Inside Nintendo's Classic Game Console

Lots of Americans know the Nintendo Entertainment System. Fewer know the Japanese console it was based on, the Nintendo Family Computer, also known as the Famicom. We'll take a look inside the Famicom and its accessories, including a unique disk system attachment.

Benj Edwards, PC World

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A Japanese Famicom game cartridge is quite small compared with the American NES cartridge to its left.

Official Nintendo "disk cards" were double-sided (64K per side), 2.8-inch proprietary floppy diskettes. They lacked a protective shutter, which caused many disks to fail when the internal magnetic media was exposed to dirt or accidentally touched.

The rewritable nature of the FDS disks allowed players to save game progress between sessions. Battery-backed SRAM in games such as The Legend of Zelda later replicated that functionality to a limited extent.