It's funny that you mention hotels potentially renting Switch docks. This is because in several hotels located around Universal Studios Japan, you actually can rent a Switch dock for in your room.
How does renting a Dock even work?? Like… do you get just a Dock and no Switch? (In theory would be Cool since when you have Limited Space during a Trip, it can be useful instead of carrying the Dock.
@@nitinanku well, as a big Nintendo Fan, I took my Switch with both Dock and even 3DS to a Europe Trip, so I’m sure other people would do that (Yes, I was willing to sacrifice Suitcase Space for a Dock)
This reminds me of the n64 they had in a hotel when I was a kid. I desperately wanted to play Kirby 64 because we didn’t have it at home and my mom took one look at the rates and said absolutely not.
I remember several of the times my family went on vacation to NH the hotel we stayed at had a rental N64 setup in the mid 2000's and I habitually played Mario Tennis on it knowing it was just such an oddity playing a late N64 game we didn't have back at home. Fast forward to a couple years ago when I was on vacation with my switch and portable dock and I had the brain blast to get some nostalgic wish fulfillment going by booting up Mario Tennis off the switch online N64 on a hotel TV yet again.
Thank you so much, for the longest time the best video of the Super Famicom box was Gamester 81's video which is 14 years old (he did do an updated video 5 years ago that I didn't know about until typing this comment up) and since Gamester 81 doesn't invest much into sound recording and mixing equipment, it was nice to watch a video of this thing without a lot of echo in the audio and actual understanding of what all the moon scribbles say :3
I have had both the famicom box and super famicom box for many years now....this is the best video I have ever seen on it...I can not read Japanese so it was nice to know the other options in select and with the keys...great piece of history..love the coinbox.
3:36 - that's probably for those regions of japan that were still transitioning to the 100v standard. Also, it's just good hardware designing etiquette. Usually the PSU is the first to fail.
Hey, I see myself at 0:20 👀 Glad you made this video, the Super Famicom Box is such a fascinating device! Even more fascinating is the fact HAL developed it and how the music for it sounds straight out of Dream Course! I'm a big fan of that game's soundtrack, so that was a fun surprise.
Yeah, kinda surprising how Kirby's Dream Course or even Kirby Super Star weren't ever part of the Super Famicom Box line-up despite Kirby's presence in the boot-up screen... That aside, this is a really well researched video! Nicely done as always!
I remember there was one hotel my family went to on trips and they had something like this!! Not sure if it was a “homemade” one or an official one but it was how I first played Mario World.
Honestly really cool! I’m glad the SFC Box can be preserved! (Unlike LodgeNet, which required a central server). Maybe you can get a Famicom Box and make it a second channel video or something?
Wait a minute, I am pretty sure it is 2 systems in a trenchcoat. I suspect timing, game switching and misc things are done by a second more primitive(?) system, which can overlay it's own text on top of NES signal, reset SNES and switch rom banks. Would be interesting to see a technical breakdown of how it is achived, but I am pretty sure that games haven't been altered much if any. I wonder if second system is also SNES or more primitive MSX style computer.
they are modified slightly, the system needs additional header data to work with the timer/overlay and menus, but thats about it, additionally each cartridge has a "main" chip that tells the system what is on the others chips
We never got anything this good at the fancy hotels I went to when I was a kid back in the 90's which all we got was a TV with boring ass advertisements for the hotel and the weather channel but Japan got this.
You should honestly do the FM Towns Marty. It's basically a computer based console manufactured in Japan only by Fujitsu. It was released in 1993 which is a year before the PlayStation. Its hardware was really impressive at the time as it used an AMD CPU, but it didn't really sell well in Japan. Heck, the Marty's CPU speed was half of the PS1. The Marty also can basically run burned CDs, as well as the Car Marty which can be used for cars.
My friend owned a hotel in hakuba, Nagano back in 1995-1999 and all his hotel room TVs were super Famicom TVs. You could rent games from the front desk or bring your own. I wonder if he still has any of them as he could put them up for export to an NTSC region.
i would imagine the f-zero and pilotwings cart went unreleased because both of those were only singleplayer while all of the other games all had some multiplayer component (except the mahjong game i think? (and starfox lol) though it was prolly just included for casual appeal like the golf game) either that or they were both just placeholders
Great video! I was really curious about the Super Famicom Box after seeing it on your Super Mario Bros. video! It's unfortunate that we don't have devices like this anymore, as they are quite unique.
Since I already watch a lot of videos of facts about Nintendo, I always think I've learnt everything there is to know, but I've never heard of the Super Famicom Box before! Great video!
