What is the Famicom Disk System?
This was a relatively short-lived device released in 1986 in Japan only. It was a disk drive unit that sat underneath the Famicom system, and connected to it via a RAM cartridge. Games came on non-standard 3-inch disks. The benefits of this system were that the disks were very cheap to sell, they utilized the extra sound hardware in the RAM unit, and that players could save their games on the disks [this was before the era of cheap battery-backed RAM]. The downsides of this system were many: The games were limited in scope and size, loading times were long, piracy of the disks was rampant, and the belt of the disk drive unit wore out all-too-easily. By the time a few years passed, memory mappers were more advanced and much more viable for large Famicom games. Thus, Nintendo quietly discontinued the FDS in the early Nineties. • How does the Game Genie work? The Game Genie basically monitors the address bus of the cartridge port and modifies the data bus of the cartridge port if it encou
