![]() ![]() The 128 kilobit storage was nowhere near as impressive as it sounds, being just 16 kilobytes, or less than half the size of a Famicom ROM, but the ability for players to overwrite the card with new game data excited Nintendo and led to the production of the floppy-based Famicom Disk System. The Bee Card, a data format used sparsely on the MSX and Atari Portfolio computer systems, was looking to expand to new computer systems, and Nintendo seemed the right direction for the format. The 40 Kibibyte ROM size was limiting for developers, and this was when Hudson approached Nintendo. ![]() The 3.5" floppy disk could store 360 kilobytes per side at this point, the equivalent of at least nine Famicom game ROMs. It had its issues over the other computers at the time though, for sure: for starters, its ROMs were puny compared to that of contemporary PCs. Because of the success of microcomputers in Europe and Asia, America's infamous video game crash did little to impact the games industry overseas, and this meant that Nintendo's Family Computer was doing phenomenally well. It's 1984, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and the Famicom has been on a hot streak for over a year. Obviously, the software companies wanted to ensure they made the money, and the recording industry will shut down any attempt at people making copies in the name of dear sweet Capitalism, so renting became illegal in 1983 and still is to this day. The Recording Industry Association of Japan, alongside the Compact Disc & Video Rental Commerce Trade Association had lobbied the government to ban rentals on software as rental stores would crack the copy protection to produce extra copies to rent out. The sentence "gamers felt prices were too high and had no alternatives, as game rental had been made illegal just the year prior" is a factual statement. Learning about Japan's gaming scene in the 1980s is a bit of a culture shock, if you are unfamiliar with it. ![]()
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