As the Yakuza / Like a Dragon community says, “BEST MAHJONG STRATEGY TIP: Quit”. It’s honestly so cool seeing stuff like this, we don’t really get anything as nifty nowadays! Although a hotel I went to once had a small arcade room in the lobby with Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., which was pretty cool.
its not a very secure lock, two sliders and thats about it, plus its plastic so if you really wanted to its not difficult to just force the issue. the pinning portion of the two keys is actually the same, but the master key lacks the tall fin which falls into a notch limiting how far it can rotate, its actually laid out such that there are eight possible permission levels depending on how that fin is cut
Such a cool iteration of the Super Famicom. Weird cartridge system, they probably went with this instead of individual cartridges probably to stop hotels from buy retail carts to swap games out at their leisure and of course to charge a premium from these cartridge sets. I wonder though, if you swap the Super Mario All-Stars rom chp out with one from a retail version of the game that has Super Mario world included on the rom, would that work? I would try my self, but I don't have $300+ to splash out something is cool! Butt I would want one if I could, so cool! But am I guessing the FamicomBox uses retail carts and can they be switched out at will?
Hm, I wonder, given the chance to have an in person look at the cartridges if I could manage to reverse engineer them and get custom roms loaded on them?
ive got all three option carts for mine, as for that unknown counter, it seems to be some sort of error counter, since it seems to mention the watch dog timer, but as far as im aware no one has ever documented what actually set its off. oh and there actually is a fourth payment system, but its disabled in the vast majority of units, however it does still appear in the menu, its the central management option, which would have been an automatic billing system, however this requires an updated version of the onboard bios card that actually has the required parts populated and i have only ever seen two pictures of this card. if you want to make the coin mechanism work its fairly trivial, all the coin box does is bridge two pins on the unused three pin header behind the faceplate, ive actually connected a button on wires up to it on mine and it works fine
this is so freaking cool, it would be awesome if one day someone figured out a way to actually add more games or maybe even the rest of the snes/sfc library onto it and actually it got me thinking if you can disconnect the controllers you could potentially use the 8bitdo retro receiver with the snes classic controll for the switch for this. this just seems so awesome!
Despite having some knowledge on the Super Famicom Box, I actually haven't seen the brochure before. Also I find it surprising that no Kirby games were made available for it considering who developed the software.
3:58 hold up, the one you should of highlighted was rf out, because rf out is the super famicom box rf signal while ant. in would be (japaneese) analog signals, however, the analog signal in japan was shut down on July 24th 2011, way later than america's ntsc to atsc june 12th 2009 shutdown, however, if you experiment, you can report back, just an fyi.
It's funny that you mention hotels potentially renting Switch docks. This is because in several hotels located around Universal Studios Japan, you actually can rent a Switch dock for in your room.
How does renting a Dock even work??
Like… do you get just a Dock and no Switch?
(In theory would be Cool since when you have Limited Space during a Trip, it can be useful instead of carrying the Dock.
USJ being based once again. And I love it.
@@LennyQUMFIFtypically people who are big fans of Nintendo will have a switch on holiday, but definitely wouldn’t take the whole ass dock
@@nitinanku well, as a big Nintendo Fan, I took my Switch with both Dock and even 3DS to a Europe Trip, so I’m sure other people would do that
(Yes, I was willing to sacrifice Suitcase Space for a Dock)
@@LennyQUMFIFI ALWAYS take my dock.
2:35 lest not forget about the Wii safety manual pictures featuring a child swallowing a Wii whole and a Wii driving
Ah, so that's where Scott the Woz came up with the idea of eating his Wii in that Memory Cards Halloween special.
This reminds me of the n64 they had in a hotel when I was a kid. I desperately wanted to play Kirby 64 because we didn’t have it at home and my mom took one look at the rates and said absolutely not.
I saw this at a hotel once. I think it was $8USD per hour
Lol typical mom move
I remember once staying at a hotel with the SNES service, I think we ended up renting Kirby’s Dream Course.
I couldn’t believe the tv had a Nintendo 64. That made my vacation. Nothing top’d it. Lol
I remember several of the times my family went on vacation to NH the hotel we stayed at had a rental N64 setup in the mid 2000's and I habitually played Mario Tennis on it knowing it was just such an oddity playing a late N64 game we didn't have back at home. Fast forward to a couple years ago when I was on vacation with my switch and portable dock and I had the brain blast to get some nostalgic wish fulfillment going by booting up Mario Tennis off the switch online N64 on a hotel TV yet again.
Lmao that I’Max logo is literally just the IMAX logo with an apostrophe added, they knew.
the also made the only official FPS for the Virtual Boy
Thank you so much, for the longest time the best video of the Super Famicom box was Gamester 81's video which is 14 years old (he did do an updated video 5 years ago that I didn't know about until typing this comment up) and since Gamester 81 doesn't invest much into sound recording and mixing equipment, it was nice to watch a video of this thing without a lot of echo in the audio and actual understanding of what all the moon scribbles say :3
I have had both the famicom box and super famicom box for many years now....this is the best video I have ever seen on it...I can not read Japanese so it was nice to know the other options in select and with the keys...great piece of history..love the coinbox.
