Family basic for famicom

[notwhoyouthink]

Anyone here ever played with family basic?

I have attached the games urban champ and spark house, a text file with the listing for a demo program that plays the space harrier boss 1 music, and a book that basically acts as a guide for operating family basic.

All of these work in the V2.1 of family basic.

There is a V3.0 of family basic, but i do not know if they are compatible with that version for sure.

Let-s-Play-with-Family-Basic.pdf

SPACE HARRIER BOSS1 BGM.txt

spark house.zip

urban champ.zip

[carlsson]

Yup, I acquired mine last year. I found another forum with some type-ins saved as audio files to download. The games I tried were rather bland, but it shows Nintendo had some potential. I might try the other games as well.

[jhd]

Thanks for posting the detailed information and manuals.

 

How practical/useful is this? Based on a quick look at the manual, my impression is that it is a slightly more sophisticated version of the Spectravideo CompuMate -- interesting to play with, but only intended to teach kinds the rudiments of BASIC programming.

 

Lastly, will this work on an NES console, or does it require a Famicom?

[notwhoyouthink]

Pretty sure you would need a real famicom.

Take a look at www.famicomworld.com forum. There is the occasional thread there on this subject.

I think i recall someone there was attempting to make their own rom hack and add features to the Basic.

Edited December 20, 2017 by notwhoyouthink

[carlsson]

It seems that BASIC won't boot up without the correct keyboard attached, which means in order to get it to run on a NES with a Famicom adaptor, you would need to make an adaptor for the expansion port too. I once tried to boot it on my Chinese/Arabic Famiclone built inside a PC keyboard but nothing happened. Since that Famiclone has a number of other software titles using the built-in keyboard, it means either someone in China exclusively developed software for the keyboard Famiclones, or some of those programs are made for the Famicom with keyboard, then patched to run on the Famiclone.

 

I'm not sure if it ever had enough users to warrant type-ins in magazines, but Hudson seems to have produced a fine BASIC that Nintendo clearly could've developed and implemented further if they had any intent of releasing a proper home computer. Unlike Sega, apparently they never did and this was more a stunt to warrant the name Family Computer. By early 1984, perhaps Nintendo would've won a few Japanese customers from the MSX if they made a proper computer from it, but in the western world it might not have flewn that well.

[Tempest]

I've got one and I got it running on my NES. You just need the Famicom to NES expansion port adapter. It works just fine, but it's pretty primitive unless you like coding little games with some early NES graphics.

[carlsson]

Hm, I wonder how come my clone wouldn't run it. Unfortunately I've only got one clone system that takes cartridges, and the others I've tried have booted fine, just not the BASIC cartridge.

 

Or well, perhaps the computer mainframe screen comes up but it won't accept any keyboard input on the clone.

Edited December 20, 2017 by carlsson

[Tempest]

I even have a patched version that runs from my PowerPak cart. I forget why it needed to be patched to run on the cart, but it did. I think something about RAM initialization IIRC.