Nintendo Famicom Family Basic
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ก.ค. 2024
- Nintendo Famicom Family BASIC
In this episode, we take a short breather from the ton of vacuum tube work we’ve been on lately, and step into the “modern” era. That’s right, we’re coming all the way up to 8-bits! We take a quick look at the Family BASIC setup for the Nintendo Famicom. I really love this system as it feels like such a weird entry in the history of 8-bit computing. So come join us!
For more information on Family BASIC, check out these sites:
www43.tok2.com/home/cmpslv/Fam...
www.famicomworld.com/forum/in...
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Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:05 Family BASIC 101
4:40 Let’s boot it up
6:38 Simple program
8:38 Loading from the Data Recorder
11:18 A look inside the cartridge
13:29 Outro
13:51 Puppy! - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I love nintendo games in japanese since they tend to use simple and straightforward enough japanese that I can understand things. When I was learning Japanese, I found japanese Pokemon was a good practice.
I love a guy who calls Famicom "Modern" tech! Great vid!
Remember I started on a TRS-80 model One ;
If the transistors are integrated, it's modern in my book, haha!
A welcome reprieve from those who call something 1 year old 'ancient', if that is ancient then what do you call the pyramids?
@@donaldhoot7741 Same here, still have it
Cool system. The game was programed to use the joypad. I paused the listing and saw T=STRIG(0):S=STICK(0). So I think STRIG is the fire button (stick trigger) and STICK is movement left and right.
Thanks!
And yeah, I totally forgot that the Famicom actually had joypads, that makes way more sense, haha.
3:29 That iconic look 😍
The Sharp X1 is gorgeous! I wish modern tech looked that cool.
Hear, hear 😊
Helpful note: the Sharp Twin Famicom has a compatible expansion port that works with the keyboard. The great thing about it (besides the fact that it includes the famicom disk system), is that it has RCA video built-in, so you don't need a TV with channel 99 or whatever (or need to mod your famicom like you did)
4:57 when this guy started speaking fluent japanese this video just blew my mind
This was the first homebrew option for a console. I've read that it had a bit of a following in Japan, with users trading programs/games they wrote. The Internet Archive has audio recordings of a number of tapes of games released for this accessory.
Link to this internet archive?
@@paulhart7739 TH-cam gets mad at me when I provide links in post, but just Google "Internet Archive" then use their "Wayback Machine" by pasting in a link to the various sites, and choose between various snapshots over the years.
If I had had this as a kid, I would've played with it for hours. Too bad it didn't come to North America!
Well, there where those toy laptops from VTECH. Quite a few of them ran basic.
If it did, then there'd be another way to do the 256W glitch in Super Mario Bros., which involves first setting up Family BASIC and then typing in these four lines of code:
10 FOR I = &H7D3 TO &H7DC : POKE I,0 : NEXT
20 POKE &H7FF;&A5
30 INPUT "WORLD=";A
40 POKE &H7FD,A+255AND255
Afterwards, it will prompt you to input the desired world number, pressing Return, and after it says "OK" then remove the Family BASIC cartridge while leaving the console on, insert the Super Mario Bros. cartridge and reset the console. Use A+Start on the title screen, and you will be at the world you earlier inputted in Family BASIC!
If the battery-backed RAM circuitry is working alright, it might be that you have to hold RESET on the Famicom before powering down. Lots of older Famicom/NES games tell you to do that to avoid corrupting the save RAM. (Later mapper chips had protection against that, so you stopped seeing that message when saving or in the instruction book.) Dunno! Just throwing it out there!
That is an excellent idea! Unfortunately, I just gave it a shot and it didn't seem to work. I think the issue lies in the opening screen. In V.2 I believe you turn the backup switch on, power off the console, then press and hold T, power the console back on, and it skips the start up screen, goes straight to basic and the RAM is preserved. But, with V1, if I hold T with the back up switch off, it does a simple RAM check and freezes on that screen, and if I hold T with the back up switch on, it hangs on a white screen.
I think there's a little more than expected going on behind the scenes!
I read about that basic cartridge when I was a kid and 8 year old brain thought this would be all I would need to start my video game empire lol great video was wondering when you were going to talk about that thing as I kept getting a glimpse of it in each video. 🙂
I was the same way with QBasic growing up!
I had QBasic on an old 386 machine and I was certain that I would be making the best video games on the planet! And while I never made anything of consequence, I do still have quite a fondness for Qbasic.
