Software Development on the Nintendo Famicom in Family BASIC

Back in the 1980s, your options for writing your own code and games were rather more limited than today. This also mostly depended on what home computer you could get your hands on, which was a market that — at least in Japan — Nintendo was very happy to slide into with their ‘Nintendo Family Computer’, or ‘Famicom’ for short. With the available peripherals, including a tape deck and keyboard, you could actually create a fairly decent home computer, as demonstrated by [Throaty Mumbo] in a recent video.

After a lengthy unboxing of the new-in-box components, we move on to the highlight of the show, the HVC-007 Family BASIC package, which includes a cartridge and the keyboard. The latter of these connects to the Famicom’s expansion port. Inside the package, you also find a big Family BASIC manual that includes sprites and code to copy. Of course, everything is in Japanese, so [Throaty] had to wrestle his way through the translations.

The cassette tape is used to save applications, with the BASIC package also including a tape with the Sample 3 application, which is used in the video to demonstrate loading software from tape on the Famicom. Although [Throaty] unfortunately didn’t sit down to type over the code for the sample listings in the manual, it does provide an interesting glimpse at the all-Nintendo family computer that the rest of the world never got to enjoy.

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Dealing With Intermittent Water Utilities

In many places, municipal water from a utility is something that’s often taken for granted. A local government or water utility will employ a water tower or pumping facility to ensure that there’s always water available to every home and business connected to it, all day, every day, and at a relatively constant pressure. This isn’t true the world over, though, and in [Sameer]’s home of Rajasthan he has to deal with a particularly onerous problem with the local water supply. Although he is connected to a utility, there is only water available at certain times of day, and not on a reliable schedule or at a particularly high pressure. This causes all kinds of problems, but he was able to employ an ESP32 to solve some of the headaches.

Most of [Sameer]’s neighbors install small pumps on the water main to pull water into reservoirs when it’s available. This creates two major problems, the first of which is that with all these pumps running, they can sometimes pull a vacuum on the water main, which can draw in contaminants and cause cavitation in the pumps. The second is that, if these pumps are on a timer and run when there’s no water available, they can damage themselves. [Sameer]’s solution pairs a flow sensor with a pump that is controllable via an automation tool like Home Assistant. He also includes a hydraulic analysis of this particular situation, such as placing the sensor on the output side of the pump rather than the inlet, as well as making sure that there is a laminar flow of water in the pipe it is installed on to ensure that it is taking valid measurements.

With everything set up and running, the water pump can automatically detect if there is water available, pump it to the reservoir as long as it lasts, and then automatically turn off the pump to avoid any thermal damage from running dry. [Sameer] even includes a complete Home Assistant setup for those who would like to replicate his work. We also think that this has utility outside of household water supplies as well, perhaps those watering their gardens with stored rainwater or those using other unique, semi-automated water catchment systems.

hackaday.com/2026/02/15/dealin…