Famicom

It's about time I put up a review about the Japanese counterpart towards the Nintendo Entertainment System; the Family Computer or Famicom. After buying a HVC-001 AKA the first edition of that in Japan last year, I recently got it AV-modded.

A repair specialist who has worked at Guerilla Games as a (level) designer for 10 years now offered the service and made me very happy once the games started working on PAL tv's. My 100+ Famicom games which I recently won through auctions all seemed to work after excessively cleaning them with q-tips and alcohol ketonatus.

But even though my Player 1 controller was also extended with it's cord length and the audio output sounded great, I started to notice vertical lines in every Famicom game I put into the console, and then, to my horror, the specialist and the internet confirmed to me that this issue, also known as JAIL BARS, is common for all of the official Famicom models, minus the AV Famicom.

Despite that I don't mind graphics in general, these jail bars really started to annoy me, especially when I now know that the AV Famicom is the best authentic way to play composite AV output, so it looks like I will have to get this in order to finally enjoy the games authentically, while a 72 pin to 60 convertor will cover almost all of the NTSC games, especially all of those exclusive USA games.

So anyway, back to the orginal Famicom, it's best feature is that awesome stylish look, especially the controllers sitting between the cartridge slot in the middle is an iconic look. It's smaller than the NES, but as I said, the audio chip is better, plus there's an expansion slot at the front, which among other things can unlock a second library through the Famicom Disk System.

I haven't experienced or bought the FDS yet, but I'm sure that I will get to that eventually. The main reason I bought the original Famicom in the first place is out of respect towards Nintendo, but secondly and most obviously, the exclusive games.

I have managed to acquire quite a bunch of them already, but notable, accessible and good examples include Splatterhouse Wanpaku Grafitti, Getsu Fuuma Den, Radia Senki: Reimei-hen and the shining Holy Diver. I've only managed to review the first example so far, and I can't wait to discover and experience more.

Next towards having seriously started to collect very recently into the retro scene, I have learned a ton of facts and information about hardware, mods, upscaling and compatibility when it comes to the Famicom and the NES models, it's clone systems, and so on.

For reference, I will share 3 of them, but of course all of the information can be found online if you are as dedicated and passionate as me when it comes to 8-bit gaming:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.nl/2010/02/famicom-av-best-overall-choice-for-nes.html
http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.nl/2017/05/hdmi-solutions-for-nes-mid-2017-edition.html
http://retrorgb.com/nes.html

The Family Computer looks amazing, plays well and it has some very interesting exclusives that never made it to the West, some of which are very English friendly. Unfortunately, if I had discovered earlier that the AV Famicom would be an overall better choice, I might not have bought the original.

It looks like it will share a room with my original PAL NES  in the nearby future :) . Also, as you might have noticed, I talked quite extensively about all kinds of topics in here, and I easily could write more articles about this interesting generation.

So let's see how things will develop from my end as I will search for an upgrade, and then I just might do a follow up article towards this, sooner or later!