@@UsagiElectric in the early 2000s I wrote an open source chapter file generator that took one proprietary chapter format and converted it to another. I'm 99% certain nobody ever used it written entirely in dark basic (basically ...heh... qbasic but for 32bit) I was always writing stuff in basic even when I was a kid back in the late 80s
Massive kudos for featuring the Fujitsu FM-7!
Japan had a lot of really cool systems emerging in the mid-80s that we never got over here in the US, which is kind of a shame! The FM-7 is a really cool machine, and I love that it uses two 6809s, one for the CPU and one for the graphics.
Although, if I'm being honest, from a pure aesthetics point of view, I'm quite partial to the red Sharp X-1!
Using vocal instructions on the tape is brilliant and yet so obvious, but I don't think I have ever seen that done before. That said, I have no envy for that system. Some of the contemporaries you listed looks a lot more interesting but I was born too early and missed out on some of the best ones (like the earliest Arm boxen). What's the story with you and Japanese?
He's a certified translator working in the automotive industry.
I thought that seemed really ingenious too!
The Famicom was indeed a gaming console through and through. It's super interesting that there was at least an effort to bring a sense of computing to the "Family Computer", but as you noted, the contemporaries are far more interesting (and capable). I personally, would love to get my hands on one of those red Sharp X1s someday, they're such a cool looking system. Though, first I think I need to get my NEC PC-8001 up and going, which, despite being released in 1979, still outclasses the Famicom in terms of performance!
I actually lived in Japan for a little over 7 years, working in the automotive industry. I'm not actually a certified translator, but I have been doing primarily Japanese to English translations for the past 10 years-ish. Even here in the US, I still continue to do the same work I did when I was living in Japan, so fortunately, I get plenty of opportunities to try to keep my Japanese ability fresh. It's quite interesting to learn new Japanese in regards to old technology, because like English, there's a lot of really specialized vocabulary that doesn't normally come up. I've been thinking about doing a short series in Japanese (with English subtitles) on vacuum tubes and tube logic, so I can share it with some of my friends and family in Japan.
@@UsagiElectric It's not hard to become certified if you're good enough, though.
@@UsagiElectric Indeed it looks amazing and en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_X1 suggests that it’s pushing the 8-bit architecture to its limit.
It’s very interesting and it is pretty genius, but I suspect it would get very annoying. After you’ve heard them once you know what to do, and you don’t need them anymore, but yet they’d be at the start of all the sample tapes, making loading slower and more awkward. It made more sense to include instructions on the tape or the box, and start the program at the start of the tape.
What I love is that Nintendo clearly had a micro computer mindset in mind for the home initially. You can tell by the classic micro computer hardware components utilised to sell the Famicom including the machine itself, the keyboard, the tape deck, family BASIC included, a joystick and eventually the disk system. These were fairly standard for most micro computers for the time and BASIC was common to program and play games. So Nintendo was ticking the boxes on what was popular across several regions, and I am surprised this didn't hit the European or Australian market especially because they were popular with micro computers as well. In fact the Famicom was the easiest, fastest and one of the most powerful systems compared to all of those others to even run software! If they played their cards right, Nintendo would have sold this in a much more interesting light than what we ended up with in the 80s-90s and the Nintendo AVS System could have worked instead of the NES. Alternatively, they could have sold it as a fairly powerful gaming micro computer or something, it might have done quite an impact! With the Sharp X1, I would have assumed the Famicom was cheaper and more accessible, and any CRT TV with RF component compatibility would have worked just fine. I think computers needed proprietary monitors.
I don’t think it would’ve done that well in Europe, the nes was expensive and bulky in a country full of cheap microcomputers. It may have been superior in some ways but it was behind in others, and it would’ve been more expensive than a ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, or Commodore 64 with all of the addons required to get full microcomputer support. But it’s true, microcomputers we’re huge here, it was just far too cramped of a market even just for dedicated computers.
Great video man. I loved your hands on approach. It made me feel like I was in the 80s, exploring this interesting program.
Also, I really, really love the Famicom. I think the aesthetic on it is supreme, better than even the Super Famicom and Mega Drive. The colors, different cartridges, commercials, simplicity... I makes it look like a very fun and avanced toy. A continuation to those old Nintendo toys from the 60s and 70s in spirit. The recorder made me laugh
Hell yeah ! I saw it in the back of your videos and was hopping you did a video on it ! Came from your "Mini" Computer
Very cool setup. I've never seen a Famicom with the keyboard!
Family BASIC can also be used to corrupt the memory locations of other games, including Super Mario Bros. Some people did this to access invalid worlds 9 to 255.