I was today years old when I realized something like this existed. Thanks for the video!
I'm in love with the kirby on the startup screen
Always fun to see Clubhouse Games mentioned
3:36 - that's probably for those regions of japan that were still transitioning to the 100v standard.
Also, it's just good hardware designing etiquette. Usually the PSU is the first to fail.
A whole Super Famicom demo unit neatly boxed up. Neat.
Hey, I see myself at 0:20 👀 Glad you made this video, the Super Famicom Box is such a fascinating device! Even more fascinating is the fact HAL developed it and how the music for it sounds straight out of Dream Course! I'm a big fan of that game's soundtrack, so that was a fun surprise.
Just recently sold my Super Famicom Box, never knew about the master key. Cool stuff, thanks for the video!
Yeah, kinda surprising how Kirby's Dream Course or even Kirby Super Star weren't ever part of the Super Famicom Box line-up despite Kirby's presence in the boot-up screen...
That aside, this is a really well researched video! Nicely done as always!
I remember there was one hotel my family went to on trips and they had something like this!! Not sure if it was a “homemade” one or an official one but it was how I first played Mario World.
This is a great video and resource for the retro community 😊
Honestly really cool! I’m glad the SFC Box can be preserved! (Unlike LodgeNet, which required a central server). Maybe you can get a Famicom Box and make it a second channel video or something?
lodgeNet used real consoles with ram carts
I still remember the time I was in N'Orleans, we stayed at a LaQuinta that had a similar machine. Never got to use it, however.
your video is a bless for video game preservation and informations. Thank you so much, i wanted to see the guts of this for years!
Waialae no Kiseki is known as True Golf Classics: Waialae Country Club in west
Wait a minute, I am pretty sure it is 2 systems in a trenchcoat. I suspect timing, game switching and misc things are done by a second more primitive(?) system, which can overlay it's own text on top of NES signal, reset SNES and switch rom banks. Would be interesting to see a technical breakdown of how it is achived, but I am pretty sure that games haven't been altered much if any. I wonder if second system is also SNES or more primitive MSX style computer.
they are modified slightly, the system needs additional header data to work with the timer/overlay and menus, but thats about it, additionally each cartridge has a "main" chip that tells the system what is on the others chips
I vaguely remember back when hotels once had something similar to it that was just N64 controller that’s tethered to the TV
14:37
Well, that was fun! Happy Victoria day everyone!
Sorry, I watch too much Joshscorcher.
There is something hilarious about the fact that Kirby is featured front and centre on the os yet no Kirby games are available
We never got anything this good at the fancy hotels I went to when I was a kid back in the 90's which all we got was a TV with boring ass advertisements for the hotel and the weather channel but Japan got this.
You should honestly do the FM Towns Marty. It's basically a computer based console manufactured in Japan only by Fujitsu. It was released in 1993 which is a year before the PlayStation. Its hardware was really impressive at the time as it used an AMD CPU, but it didn't really sell well in Japan. Heck, the Marty's CPU speed was half of the PS1. The Marty also can basically run burned CDs, as well as the Car Marty which can be used for cars.
Like this video idea?
Super neat, thanks for sharing! It is truly tragic that Kirby is here to present the box but you can't play any Kirby games lmao
They should really make another one for Nintendo switches in the modern era
I stayed at a hotel in new hampshire in the early 90s that had these
My friend owned a hotel in hakuba, Nagano back in 1995-1999 and all his hotel room TVs were super Famicom TVs. You could rent games from the front desk or bring your own. I wonder if he still has any of them as he could put them up for export to an NTSC region.
i would imagine the f-zero and pilotwings cart went unreleased because both of those were only singleplayer while all of the other games all had some multiplayer component (except the mahjong game i think? (and starfox lol) though it was prolly just included for casual appeal like the golf game)
either that or they were both just placeholders
I wonder if those giant cartridges work on a normal super famicom
Great video! I was really curious about the Super Famicom Box after seeing it on your Super Mario Bros. video!
It's unfortunate that we don't have devices like this anymore, as they are quite unique.
Since I already watch a lot of videos of facts about Nintendo, I always think I've learnt everything there is to know, but I've never heard of the Super Famicom Box before! Great video!
As the Yakuza / Like a Dragon community says, “BEST MAHJONG STRATEGY TIP: Quit”.
It’s honestly so cool seeing stuff like this, we don’t really get anything as nifty nowadays! Although a hotel I went to once had a small arcade room in the lobby with Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., which was pretty cool.
That's some crazy old stuff.
