In honor of the Famicom's upcoming 30th birthday, I picked up the following

[TheSonicRetard]

Almost all my famicom shit has arrived now - I'm waiting on Rad Racer now - EXCEPT my Famicom itself. That's so damn frustrating, because I'm dying to try this stuff out. I can play it on my NES with a cart converter but that misses the whole point of this. Besides, there is no way to hook up my Famicom 3D Glasses to a US Famicom.

I've been flipping through the manuals for some of these games, though, and they're fucking rad. Metroid on the FDS, for example, comes with this thick book that is several times larger than the American manual. It's filled with some awesome art. Years and years ago, I picked up a copy of Nintendo Power from 90 that had a retro guide to Metroid included, and it had the same art from this manual. I remember thinking that NP must have had awesome artists working for them, because the art is incredible. Now I know - they got their art from the Famicom manuals. That explains the character in one issue that's flicking off the player that the AVGN went off about in his Nintendo power issue, because, in japan, the middle finger is looked at more like the way sticking your tongue out is in America.

Also of note - Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti. I picked it up as well (don't remember if I made a post about it) but it arrived today in this awesome package. Famicom games usually come in these small cardboard boxes (which is why finding boxed stuff is more difficult) and FDS games come in these small, square plastic shells that house another plastic shell that looks more like a CD case, which houses a paper sleeve (lots of packaging). Splatterhouse comes in neither. It comes in a plastic clamshell that looks like a very tiny Sega Genesis box, about the size of a Genesis cartridge. It's AWESOME. One of the coolest packaging I've seen out of Japan for any japanese system. Apparently it was a namco thing and all their games in japan came in that sort of non-standard packaging. It opens like a japanese style book - the front label is on the wrong side so you open the box to the left, rather than the right. It even has some clips inside to keep the manual in place, AND the cart is shaped differently from a normal Famicom cart. Just oodles of neatness.

Hopefully my damn famicom arrives tomorrow so I can snap a picture of everything together and give some impressions on how this stuff plays. I'm dying to try these 3D glasses.

[TheSonicRetard]

A few more games came in this morning - Mario 2, Castlevania 1 & 2, and Ai Senshi Nicol, so they're not in any of these pictures. Also, Ninja Ryukenden 3 (Ninja Gaiden 3) and Rad Racer aren't in the picture either, although both have already come in.



The AV famicom looks fantastic, my unit is in great shape. It came with a dead AV cable and a dead AC adaptor, but luckily a model 1 US genesis AC adaptor is the correct voltage and wattage, and the AV connection is the standard Nintendo multi-av, so I used a spare SNES A/V cable. It looks much clearer than a model 2 NES - not because the picture is sharper (I'm a proponent of blurrier CRT images as opposed to crystal clear RGB output), but because it doesn't have the vertical bands running through the picture that the RF modulator causes in the top loader NES. It's pretty to play SMB and see a deep, clear blue sky without any lines running up and down it. It also works like a champ - no blowing into carts necessary. It just works.



3D is about what I expected. The Famicom goggles are comfortable, but like the SMS 3D glasses, they fall short to the 3rd party glasses I have. I'm not sure why, but the 3D effect seems deeper and clearer with my 3rd party glasses, I think it might have something to due with the tinting. I realized pretty quickly when playing Famicom 3D games two things - one, the background mode from the Master System that was present in games like Space Harrier 3D doesn't have an equivalent. In Space Harrier 3D, the scaling enemies aren't actually sprites, but rather updating sections of the background.



An example of a normal screen in Space Harrier.



The exact same screen with the background layer turned off. You can see that the only sprites on the screen are Space Harrier himself and his score and lives (and the bullets from his weapon as well). The enemies are all actually background tiles. There's only 1 background layer on the SMS, so that's why corners of non-rectangular objects in space harrier that overlap other objects have sections that are "missing," because they're not sprites but rather all a part of the same, flat background:



examples of the effect are circled in green. Notice how bits of the objects behind are missing in square chunks? That's because there is no "transparent" color - it's all one big background layer. This is a double edged sword, because, one one hand, the missing transparency can looks janky when there are tons of objects on screen. But on the other hand, because these aren't sprites but rather parts of the background, Space Harrier 3D allows for enormous enemies, especially by 8-bit standards, with absolutely no flicker. 8 bit machines had a low threshold for sprites - put too many sprites on one line, and they'll start flickering on and off. Because the enemies and objects are part of the background, this problem doesn't arise.

