This Famicom Disk System drive emulator looks amazing!
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Looks cool but:
low-cost
OLED display
pick one lol?
Juts looked it up and my FDStick cost $15 in 2016 and is still going strong.
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speaking of FDS stick…
if i have an RGB modded NES and want the best FDS experience, have any better options presented? i play most off my N8 but i know i lack the audio chips/channels for the full experience, just wondering if anything else has replicated them well in the years since
N8 has gotten a lot better for FDS sound. It was a disaster for a few years but is now acceptable. Not exactly the same but about as close as other audio chip emulation.
FDStick works perfectly though and costs peanuts. Just need a RAM adapter.
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nice! i need to update my N8 soon just in case. is there any benefit from FDS stick use that i’m not getting from said N8?
Just more accurate. It uses the real RAM adapter so it’s basically flawless emulation because all it is is disk emulation.
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You can also use the FDS Stick to dump and even re-write Famicom Disks.
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I want one! Just so I don’t have to set up the Twin just to play the few disc system games I own.
You need a 7201 FDS or modded one, plus transfer cable too though.
And it starts to get weird with writing FDS games. Written games work fine on the console they were written on, but may not work on other consoles! There is some black magic in tuning the write heads apparently.
Yeah there are some hoops to jump through, but nothing too difficult. You can even easily make the transfer cable from cheap composite cables.
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I got one by cutting an old Gyromite game cartridge into half. There was a batch of Gyromite NES cartridges that used Fami boards inside, they weigh heavier than normal NES carts because of the conversion adapters inside.
Recently I gotten the “reverse” adapter to turn NES carts to Fami and it worked really well.
Finished Zelda 1, for the second time ~ten years later, on the SFC/CRT so I consider that this time the conditions were optimal unlike the emulation on the 3DS hardware.
In the action adventure genre, it’s unrivalled in my opinion. And it’s so interesting, so troubling, compared to the sequels and the mostly hermetic opinions of gamers today. The game has a reputation on the net for being too “random” in its discovery mechanics, in the sense that it’s posed at random and the player doesn’t have the necessary reading to solve it. But today’s gamers have well-formatted habits, and therefore an outlook skewed by the expectations that make up today’s norm (bad IMO). However, if you sit down in front of the game properly, and don’t go on the Internet looking for the solution to the slightest unusual difficulty for a modern game, you’ll realize that Zelda 1 has a coherent original design, clearly presented, well thought-out (it’s not just a list of things to tick off) and readable. Gradually, of course, and so much the better, as players discover it for themselves as the game progresses. It’s meant to be, if you really play it.
A simple example: from Zelda 3 onwards, “bombable” walls are identifiable, either directly visually or by the noise made by the clash of the sword for the more hidden ones. And this isn’t the case in 1.
First of all, in the dungeons: as you play you quickly realize that each of the four walls of a room is likely to hide a passageway in its middle, even though nothing is marked on it. And the game makes us understand this gradually, correctly through experience, without telling us directly, until we understand that we need to consider this possibility for each wall of a dungeon. We then look at the map, see if we’ve already passed through the room behind it, check its position on the map: on the edge, stuck to a single dot left in the middle of the map, drawing an eye in the shape of an animal. In the latter case, it’s even indicated several times by a wise old man with more or less enigmatic phrases (sometimes the English translation is questionable, but it has its charm, like an old Chinese master lost in translation). You then have your stock of bombs to seriously manage (upgradable quantities for real adventurers) to carry out this task, which is strategic in many ways, more and more present as the dungeons progress, and totally designed. This is just one aspect of the game.
In the over-world, bombable rocky areas are often visually suspect due to the evocative geometry of the scenery, once again when playing you’ll quickly understand the logic of the design, and you’ll bomb regularly, but without exaggeration either, in your escapades always driven by your overflowing intentions. And, surprise, we come across often. This reading of the scenery, more organic than the same motif repeated over and over again, is fun and contributes to the adventure aspect through this attentive, even sensitive interactivity with the scenery, more enigmatic, more mysterious, more charming, giving a magical touch to the scenery we pass through, as we like to feel in a fairy-tale world of fantasy giving free rein to the imagination.
There are indeed two places to bomb without any clues, giving an extra heart. This is optional, and may reward the curious player. But it’s not totally by chance either, as the game trains us to be attentive: no “real” map, you have to memorize everything yourself, find your way around certain details, get lost, grumble (grumble) and find your way back, having found a new way to spot an area for the next move, learning from our mistakes. The map gradually becomes a playground that is truly tamed by our minds, in a non-passive way. It’s not surprising, then, that in this gratifying design logic for the player, we sometimes try to plant a bomb “at random”, by intuition, in a place that’s part of a whole we’ve been investing in for more than ten hours, and whose pleasure in knowing it even more precisely is intrepid. Also, because Zelda 1 comes from a time when the game had to, with a few well-placed points, carry on by its thickness and not its size.
