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Information about Nintendo Family Computer

The Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom (known as the Nintendo
Entertainment System in North America and Europe), was released by Nintendo
in 1983 and went on to become one of the best-selling videogame consoles of
its time.

It had a smaller cartridge port on the top of the unit than the NES (60 pins
vs. the NES's 72 pins), no regional lockout circuitry, and hard-wired
controllers with a 15-pin expansion port on the front of the unit for a
light gun, Power Pad, special controller, keyboard for BASIC programming,
etc. The Famicom had nearly 1,200 games released for it by the end of its
production. Even after release of new games was ended in 1994, Nintendo had
been selling Famicom until recently for play with old cartridges. Units made
after 1993 was different greatly in appearance and slightly in function, and
was called New Famicom or AV Famicom by users.

It had many additional hardware peripherals that were only available in
Japan, including a karaoke machine, true 3D glasses, and a floppy disk
drive, the Famicom Disk System, that could be used to play games purchased
at game kiosks in stores.

A redesigned Famicom was released in Japan in 1993. However, it had a 60-pin
connector and had composite output only. They can be found brand new in many
denki-ya in Japan, from 4,800 yen to 7,200 yen, equivalent to $42-60. The
new Famicom was released because many Japanese televisions at the time only
had AV output, which meant that the old model was already out of date in
1993. The original Famicom was RF only, so the Japanese made a new model.
The FC Expansion port was moved to the right side of the console, and the
microphone on controller 2 was removed. The controllers are detachable;the
older Famicom had the controllers wired in.

An original, unmodified Famicom cannot be used on US TV Signals properly.
Even if you got it working, the picture would be on one channel and the
sound would be on another channel. The newer Famicom can be used on US TV
stations.

Famicom fans on foriegn shores would have an easier time buying the newer
Famicom over the older one, as they do not have to mess with the RF output
of the older one, and it is still widely availible with importers.

Technical specifications

CPU: Nintendo 2A03 8 bit processor based on MOS Technologies 6502 core,
running at 1.79MHz, with four tone generators, a DAC, and a restricted
DMA controller on-die
Main RAM: 2 KB
Palette: 48 colors and 5 grays in base palette; red, green, and blue
guns can be individually darkened somewhat on a particular scanline

Onscreen colors: 25 colors on one scanline (background color + 4 sets
of 3 tile colors + 4 sets of 3 sprite colors)
Sprite sizes: 8x8 and 8x16 pixels
Maximum onscreen sprites: 64
Maximum number of sprite pixels on one scanline: 64, dropping out the 
lowest-priority sprites on overflow
Video memory: PPU contains 2 KB of tile and attribute RAM, 256 bytes of
sprite position RAM ("OAM"), and 28 bytes of palette RAM (allowing for
selection of background color); 8 KB of tile pattern ROM on cartridge
(bankswitchable to up to 512 KB)

Scrolling layers: 1 per scanline
Resolution: Most games used 256x240 pixels; for additional video memory
bandwidth, it was possible to turn off the screen before the raster
reached the very bottom.
Expansion port on the bottom right hand side used originally for the
Famicom Disk System, but piracy concerns kept this device from bein released in the US.
2 seven pin controller ports in the front of the machine
1993 re-release does not have RCA composite output plugs.

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