But the famicom has no equivalent. I don't think it can update a background that quickly or something. A few bosses in Cosmic Epsilon are backgrounds, but they're not scaling like in Space Harrier 3D and don't do much beyond pan left and right. Rather, all the objects you interact with are built out of multiple sprites, which keeps everything small. Even when things are supposed to be as closes as possible to the screen, they're still made up of tiny sprites and never approach the size of the larger objects in Space Harrier 3D.



Both of those enemies are supposed to be right up next to the screen. You can see that, compared to the objects in space harrier 3D above (which aren't at their biggest size), they are much smaller. This gives the games a much shallower illusion of depth - the big objects in space harrier 3D makes it seem like the depth can go from very deep into the TV to almost popping out of the TV.

Now Cosmic Epsilon actually has some clever segments which get around the size of the sprites. There are these laser barriers in one of the space levels which have a small sprite moving quickly up and down, that gives the illusion that there is a solid line much bigger than any sprite could be. It winds up working like Joy Mech Fight or Vectorman, where it's just a single ball moving around, and our minds fill in the rest, but it's effective.

Another problem with the famicom 3D titles is the lack of detail. There are many areas in Rad Racer and Cosmic Epsilon where the background has long stretches of one solid color. This is a problem, because the 3D effect is achieved by offsetting details - one pixel appears offset from another on each alternating field. Games on the SMS like Space Harrier 3D and Outrun 3D try to make the terrain as detailed as possible so that there is plenty of details to be offset by each eye. This lets us judge the distance. Any field of solid color will appear flat on either the SMS or Famicom for this very reason. Thus, Cosmic Epsilon and Rad Racer come off more like layers of flat pieces of paper hovering in front of each other in 3D space, rather than actual 3D. I've read that World Runner is much better in this regard due to the checkerboard floor, so I'll try and pick that up next.

These are all nitpicks, though. I still find the 3D effect compelling, and the games look much more interesting than a normal Famicom game because of the effect. The goggles, like I said, are comfortable, but I've been playing with my 3rd party pair of glasses.



The Disk System, as expected, shipped with an error, but it's not that bad. I can't boot any game, I get err. 21, which is a misaligned spindle error. This is preferable to most other errors I could get because this is fixable. The problem is that fixing it is a pain in the ass, I'll likely have to devote my entire weekend to fine tuning it, as it's basically trial and error. I've read horror stories of people spending 5 or 6 hours trying to get the spindle aligned juuuuust right. I have an o-scope to work with, so perhaps that'll make my job a bit easier.

As such, I can't try any of my FDS games, which makes up half of my famicom collection thus far. So no doki doki panic, no SMB2, no Nicol, no Arumana, no Castlevania 1 + 2, etc. Once I get it up and running, I'll post my impressions of those games. The actual FDS looks slick though.

All in all, pretty neat stuff. One of the funniest kicks I got came when I opened Akumajo Densetsu (AKA Castlevania 3) - it was mint and came with a Konami catalog from its release. What's bizarre about the catalog is that one side is Konami's NES product, and the other side is advertising Konami's MSX2 products from the time. That alone is pretty mind blowing - could you imagine Nintendo allowing a game company to package an advertisement for games on a completely different system today? But I got a bigger kick from the actual games they were advertising - it was a catalog for Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Space Manbow, and SD Snatcher. I own all 3 of those MSX games, they're pretty much the crown jewels of my MSX2 collection. It was wild to see those stellar games get advertised, especially since each of those had tiny print runs coming at the very end of the MSX2's life.

EDIT: Also, sorry about the poor picture quality. I'm not a photographer. And please don't comment on how fucked up my coffee table is - I have a puppy lol.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

You've pretty much gotten what would be my dream set up if I were to ever get a Famicom. If you don't mind my asking, where did you get all of it? I'm assuming you didn't get it all on ebay from the prices and comments you've mentioned.

[TheSonicRetard]

You've pretty much gotten what would be my dream set up if I were to ever get a Famicom. If you don't mind my asking, where did you get all of it? I'm assuming you didn't get it all on ebay from the prices and comments you've mentioned.

Some of it did come from ebay, but most other stuff came from members of other forums I visit, like Assembler or FamicomWorld.

[Drakon]

That's one sexy lineup of famicom stuffs!

[KnightWarrior]

I'm going for Famicom only few months, I want a Loose AV Famicom..

Also I'm getting Mighty Final Fight in Next Week for the Famicom

[NostalgicMachine]

INSANE FAMICOM RIG!!!

I'm picking up my top-loading NES tomorrow .