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Monday, March 26, 2012

Oh Yeah, My Famicoms Work

The game to Famicom ratio is now 1:1
Several months ago I talked over a few posts about two Famicoms and one Super Famicom which I scored for free. While I did elaborate later about the SF, I never really did post further about the two other Famicoms. I'm not really sure why I didn't, it just got forgotten like the band Hanson. Seriously, they sucked.
In the last post which was focused on a Famicom, I posted about how the LED's lit up on the joystick pad and how this looked assuring until my test game arrived. I never posted after that, but my test game did arrive. The game was suppose to be something fun and cheap, but in the end I purchased Matsumoto Tooru no Kabushiki Hisshougaku. The English text on the box simply says 'Family Computer Business Economics Software, Volume 1.' It's about as exciting as it sounds, cost me $3.83 Australian, complete it box and totally in Japanese. While the game is er, well, about economics, it still has all the original pamphlets in it and could make an interesting video.
Either way, it was bought as a test game and I've used it to that purpose. It proved that my better condition Famicom worked, and that the other one did too after some persuasion. I opened that up to find it full of sawdust. While I'm still trying to think of a scenario where a fully sealed Famicom becomes full of sawdust, after I pulled it all out it now worked as well.
Tuning it to an Australian television has been fairly hard though. While I do have a mostly clear picture (with some static saying hello every now and again) I still haven't mastered the sound. I can hear it slightly, but this is over rid by roaring white noise. Sound isn't really that much of a problem and not totally necessary in 80's games, but it would be nice to hear those 8-bit tunes more clearly.
The other day I received Tetris in the mail after I decided I wanted to play some games on the system which I actually enjoyed. As you can imagine, a totally Japanese economics game gets boring after a while. In fact, I think I got bored of it after about 30 seconds. The Tetris is game is great, but has some small issues like the fact you change the angle of the shapes by pressing down. The amount of times I've pressed it by accident so far has been a little bit annoying, but all well. I'm not even interested in English economics.

3 comments:

  1. Japanese economics LMAO ....very funny but like you said, it was just a test game. Congrats on your working famicons. Very cool!

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  2. I should make it my soul purpose to learn Japanese, or at least drag a Japanese speaking person into my games room so I can beat it.

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