Here are the lines to enter to get the invalid world select (256W) feature:
10 FOR I=2003 TO 2012;POKE I,0:NEXT
20 POKE 2047,165
30 POKE 2045,W (replace the W with the desired world number from 1 to 254 for worlds 2 to 255)
カタカナしかありませんでした。
I love the message on the tape, it's a pretty good use of the medium.
Ooooohhhh. Found an Old Vid I haven't Seen Before!!
TIME TRAVEL!
Dogs love sticking their heads out the window. I suspect that's due to the parade of scents going by and the sensation of being able to run REALLY fast.
Our old boy doesn't do it much anymore, but he still loves to get all the smells!
Nice video 🙂
You have major skills
You should make a video on how noob like us can learn Japanese, like share tips, tricks and insights? video might attract lots of new viewers too
I think a video on learning Japanese might be a bit out of the scope of this channel, but I am planning on doing a video on vacuum tubes and tube logic in Japanese to share with some of my friends and family in Japan. I will add subtitles in of course, so non-Japanese speakers can also watch the video, but it should be a fun way of keeping up to date with my Japanese!
I was just wondering the same. Where do you start, being from Europe I speak Dutch, English, German, French and a little bit Spanish. We all learn them at school as a kid. But Asian languages, dude that's a whole different cookie to crumble! Respect!
@@LarsvanderSchans wow, that's 3,5 languages more than i have learned so far ... did you take lessons or learn all of them in regular school ?
we had english in school ... only english ... and german as native language of course
@@KenjiUmino are you from Europe? (Netherlands) they feed you languages in high school till you puke 😂😂
@@LarsvanderSchans i'm from germany - the school system here is kind of cluttered, branching off multiple times and whatnot - and the path i went through only offered english.
other branches might offer a an additional language or two, but AFAIK that includes only other european languages (and maybe latin) while languages that would also require learning a different set of letters/script like greek, japanese or russian are not on the list
Anybody know what software the Japanese folks use for schematics. I love the look of them- 13:25 in the video
That rocks!!!! I just missed all these items and I am going to collect them in JP. Thank you so much for sharing.
You going to create a memory module for the NINTENDO FAMICOM.
I’m pretty sure that you can play the game with the console controllers. I don’t understand how you overlooked that? 😂
When you started the game, you were supposed to pick a game pad that's included with the system. I can see that you have two of them attached to the main unit.
Genuine question. Do you think it's possible to make a keyboard for the NES and run Family Basic on a flash cart?
I often day dream about this.
Hmm, the NES controller ports and the Famicom expansion port are a bit different, and the Family Basic keyboard uses some of the data pins that aren't available on the NES controller port. So, I think you would have to access the 48-pin card edge located on the underside of the NES to get to the necessary data lines.
Here's some info on the expansion ports: wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php/Expansion_port
That's only half the battle though because the Family Basic keyboard doesn't use standard keyboard protocols. It's been a while since I've done any in-depth reading on the Keyboard, but it essentially it splits the key matrix into two columns and eight rows and then cycles through them in software to detect which key is pressed. Granted, the Family Basic software takes care of all of that, so you really only need to copy the keyboard matrix.
Here's some info on the Keyboard: wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php?title=Family_BASIC_Keyboard
And some more in-depth info in Japanese on it: www43.tok2.com/home/cmpslv/Famic/Fambas.htm
It's certainly not impossible, but it will definitely take a bit of work to get it going!
@@UsagiElectric dunno how to get the keyboard connected to a stock NES, but somebody developed a mainboard replacement PCB for US/EU front-loader consoles called the "NESessity" - and this PCB has a spot to solder a DB15 connector onto it - it is accessible from the bottom of the console where that useless expansion port cutout used to be
I too have it all but no tape drive
It's a cool system! The tape recorder is really just a generic tape deck rebranded. All it takes is just any tape deck and two mono audio cables to hook up, and you're in business!
I've just realised that the data recorder is EXACTLY the same model as my tape reader
When he said the modern are it feels like something between 1979 and 1981
Niceeeeeee
Thank you!
Puppy!
That's our fluffy boy Beau!
6:30 It had 1983 bytes free and it released in 1984? Soooooo close.
Maybe the UFO game is played using the controllers
It totally is! I just completely forgot that the Famicom actually had controllers, haha.
