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Playpower.org

PLAYPOWER

We support affordable, effective, fun learning games. We're starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.

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Family BASIC

Beautiful. Did you know you could program on a Nintendo?

Beautiful. Did you know you could program on a Nintendo?

Did you know that a keyboard was released for the Famicom?

Yep.  The year was 1984–one year before the NES was even released in America.  The primary purpose of the keyboard was to enable simple programming (The programming language was NS-HUBASIC, a variant of BASIC)

This keyboard right here is why a $12 computer exists.  So we need to know as much as possible about it!

It would be excellent to fill up this page with as much information as we can find.  Thanks!  I think it would be a good research project.  Let me know if you find anything crazy.

Amazing. Computers actually looked like this back in 1984

Amazing. Computers actually looked like this back in 1984

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 3:42 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Jellystapler
    During a trip to Japan last year, I bought one of these kits, as well as a Famicom and a Disk System.

    The keyboard is kind of neat. It plugs into the front.
    The cartridge has a battery in it, which you can use to save your very simple programs.

    The cartridge had some sprites from different popular nintendo games.

    The tape recorder was used to back up the games onto tape. (much like a MicroBee)

    The disk system plugs into the cartridge port, and adds a disk reader. The disks could be both read off and written to.
    You used to be able to go to video game stores in the 80's, and download games from kiosk's to your spare disk system disks, or buy blank disk system disks, too!

    The disk system disks are double sided. 1 side is big enough to fit an entire game! I have a disk with Mario Bros.2 on one side, and volleyball on the other!

    Some disk system games were so big that they needed both sides. You would start with side 1, it would load into RAM, and then you would flip the disk and load that side, too!

    anyways, if you want more information, please email me mananime@hotmail.com
    Im registered on your development wiki as "jellystapler", too.
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