Nintendo Family BASIC Type-in Programs Collection

2 Comments

I just stumbled upon a website named Gaming Alexandria. Their main goal is to preserve videogames related stuff like artwork scans, posters, articles, interviews and even game dumps. My main focus is on playable game Roms, specifically on the Type-in Programs from magazines for the Family BASIC.

  1. Games
  2. Downloads
  3. Learn more
Evan-Amos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Famicom (the Japanese NES) had a programming toolkit called Family BASIC, a BASIC language interpreter. It came with a keyboard and application in cartridge format. Users could program and create simple games or other applications. Games could be saved on cassette tapes (they are preserved as .wav audio files here). As this was a BASIC language, it was also possible to release the “source code” of games in magazines as BASIC instructions. Users had to type them off from the magazine into the Family BASIC toolkit, in order to execute the program and play.

These are all sprites that can be used in Family Basic

The Gaming Alexandria group and members of their Discord did exactly that, scan magazines with the source code of games, type them into BASIC and create standalone playable Rom games in .nes format. This should be enough to preserve these games, which would be lost to time otherwise. I personally only tested a handful of Roms so far, with Mesen in RetroArch, but I assume other emulators should be able to play them as well.

Games

Have in mind, the Family BASIC was extremely limited in capability and hardware power. It was even more limited than the NES/Famicom itself. Most of the games are of low quality and not fun to play to be honest. So doing anything that remotely looks good and is fun to play is very impressive. Here is a little selection from the entire collection:

(I gave a 5/5 rating to each game. Lot of the titles got a bad rating. I actually don’t think that there is a really good game for this platform. Don’t take the rating too seriously, as I tested the games only couple of minutes.)

  • Act Fever: (3/5) A block puzzle game. Align 3 blocks of same kind to eliminate them.
  • Jumpman: (2/5) Jump to touch the enemy. Do not let them reach the ground.
  • Kudzu Sankai 2: (1/5) Basically an Arkanoid or Breakout clone.
  • Let Out: (3/5) Move those blocks and destroy them. Do not touch the wall.
  • Marble Madness: (3/5) Some kind of ball physics. Play against player and push them to out of ring.
  • Turn: (2/5) Reversi clone or similar to it.
  • The Spirit of Satan: (3/5) Generic simple vertical shmup.
  • Zoku Kikaikaikai: (1/5) Jump and survive and shoot enough enemies until boss appears.
Act Fever
Jumpman
Kudzu Sankai 2
Let Out
Marble Madness
Turn
The Spirit of Satan
Zoku Kikaikaikai

Downloads

I visited the page www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/type-in-programs , scroll down to section “Nintendo Family BASIC” and downloaded all .zip archives for each listed game. Every archive contains scans, .wav and .nes files and other goodies. It’s an excellent preservation project. On top of it I extracted all .nes Rom files from these archives and bundled them into a single .zip archive. This romsonly archive is a bit easier to handle and roughly 1.4 MiB small, compared to the entire original collection with all supplementary files at 249 MiB size.

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2 Comments

    1. No, I don’t think that something like this exists for other Nintendo consoles (at least not by Nintendo). I wish there was, because the other systems are way more capable. And this Family BASIC for Famicom sold over 400 thousand times in Japan only (according to Wikipedia). There was still much potential, but overall it seems it as not worth it for Nintendo to create a follow up.

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