Are there any clone keyboards out there? I have an ENIO board for my NES so it should work with it. Ive heard if you have the keyboard you can use the load and save functions in excitebike or wrecking crew to save data to a cassette recorder. I also own an analogue nt, it has a 15 pin port built in. The Japanese always has the coolest stuff.
Years obsessed with how the hell you save the programs in the battery backed RAM. At leas on v3.0 on the Fceux emulator you just use the command BACKUP then stop the emulator/power down the nintendo. It should save the background if you draw one if you use the command BGGET before the BACKUP command.
Bonus info from the manual: "A." or "AUTO" or "AUTO 200", will automatically increment the lines in units of ten staring at line 10 or the line right next the command. The STOP key will get you back to the regular prompt.
It's pretty respectable you've got all the original equipment for a full setup, but what really tickles my hacker bones is the possibility to get Family BASIC running on the NES. There have been one of two success stories, so it is possible, but not without effort, and AFAIK no TH-camr has ever fully documented the process. From what I understand, the lockout chip and differences in Famicon/NES cartridge pinout are obstacles that need to overcome through the use of a 72-to-60 pin conversion adapter and possibly also a Game Genie to deal with Nintendo's region-specific lockout shenanigans. However, the biggest hurdle might be the keyboard hookup itself: On the Famicon, it connects to the 15-pin expansion port, but that's not present on the NES, and the controller ports don't have all the same pins, so what to do? According to neswiki, there's an 48-pin connector at the bottom of the NES PCB, but to get to it, the user needs to turn the NES on its back and remove (literally break out) a little plastic cover, revealing the connector. (There might also be an additional, removable and replaceable plastic protection cover - not sure. Or maybe that would have come with any accessory requiring users to break out the former cover, though none was ever officially released.) At one point, someone had built and even offered an NES-to-Famicon expansion port adapter called the ENIO EXP Board, but this seems no longer available; only some serious digging through the page history of the Familiy BASIC Wikipedia article and the Wayback Machine history of the ENIO board maker's site reveals that information. (If you have an email, gimme and I could send you some links.) I don't know why that's no longer available; maybe it was a small run and its maker has moved on, or maybe Nintendo stomped them - I dunno. The bottom line is, with the right skill set, which you have, this should be possible, and no-one's ever made a good video on it AFAICT. Of course, I don't actually know if you have an NES. I also don't know if it matters whether an NTSC or PAL NES is used and if Family BASIC would run the same on both.
If there could have been a Famicom Dysk System version of Family Basic, it could have been turned into an 80's PC
Wow, you've got V1.0, I've heard that's the equivalent of having a Unicorn Feather. My startup screen shows:
NS-HUBASIC V2.1A
(c) Nintendo/Sharp/Hudson
1982 Bytes Free
OK
So it looks like V2.1A users have been shorted 1 byte by Nintendo! Also, I have a 3rd party cassette unit & although I can save to tape, I can't get the adjustment correct so that I can read back in a program once it's saved to tape. Any hints? Thanks!
My question is:
Can You play Doom ?
Well, the Ricoh 2A03 CPU in this machine is essentially a 6502 at its heart, and some crazy programmers have built a very simplified version of Doom that runs on the Commodore VIC-20, which is a 6502 based machine, so it's totally not out of the realm that that Doom port could be ported over to the Famicom!
@@UsagiElectric can You make a vídeo playing doom, please ?
@@enjoyer____9685 can you understand that that would require porting the VIC-20 port of Doom to the Famicom, please?
Why didn't you try the controller to use the sprite?
I’m so used to commodore basic that I would suck on a famicom basic
4:08 Ugh! 1.66Mhz? Fuck! I figured the famicom wouldn't be clocked very high, but I didn't think it would be THAT slow!
The VTECH Precomputer 1000 Might be faster then that at 3.12Mhz, even if it uses a z80.
There 1 thing that hardware geeks wanted to know is ...can it raster intrupt to double the amount of vertical pixels
My dude! Incredible channel! Really enjoying the artful presentation and professionalism. Awesome stuff.
Please filter above your 15khz, though! so v e r y screech.
Same thought exactly. Awesome video but not very pleasant to listen to.
BTW guys this Family Basic v3.0 is 40k decompressed.
I wish Family BASIC could be emulated. There's a ROM of it, but it doesn't work because no emulator I know emulates the family basic keyboard and data recorder.
Actually several Nintendo emulators, e.g. nestopia and Nintaco, are fully capable of that. I use nestopia on Linux and it works perfectly with different versions of Family BASIC roms.
i miss the usagis at the end of the video :P .....
Don't worry, our little bun will be back soon!
