom. But I have never heard of a cassette tape player attachment with a keyboard
Have you ever seen the UA-cam channel "Famicom Dojo"?
They discuss ALL things Famicom related, including this cassette deck, keyboard, disk drive, modem etc.
I know they certainly mentioned about saving game _progress_ to cassette, but I don't remember hearing them mention about actually creating software for the machine (which I believe can save up to 4kb of data).
I really thought you were going to show homebrew on the famicom tape loader. You really need to buy one. The software is very underwhelming, but there is no reason you couldn't make homebrew on it
Well I grew up with the Vic-20 and Apple IIe and I was very well resigned to the idea that "Basic" would never be fast enough to allow one to make a proper game with a framerate greater than about 4fps. Turns out I had been just a couple of years too early.
those basic prorams use the NES' PPU-picture processing unit... and , then the machine code , as said in the video...
@@DmitryDaren The machine code helped. But it was not strictly essential to make a basic but playable game. I need to restress: Making a game in Basic on Apple II or Vic-20 tended to give you about 4 fps. The pure Basic (without anything fancy) games on NES are running at perfectly playable framerates.
Just wow
How about on trying to open Castlevania III or Batman Return Of The Joker, or SMB3, Battldtoads, etc on a Cassette such like this. I guess that it could, but about the loading times will be a real suffering at times.
How much did the Famicom computer setup cost back in their day? I'm wondering how it may have compared to other 8-bit home computers.
I could not find any hard info on that, the only thing I found said it cost the same as the Famicom itself which was 14800 yen.
@@Sharopolis thanks. If that includes everything needed to get going with BASIC coding, it seems pretty good value from what I know of the Japanese home computers. Which isn't that much. But the amount of RAM seems too low for anything other than hobbyist or educational coding.
If they'd put 64kb of RAM and a keyboard on the NES, it would have given the Commodore 64 and MSX machines a run for their money. But I'm sure they saw the failures of the SC-3000 and the Coleco Adam and decided the home computer market wasn't worth chasing...
a vic 20 with beautiful graphics? yes please!
I have seen this on sale in Akihabara, but I have been hesitant in buying it
The original nes is an original mp3 player too! If you had made the music's and samplings and make a good ass tunes with no videogame art or gameplay , wouldn't that kinda beat out the 8tracks ?
I wonder if anyone's figured out how to decode a Nes Rom say like Super Mario Bros and recorded it to tape and load it the same way . That's what i thought this video was about ?
Did you try using the headphone output of the deck instead of the line output? :D
Kinda wish they had brought this over
I have either the very same cassette deck (WE something or other, IIRC), or certainly the same family. Bought it new in like 1996 or so.
The problem with the "computer add-ons" is they all suck because none of the game consoles with these expansion units contain enough RAM and adding 60k of RAM to this add on would have priced it right out of the market.
Being NES based makes this problem even worse because the graphics would have to be loaded twice, once in the program as data statements and once in the character portion of the memory map, which would presumably just be RAM rather than the clunky permanent character ROM as implemented in this computer expansion module.
@@IcyTorment It was also like $600. Funny thing is, it doesn't use any of the Colecovision's parts. Not the CPU, not the video controller, not any of the RAM. It is all reproduced inside the Adam.
I don't think anything could have saved the Adam. I think it was doomed no matter what they did. There were already too many 8 bit computers.
why did'nt they just use tape for the music in nes games ? ? ?
5:08 Those damn data commands are inscrutable for trying to figure out what a program does. It’s just a list of integers! Are they graphics? A routine in assembler? who knows!
6:02 yay we crammed a forloop into a single line, so it fits on a page. anyone who would have to maintain or fix bugs would be ripping their hair out. Not as bad as obfuscated JavaScript.
Still, all my basic experience was on the Apple II so it’s neat to see the NES specific commands for palettes and sprites. Unlike the Apple II games in basic seem halfway viable
9:24 oh wow instead of base64 this dev used kana which can get you more bits. But, Ow my eyes. There’s no disassembler in this environment either, so it’s basically a read only inscrutable binary blob. Aaagh.
It would,ve been cool if more software titles were released for it,also it would be cool if the disk system and keyboard could,ve been uaed atonce as well😁
That is a great idea, though I'm not sure whether it would be possible since the Disk System plugged directly into the cartridge slot, and the BASIC system ran off of a cartridge... You might get by with a disk that starts up the program, then you would swap out the disk, but that sounds very cumbersome and probably would have disadvantages. Also, I can't remember how much RAM the Disk System had.
@@BeefJerkey mmm i suppose the disksystem does 32KB of ram to store program data on it while it also does contain 8KB of ram for tile data., now i do wonder how that modem inside that famicom keyboard handles data,if it sends and recieve data to and from the famicom basic cartride,it makes me wonder how much ram inside that famicom basic cartride is left for the user to be used.
Please sir can you add a new game on basic operating system nes like new homebrew games. It is possible or not? Please tell me if you don't mind. 💗
So my mom was right all along... There really is a Nintendo tape...
Very cool
Stereo cassette players are a pain to load programs from. It's much more reliable to use mono portables. :)