This weekend, RetroNuts, a Japanese obscurity, gets a tune up.

Of all the Japanese game platforms never to make their way to America, the Famicom Disk System

hurts the most.

Sure, in the most technical sense, the FDS was an expansion rather than a standalone console,

but what other expansion ever saw more than 200 games released for in the course of its

life.

The Americans and even our poor beleaguered European counterparts ended up playing quite

a few games that debuted on the Disk System in Japan, but in every case, the localized version

we received suffered some sort of compromise.

The Disk System added three major features to the stock NES and Famicom hardware.

The Discs offered more storage capacity than NES cartridges at the time.

Secondly, they were re-writeable, allowing for players to save data to the Discs.

And finally, the FDS hardware itself added an additional sound channel to the console's

audio capabilities.

By the time the Disk System games began making their way to the West, the first two factors

it sorted themselves out.

Famicom cartridges grew in capacity, and thanks to the revolution offered by bank switching,

even began to offer more storage space than the Discs could.

As for re-writeability, the advent of passwords allowed for the saving of simple progress,

while batteries let players record their achievements in more complex games with minimal fuss.

The arrival of the Legend of Zelda in the US in 1987 made the Disk System essentially

unnecessary.

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