Weird that it has 2 x 128K Program ROM and 1 x 64K character ROM....and only *TWO* kilobytes of actual usable RAM included (luckily upgradable via a RAM cartridge).
Yeah, the 2k of RAM is hilariously small! But, from the system perspective, the RAM was supposed to be in the game cartridges, and some cartridges came with up to 1MB of RAM, which is massive. Now, why the Family Basic system used such tiny RAM chips for storing programs is a weird choice. I think if they had put a 16k RAM chip in there and streamlined the Basic experience, it could have been a decent "family" computer contender.
@@UsagiElectric Putting the extra RAM in the cartridges seems very wasteful, but I agree the system would have probably benefitted more by having 16k or whatever on the main system. Funny side note: There was a BASIC cartridge for the old Atari 2600, but it only had 128 *BYTES* of RAM and a lot of that was used as overhead. It was, as you can imagine, super duper limited but impressive that it could allow any BASIC programming at all on such a system!
Those ROM numbers are Kbits. So 32KB PRG + 8KB CHR which was the max you could address without bank switching. Although in this case I think the 2/4KB RAM is bank switched over the PRG ROM.
Using a lot more ROM than RAM for a BASIC implementation was pretty par for the course for early home computers. Robust-ish BASIC interpreter takes space and mask ROM in volume is a lot cheaper per bit than SRAM (or PSRAM)
@@espfusion It seems that starting with the Japanese cartridge consoles like the Famicom/NES game size was measured in kiloBITS instead of kiloBYTES to make them seem more impressive I guess.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere most ram, eeprom , eprom chips had the type number specify bits or kilobits, such as a 62256 is a 32k byte ram chip (256k bits)
did you know "$" is known as "String" so CHR$(I) is said as "CHR'string'(I)"
Shall we play a game?
try "famibe no yosshin"
I'm guessing the game actually used one of the controllers instead of the keyboard.
Very impressive Japanese!
It’s cool stuff but i hardly could imagine that anybody would seriously do programming stuff on it,considering the limited ram you could use,the fact that you needed freah batteries to keep your beloved program preserved our you could store everything on tape and hope for the best,thing is there was no way nintendo could compeat against other computers and i don’t really think it was ever ment to compeat against other computer brands,that would,ve been laving.
WRONG! The famicom had a 1.79 mhz 6502 (Ricoh) cpu. Only those in Pal territories got the slower one.
😊interesting... good stuff
This basic was made by Hudson Soft.
to hide sprites, you need to write SPRITE OFF
That AV side placement is absolutely hideous, what were you thinking?
How did you learn Japanese, it's not a common language to learn in the uk, but maybe more so in the us, being closer?
How did you learn Japanese? is it easy to learn ?
No. 😅
The story of how I learned Japanese is quite a long one, haha.
I did a homestay in Japan for a few months when I was 19, taking some crash courses in learning the language. That taught me the basics, so when I came back to the US, I ended up going to University and majoring in Japanese studies, with a minor in Korean studies. Then, when I was 23, I moved to Japan and lived there for about seven and a half years. My wife and I moved back to the States about, jeez, 7 years ago now, but I still do freelance work for the company I worked for in Japan doing translation and event support, so I get plenty of chances to keep my Japanese fresh.
I wouldn't call Japanese easy to learn, but it's certainly not impossible. It requires a lot of dedication and repetition though. A lot of people find the pronunciation and diction to be the most difficult aspects, and I can certainly pick out "foreign" accents with ease, especially on TV and in movies. A good trick that I found for that was watching kids TV shows. Notably, I watched a whole lot of Pokemon (un-subtitled). That of course requires enough an already decent understanding of the language.
If you're interested in learning Japanese, there's a lot of excellent resources out there, but I always had a hard time with text books. I found it easier to try to immerse myself in something I was interested in (for me it was old cars). I would buy magazines, watch videos without subtitles, etc. Just surround myself with my interests that just so happened to be in another language.
@@UsagiElectric that’s an interesting story :)
:)
please please, oh please do every video in japanese!!! (with subs..please)
There will be some more Japanese content coming up soon!
Use the controller
If you don't mind me asking - how and why do you speak Japanese?
I asked my husband what he thought about your Channel, he said "If I robbing the cradle he's not going down with me."
Da f, I will be 47 on December fourth. He said "You still have your mom's milk on you face." F In Men!
I'm not sure I understand, but thanks for checking the videos out!
Kinda cringe listening to him speak japanese
Kinda cringe reading your comment.