NES



"Now you're playing with power."

Often called the machine that resurrected a dead industry, the NES was the uncontested winner of its generation. Even though its main competitor, Sega's Master System, had better specs, the NES had a much wider game library, thanks to colossal third party support. Of course, if you lived in Europe, feel free to remember things a bit differently: it didn't get as much traction there, trailing not only the Master System, but a variety of home computers.

If you're a real collector, get an NES 101 (the top-loading model), as it plays PAL games, and has a port that makes it compatible with the Famicom Disk System! Note that it does NOT play Famicom games due to the pin difference, you'll have to get a converter (those were particularly common in Brazil, where clones of both standards were sold). Or just, you know, emulate the shit out of this motherfucker.

Famicom




Basically Famicom is Japanese version of your NES. It got two worth mentioning add-ons that were forerunners for future gaming trends. First one was Famicom Modem. Even if it's quite primitive for today standards it allowed gamers to go online which was pretty revolutionary at the time. It was never used for online gameplay but provided content such as game reviews and previews, cheat codes, news, weather forecasts or even banking transactions and stock trading. Famicom Network idea was later expanded in SNES Satellaview. Second add-on is rather short lived Famicom Disk System. The biggest issue at the time was with saving your game progress. First generation of cartridges were ROM only and lacked battery-backed memory which was too expensive at the time. Famicom Data Recorder introduced by Nintendo allowed to save content of few games on cassette tapes but it's manufacturing costed still too much. That's how FDS was born. Games that were released for it had a save feature also FDS had additional RAM memory and could generate better sound. Games came in two ways. You could buy pre-written disk or get some blank disks and go to one of those Disk Writer vending machines and choose games by yourself. You could use the same disk and rewrite it again. A lot of games that were released for FDS were cheaper re-releases of cart titles. Many of games that were released first for FDS were later ported to cartridge format when battery-backup memory get less expensive. Outside the Japan they usually came with implemented password system. Game prices were the reason why FDS remained it's popularity even after Nintendo abandoned this technology in a favour of more reliable cartridges. FDS even had it's official mascot, Disk-kun (Mr. Disk or Disk Boy in English).

These are the games that didn't quite make it out West, but are still worth checking out. Whether you own a clone system, an actual Famicom, a converter for your NES, or maybe just looking for ROMs, here's the list for you.

[* Denotes the game only came out on the Famicom Disk System]

ROM Hacks
In this section, we recommend ROM Hacks that we consider worth checking out.

Links to the patches -and NOT to patched ROMs- should be provided in the description whenever possible.

How to play
You will need ROMs of the original games. Sometimes you need a specific version of the said ROM but it's usually told in the readme file. For example you may need to use "awesomegame (U).nes" while it may not work with "awesomegame (U) [!] [b1].nes".

You will also need a ROM patcher such as Lunar IPS, which you can download here

Of course, you will need the patches that turn the original ROMs into the hacked ones. Links should be provided in the descriptions. Most of them should be avalaible at www.romhacking.net and/or at

Finally, run the patched ROMs in your emulator of choice (or put them on your expensive Powerpak to play them on a real console, but that's only if you're a rich bastard). If nothing happens, or if something odd happens, then you probably applied the patch on a wrong version of the ROM of the game.