Let's look at Family Basic on the Famicom

Re-enthused

#nintendo #retrocomputing #retrogaming
Family BASIC

The 80s marked a curious switch-over point from home computers to gaming consoles and many manufacturers decided to play it safe. Nintendo was no different, releasing the Family BASIC pack for its Famicom system, effectively making the console into a computer.

Theme tune: Re-enthused by Onyapatto and Jonn Blanchard

Nintendo Family Computer
Family
BASIC

Chapters
========
00:00 Intro
01:10 In the Box
01:50 Reading the manual
02:20 Trying it out
03:28 In Sharp BASIC
04:12 Trying our first program
05:10 Trying it again
06:40 Hello World
07:00 Summary

[mavhunter]

I'm really glad you did this! Satoshi Tajiri apparently used this program to learn game design.

[AngryCalvin]

I loved Home Computers in the 80's. I guess that's one thing that really bothered me about the NES other than gamepads over joysticks. Still don't care for gamepads to this day.

This looks like a Home Computer especially having the disk drive. This is why Famicom was so much cooler than the NES.

Yeah I remember BASIC really well since my first console was a Texas Instruments Home Computer. Most my friends had an Atari 800, and 1 had a C64.
BASIC programming was a big deal back in the Home Computer era.

I can't imagine what would have happened if the game crash didn't happen. Definitely delivered a blow to the Home Computer era.

Funny how Nintendo originally had the idea to be a 16 bit Home Computer with arcade like controllers but everything went in a different direction and became a success anyway being much more affordable and becoming a household name.

[apha]

It's interesting. Commodore Amiga Basic did the same thing. It would continue to run the sprites even after the main program finished.

[HajimeNoJMo]

I’ve seen these in Akihabara, so I’m considering getting one in teh future

[GameRetro]

Wow! I had no idea this existed! Nice!

[WhatHoSnorkers]

That is FUCKING COOL. 4 lines to make an animated Mario run all over the screen? That is AWESOME!

I now wonder if the SEGA SG-1000 that SInce Spacies had was as cool as this?

[micahcowan]

Ctrl-D hides the sprites. I think there's a SPRITEOFF command or something like that as well. Sprite movement (and display) is handled outside of the CPU, which is why they happily kept running after the program ended (for quite a while).

Since the Famicom/NES has a sound synthesis chip, it ought to be able to handle multi-voice sound in the background as well, but Family Basic only lets you do single-voice, and pauses until the sound is done (the "Music Board" toy you can run from the initial screen lets you do multi-voice, but you can't use that from within BASIC)

[ssg-eggunner]

The first one is just the code sakurai used in his example

[shieladixon]

That's a route into programming for kids with a famicom. There's real instant gratification there. Does this kit also work with the nes? I guess it wasn't sold over here?

[ncot_tech]

That's cool, it's like SmileBasic on the Switch, that has a tutorial that runs like a game.

[magnus]

I always wanted to have a Famicom Basic, although Nintendo of America did not dare to launch the AVS (NES prototype), since instead of selling it as a toy with ROB they would have sold the console with a keyboard as an educational product, it would be like " your first micro computer "

Hopefully someone can create a new "BASIC for NES" using modern tools like the NESMaker, so have a more complete version of BASIC like Commodore 64/128.

[leadedsolder]

How did you get past the "tutorial screen" at the start? I seem to remember hitting some of the F-keys and then typing in a BASIC statement for some reason, which the machine approved of, but without any functional understanding of Japanese I also found it pretty difficult and now can't remember how to get back in.

[kevin]

Woulda been cool if this came out in the States back in the day! Thankfully today there's a modern version of this concept with SmileBASIC for Switch!

[Cahos_Rahne_Veloza]

Nintendo SHOULD DEFINITELY DO A switch Family Linux kit for the modern era to stick it into Microsoft and their Windows 11 Bullcrap