Guys, Can anyone tell me what this is, what it does and what it is worth (for me to make an offer on it)? Obviously it is something to do with the Famicom Disk System, I think it might allow transfer of cartridges to disks, but really have no idea! I have been offered it, but have no idea how much they sell for as I can't find details or anything previous on eBay, if it's pretty useless, I won't bother! Cheers, Paul
Could be anything. More pictures needed: front, back and the sticker on the bottom side. You don't have the outer box, have you?
It's a device to playback early cartridge games from RAM. Basically it's a clone of the original Game Doctor. It does not backup games, you had to buy games already on disk in the proprietary Game Doctor format. I must stress that again, it does not backup games, everyone buys them because they think they do. It supports: CNROM, GNROM and U(N/O)ROM styles of bankswitching, so most games before 1988 and few after. There are multiple versions of the Game Converter that aren't discernible from the outside, the RAM could either be SRAM or DRAM and there could be 1M or 2M inside. 2M of SRAM is technically best but it doesn't affect the value because I'm likely the only person that knows/cares. Famicom copiers have come down in price over the years as people give up on trying to use them. You honestly need to be both highly technical and/or highly motivated about tracking down disks to get good use out of them which at its very best is very limited compared to emulators / the PowerPak. The unit is still worth $20 loose, but up to maybe $75 boxed, the box is quite rare though it's really nothing to look at. Boxed FC copiers don't come around very often but they really don't go for much when they do. 7 years ago this would sell for twice as much.
Yeah, I don't think there ever was an actual copier that used 3.5" disks. They all used FDS disks, which made them 100x less desirable. The only thing as good as the PowerPak before its release was the Dr.PCJr, which really did support a good number of games/mappers, and on 3.5" disks.
()? The PowerPak is so much better than the Dr. PC Jr. The Dr. PC Jr only supports a limited number of mappers and those can't be changed. With the PowerPak, it supports lots of mappers out of box and you can even upgrade it to support more. Calpis has done this for his PowerPak.
I said the DrPCJr was the only thing as good as it BEFORE the release of the Powerpak. Sure, the PPk made it completely obsolete, but it was still pretty darn good (if your hope was to play NES ROMs), and miles better than FDS-based copiers. And the "new game option" let you write headers/patches to act in the same way as new mapper definitions. I even wrote a couple new mapper patches back in the day. Hey, my PCJr page is still here, by the way: http://mypage.direct.ca/c/ccovell/nesdev.html (amazing my old ISP never took it down...)
Guys, The seller has offered this to me for $20! (plus shipping to the UK)... He has a load of unboxed games he is offering at $1.50 each, but I assume the majority of these are intended for use with this unit if it is a proprietary format. Is it really worth going for, or are there loads of these kicking around? Cheers, Paul
It's up to you, it would be an interesting thing to have in any collection. No idea how common they are in the real world but on the internet you don't see them all the time so who knows when the next one will show up. It would be nice for someone to get it and document it, even dump the games. Just for preservation and knowledge's sake.
There are pretty common for a FC copier but I would go for it if you like early FC games. Make sure the disks are Game Doctor games, not just regular FDS bootlegs.