This is a real cool thing to look at!!! Thank you for sharing AK, great video! :D
It would be interesting to see what other games were supposed to be on the super famicom box officially and if white units were ever distributed
i wonder if the key override things could be activated with a standard lock picking kit? that would be an interesting test!
its not a very secure lock, two sliders and thats about it, plus its plastic so if you really wanted to its not difficult to just force the issue. the pinning portion of the two keys is actually the same, but the master key lacks the tall fin which falls into a notch limiting how far it can rotate, its actually laid out such that there are eight possible permission levels depending on how that fin is cut
Sumpit dan garpu adalah cutlery yg bisa saya pakai di tangan kanan maupun kiri. Kalau pas adanya sendok doang dan ga ada garpu sumpit bisa gantikan 😂
Ah yes every time I went into Super Potato they had one on display
if i owned this i'd want to track down all the extra carts for it. it's really an awesome piece!
really cool stuff here, lovely video
Such a cool iteration of the Super Famicom. Weird cartridge system, they probably went with this instead of individual cartridges probably to stop hotels from buy retail carts to swap games out at their leisure and of course to charge a premium from these cartridge sets.
I wonder though, if you swap the Super Mario All-Stars rom chp out with one from a retail version of the game that has Super Mario world included on the rom, would that work?
I would try my self, but I don't have $300+ to splash out something is cool! Butt I would want one if I could, so cool!
But am I guessing the FamicomBox uses retail carts and can they be switched out at will?
Hm, I wonder, given the chance to have an in person look at the cartridges if I could manage to reverse engineer them and get custom roms loaded on them?
I remember a hotel having something like this, it had Super Mario All Stars.
aw man i wish you had the coin case tthat'd be a funny thing to show
ive got all three option carts for mine, as for that unknown counter, it seems to be some sort of error counter, since it seems to mention the watch dog timer, but as far as im aware no one has ever documented what actually set its off.
oh and there actually is a fourth payment system, but its disabled in the vast majority of units, however it does still appear in the menu, its the central management option, which would have been an automatic billing system, however this requires an updated version of the onboard bios card that actually has the required parts populated and i have only ever seen two pictures of this card.
if you want to make the coin mechanism work its fairly trivial, all the coin box does is bridge two pins on the unused three pin header behind the faceplate, ive actually connected a button on wires up to it on mine and it works fine
I mean, there's at least a Kirby CAMEO, so I can't really complain.
The virgin Satellaview vs the chad Super Famicom Box
this is so freaking cool, it would be awesome if one day someone figured out a way to actually add more games or maybe even the rest of the snes/sfc library onto it and actually it got me thinking if you can disconnect the controllers you could potentially use the 8bitdo retro receiver with the snes classic controll for the switch for this. this just seems so awesome!
super Metroid, a link to the past, and super mario world wouod have been EPIC
Fantastic video. Thank you!
Despite having some knowledge on the Super Famicom Box, I actually haven't seen the brochure before. Also I find it surprising that no Kirby games were made available for it considering who developed the software.
Having a rentable Switch dock is a pretty good idea.
Do a video on the Nintendo world class service centers and the test equipment and cartridges
That poor dreamcast 😢
Can we see your whole collection
Wow… your logo is AWSOME
You could probably take the front plate off and fill in the gaps with some wax.
nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic, eh Famicom
3:58 hold up, the one you should of highlighted was rf out, because rf out is the super famicom box rf signal while ant. in would be (japaneese) analog signals, however, the analog signal in japan was shut down on July 24th 2011, way later than america's ntsc to atsc june 12th 2009 shutdown, however, if you experiment, you can report back, just an fyi.
I feel like I met you in VRChat. You sound incredibly similar to someone I found on there.
very interesting video, but why is your dreamcast sideways?
If someone manages one of those optional cartridges with Super Bomberman 2, Someone better let me know because I'm a huge Bomberman fan!!!
“Mario Chip” 🤣
Nice Video ! Sub & Big Like ! And Love Retro Snes Games !
interesting
The FamiBox
I've always loved the Famicom and Super Famicom Box, they're so big and bulky and bulky and they're so cool.
Why is your channel called ‘Alfamikyhome’? I’ve been wondering ever since I started enjoying your content.
Seems like you got the worst second cartridge
What if Toy Story and Kirby super star was on this?
box
Can you post the roms online
It would be illegal, but I do hope that the software gets preserved.
これって僕が小学6年生の頃にありました、北海道のホテルに。
Who else is watching this on a Nintendo switch at a hotel?
Who else is watching this while in a hotel? 😂
Hello public viewers! Am I baffling you?
No, I know of Patreon.
dont overact, you dont have to turn them simultaneously, this is not a james bond movie, geee
I have one, bought a new one and the system after importing damaged the side, but the front faceplate is great, got it for 200$ after the damage.
Now do a video on the Famicom Box