Has anyone ever come across a Famicom development hardware? Over a thousand Famicom games from several major companies as well as small entreprises were released in Japan, so there have sure been a whole lot of them around. Were they supposed to be sent back to Nintendo whatsoever or why are these units so scarcely available for sale? At least I have never seen even a picture of a Famicom (or NES) dev system. The only dev items from the Famicom era that I've seen so far on yahoo/ebay were white beta disks for the Disk System as well as some beta/proto cartridges, but never hardware. I'd also love to know if there were any differences between Disk and Cart development considering the dev hardware or if it was just a matter of copying/writing the data on either medium. A Disk system/FC cart gang writer would be awesome, but I doubt such a thing exists :mario:
rI have have a kit, but it's from after the system came out. A preproduction dev would be key to find. Basically what I have consists of a pc card, rom emulator board and various cables. You'd send your code to the module and run it on a slightly modified nes.
The only Nintendo hardware I know of is the Intelligent Systems Famicom which was obviously released very late, and may or may not even have a debugger. I've never seen one for sale or in a collection. 3rd party hardware HAS popped up, and it's often ugly. Most developers without question had to make their own hardware, particularly ones who manufactured their own carts/MMCs. Official documentation was provided to 3rd party developers though (at least NES developers), and I believe one or two collectors DO have copies. Nothing else is terribly necessary since 6502 assemblers were very attainable even before the FC's release. The differences between cart and disk development are pretty huge, only the most basic games ("NROM" carts/single-sided disk games) can really be developed for both simultaneously. Once your game gets over 32K for program and 8K for graphics, the game's design and code has to fork drastically for each format.
Nintendo probably sold some sort of FDS dev system to licensees, but I've never heard of an actual Famicom dev system. I think for most companies it was just socketed carts and EPROMs all the way. FDS Dev pic:
I hate to say this but I know what to look for, but as I haven't found it yet on ebay or elsewhere I'm going to have to be selfish and not say a a word. Basically it was hardware->hard emu or rom emu module.
I have a few Nintendo famicom dev cart circuit boards so they definitely sold those. The mmc 1 one I have is is a small circuit board that would fit in a small famicom cart. The mmc3 ones are interesting because they are in disk system ram adapter cases. That gave them more room for eproms. Then the mmc5 one I have is a long circuit board that I think is bigger than even the biggest famicom game case.
