Hey Guys I was wondering if anyone has seen this before or knew much about it. It's the Basic House Famicom Editor from Sharp. I'm trying to do some research on it and thought maybe someone here had heard of it before. Any tips?
Well,last week a Complete in box (first time i saw one ) Sharp X1 Twin was sold on Yahoo,along with Punch Ball&Excitebike games,AND this. Based on the final price,i have an idea of its value,but i never saw one before (and i didn't know it existed,or was looking researches for it)
Never seen one with a box. Yours? I love stuff like this, though most people prefer games to hardware. Any chance of a boardscan?
Yeah, it's mine, but everything I own gets sold so I'm researching so I can describe it properly. Let me know what info you want and I'll send it along to you or I'll post it here. My assistant glanced over the instructions but she's not really familiar with gaming so I really didn't have her spend too much time on it. Her only opinion was that it's used to create characters. Beyond that I really don't know much else. I've searched in Japanese but even then I haven't been able to find anything out about it.
I have seen similar devices (Although homebrew and for machines that sold well like the NEC PC-88 and PC-98...), but I am sure it is a device that allows you to take your Famicom BASIC cartridge, use it on the Sharp X1 with the interface and then you can copy / move programs, create tighter code, edit and create programs on the X1 and copy it back to the Famicom BASIC cartridge, it should also dump the cartridge too. The 40KB RAM Cartridge should have a battery at the back? I am pretty sure that is a Famicom cartridge (as it has 60 pins...) that will hold a dump of the Famicom BASIC cartridge and give you much more RAM to play with then the normal FC cartridge does to create much bigger programs (oh and you should be able to run machine code too). The X1 and the FC did share a very similar BASIC as both were created by Hudsonsoft...
Talking about obscure. I love it. I am guessing it's a subtitle utility for scripting detailed and timed text for the titler.
I don't think this has anything to do with Family Basic, it really looks like you make your game on the X1 and just upload it to the cart via the PC interface. The cart will be a bog standard NROM RAM cart, and the interface just address decoders, tristate (for two FC buses) and a couple gates to reconstruct FC signals. The most intriguing thing about it is definitely the software, but I wouldn't expect much from an X1 app. I wonder if the game is linked with a BASIC kernel making it interpreted at run time (slow game, fast development) or if the BASIC is linked with a Famicom library and compiled (fast game, SLOW compiling on a X1).
More info.... The RAMPACK does have two slots for batteries inside. I didn't see that at first so when I caputred the video below there were no batteries inside. You can download the raw video capture here (4 MB): http://www.japan-games.com/temp/FamicomEditor.avi This is the YouTube link, but there is a loss in video quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kz8bpjXbmU The screen is a bit hard to read in the video. This is the text of the first option menu (0:34 into the video): 1: LOAD FILE 2: SAVE FILE 3: EDIT CHARACTER 4: READ PORT 5: WRITE PORT 6: CHECK PORT 7: DUMP MEMORY 8: DISASSEMBLE 9: TRACE /: PRINTER SWITCH 0: END I chose "3." It prompted me to give the location of the data disk, so I just pointed it to the 0 drive where the Basic Houre disk was. From there it gave me this screen (0:50): 1: LOAD FILE 2: SAVE FILE 3: EDIT CHARACTER 4: READ PORT 5: WRITE PORT 6: CHECK PORT 0: EXIT I chose "3" again. That's when it pulled up the screen (0:55) with the two boxes on each side. I'm guessing since I referenced the data disk as the actual disk it chose the graphics you can see on the left hand side. You choose an area from the left and it transfers it to the right. Originally I chose a white area and nothing transferred over, so I chose a different area after that and it transferred it and magnified it. It looks like it was using the X1 blue graphic for that part. After that I chose a different area and it added that to the box on the right. There are two colums of options under the two boxes. The left column: CURSOR KEY: MOVE RETURN KEY: STORE & EXIT ESC KEY: EXIT ??? KEY: COLOR SET The right column: CLEAR SCREEN ROTATE & SHIFT LINE OFF CHANGE COLOR SIZE > 0 That's when I stopped for fear of causing a complete disk meltdown. I've been known to cause things to explode by touching them.
