[View the FDS Games]




FDS-Logo

Disk System Photo



The Famicom Disk System (FDS) was released in 1985 by Nintendo as an add-on to the popular Famicom. It was a unit that sat underneath the Famicom and used non-standard floppy disks for data storage. Why did Nintendo introduced this machine?
The main reason for the release of the FDS was the price : a disk could be produced cheaper than a cartridge. Games on disk retailed for around ¥3,000 vs. ¥5,000 or more for a cartridge. And in 1985, the disks' 128k of storage space was quite appealing. Another advantage of the disk has been the rewritable qualities of the disks which opend new possibilities : games such as The Legend of Zelda (which has been the first FDS game), Metroid and Kid Icarus were first released to the FDS with a save feature. While the American NES saw these games with password features released only a year or two later, Japan's Famicom Users would have to wait half a decade for them in cartridge format. Also of note was Nintendo's 'Disk Writer' : a vending machine that charged 500 yen to write a new game on your disk. With blank disks costing only ¥2,000 apiece, this approach had obvious advantages over a ¥5,000-7,000 cartridge. To top it all, the FDS was given an improved sound chip.

The machine didn't the success the famicom itself had in Japan. Nintendo turned off developers early on by demanding partial copyright ownership over any games developed for the FDS. This caused many licensees to simply ignore the system outright. Then, four months after the release of the FDS, the first 128k cartridge-based game, Ghosts 'n Goblins, was released. Transistor prices went down and battery backup technology improved a lot faster than Nintendo had anticipated, and all of a sudden, the FDS's storage capacity and saving abilities didn't look so special anymore. Publishers and retailers complained that the Disk Writer machines, while great for game buyers, were severely cutting into their sales. The final nail in the coffin was an unlicensed device that connected two FDS systems in order to copy games. After a brief surge of FDS sales following this device's release, Nintendo was finally forced to stop the production.



Some other datas:

The Disks of the Famicom Disc System were proprietary 3"x4" 64k/side floppy disks for data storage. These 'Disk Cards', as Nintendo called them, were a slight modification of Mitsumi's 'Quick Disk' format used in a handful of Japanese computers and MIDI keyboards.

Nintendo provided service to rewrite Disk Cards till Sep 30, 2003.