For the trees to be burned, el famoso untraceable dungeon 8 entry: we’re given a tool to burn the trees. At first only once per entry screen, then by the end unlimited. We’ve been analyzing the scenery for the past 10 hours, just as we learned in The Witness that you have to pay attention to environmental enigmas. In one area, there’s a tree in the middle of a path that prevents us from getting through. While a wise old man tells us that the secret lies in the tree at the dead end…
Combats: no one talks about the fighting in their youTube rankings, but I was blown away. It’s exactly this gameplay, which I’d describe as geometrically complex, that in my opinion is the strength of arcade games (the real ones) in the positioning gameplay that requires a high frequency of screen reading, and overall kind of peripheral vision based on movement. If you focus on a particular point, you’re dead, just like in a good shmup. For me, this is better than ALttP’s combats, which are very good. It’s lively, precise (except for that damn ladder that automatically lands and sometimes blocks you), and feels very good the more you master it (you have to play without input lag of course). At times, I felt a little like a manic shooter: reading all those trajectories that shoot onto the screen, the high-frequency positioning, the precise inputs, the amount of work that goes into making it work (gone from the 2023 analyses). The principle of dueling “diagonally” with some of the enemies is brilliant. The game forces you to learn it with the blue knights, which you can’t hit from the front, and then reuses it with the teleporting wizards (the absence of flickering and slowdown of the SFC port is a cool little plus for the arcade feel). Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s a real pleasure to try and position yourself correctly by mastering the D-pad, and sometimes to be able to string together a series of moves between quick replacements on the bishop’s diagonal (you can’t use the diagonal, hence the lightning inputs), while taking into account the other dangers whirling around you, with the shield to orientate. Combined with the second weapon used simultaneously, often the boomerang, which can quickly take care of small targets from a distance and can be thrown diagonally (man those sensations). Sometimes these ranged actions (like boomerang + sword beam) are really reminiscent of the old shmup, so classy. By the way, when it comes to the pleasure of using weapons, in a complementary, fast and well-designed way in relation to our movements, for me the sequel that comes closest to this is Skyward Sword, in a more relaxed way of course. Here, with just a D-pad and two buttons, you have to manage several things at the same time with the same controls, another forgotten pleasure: the character’s orientation, so important for attacking and defending, is linked to movement via the D-pad, requiring precision on all four D-pad inputs: you often have to position yourself quickly without wanting to move, a bit like a parry in one of the four directions in terms of rhythm. And in the midst of a hellish battle, this episode doesn’t hesitate to fill the screen with fast-moving enemies and projectiles with varied geometric movements.
By the last dungeon, I was totally won over and savored it, it’s a big one on top of that. I’d just have done without the one-way that I took twice, forcing me to do a loop again, but that’s part of the pain to be able to tell the story afterwards, that’s the adventure.
In AlttP, the sword strike is circular and hits a wide area in front, unlike the precise stabbing (or vertical strike maybe) attack of 1, which results in a more permissive and less precise combat gameplay (though I do like the fact that the swords in this one get bigger and bigger, improving the touch distance over the course of the game, as in Skyward Sword). Everything else about the fighting is better imo (and I can’t think of any game in the genre that comes close).
I hear that some of the puzzles are a bit tricky, like Grumble grumble. I’ve always wondered if I’d have had the patience to figure this one out without knowing it by reputation. But what a brilliant oddity, such a skilful, high quality blend of arcade combats, adventurous exploration and a RPG’s roguelike build-up. Non stop.
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Nice write up bro… I finally have had a good read on Zelda (player’s perspective)
By the way, I did a follow up video on my cheapo NES cartridge player , to support NES peripherals, nothing beats playing with the classic controller n zapper!
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Thank you for your kindly reading.
I am curious to play through the second quest.
Stellar reflections here. Thanks for taking the time to write this. Can you tell us more about this SNES port? I know nothing about it. Was it a Satellaview game?
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Thank you 
It’s a recent hack, from my knowledge it’s perfect (but I’m not used to the original), more info here:
He’s ported Mega Man 2 & 4 also
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A great occasion for me to play Megaman 2, thanks.
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Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Famicom’s release and Nintendo is celebrating.
https://www.nintendo.com/jp/famicom/
No place in the image for one of my favourites, Little Mac…
Thought I’d give Punch-Out!! a go on Switch but found it pretty jarring, nearly impossible to time counters accurately. Either serious lag or shot reflexes…
So I fetched the Famicom/CRT from storage (I moved recently):
It turns out I can still play this game after all. Phew!
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40 years, insane. I’ll pull out the square button for a session.
These anniversaries fly by as you get older…
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