Famicom Disc System

Type: Console
Publisher: Nintendo
Firstly released in: Japan
First release: 1985
Release and compatibility details: Released only in Japan. Combination of NES and FDS together was released by Sharp in 1986.

Success and unsuccess:

Most popular years: 1986
Most popular countries: Japan
Amount of games in database: 197 (list)
Amount of music records in database: 4 (list)
Importance on the market in the most popular years: Medium

Characteristics:

This add-on to the original NES allowed to play games on the non-standard 3" floppy disks instead of cartridges. The games were a lot cheaper because disks were cheaper than cartridges, and very cool thing was that there were kiosks in electronic shops in Japan where you could insert a blank Disk System Disk and buy a game to put on the disk (!). Anyway, it suffered for a lag of games released for this system, as also for lot of illegal copies. Most companies haven't supported it and continued using cartridges as data sources, so the FDS finished selling in 1988 with around 200 very good games (including Zelda, Metroid etc.)

More info: http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/fds/fds.html

Games and music info:

Most common media for storing games: Floppy Disk
Average packed game size: 50 kB

Emulation info:

Look in Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) platform, the best emulators support also Famicom Disk System because of hardware similarity.

This emulation info was written on 16.January 2003. (This time is very important, because emulation info very depends on the time it was written - emulators can improve a lot after this time..).