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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