Been wanting a NES for a minute. Decided on buying myself a toploading unit for my 40th birthday this year. The American NES toploaders were too pricey, but the Famicom AV was much more affordable and with the bonus of AV instead of RF only like the US model. Just by coincidence I bought Mario Bros as my first Famicom game since that was the cheapest, best quality game I could afford and it just seemed right to make it the first Famicom game I owned. But after I purchased it it dawned on me that it was delightfully appropriate to buy Mario Bros on it’s 40th anniversary as my 40th birthday present this year :D
Looking forward to grabbing an Everdrive when I have the cash and really getting down and dirty with it. I have a whole bunch of homebrew and hacks I’m itching to play.
Happy birthday from a fellow Famicom AV owner born in 85! I am playing it on my hd TV at the moment with a RAD2X RetroTink HDMI cable, but I also have a CRT I rescued from the trash 😁
Sweet! Thank you, happy B-day (or soon to be) to you too! The CRT is the icing on the cake, I love real scanlines in action. Sadly I didn’t pay attention to the listing close enough and purchased the console only so I don’t have the dogbone controller (was really looking forward to it too). I had to grab a generic NES one for now. Eventually I’ll be grabbing the dogbone when I can though.
I’m also from ‘85 and had forgotten about SMB releasing that year. Now I gotta do a play through on my birthday. Great setup btw!
Haha, yeah. I even used to have a Mario shirt I loved that said “Down Since '85”. I completely spaced the connection until I bought the cart. Honestly, the earliest memories I have of gaming are of playing Super Mario Bros. over at the neighbors. My parents couldn’t afford to get me a console until I was 6, and the one they could afford was an Atari 2600 from the thrift store. The carts were something like 25 cents a piece though, so my mom got a crapload of them, I loved it, but was definitely jealous of my other friends who had Nintendos. On my seventh birthday though, they bought me a new SNES that came with Super Mario World, and to this day is the game I’ve beat the most times (I never did get any other games for that SNES since my parents couldn’t afford them).
I don’t remember when I got to play SMB but at that time my friends had a SNES or Genesis. But I played the hell out of it!
I would always be jealous of my friends who would talk about playing a Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger. Here I was sitting in my room playing Pitfall and Enduro on my 2600, while they were jamming on their SNES systems. I had one friend who was lucky enough to have a PS1 when it first came out, seeing FFVII on the PS1 blew my mind at 12 years old. Eventually my parents did get me a other systems, first the SNES than the Genesis and later a PS1. My dad got in on the PS1 pretty hardcore (he was a big car fanatic and thought Gran Turismo was amazing). The funniest time as a kid was when my parents got us a Genesis, and we got the Sega Channel through the local cable company. My parents got so hooked on Shining Force that they’d play for hours and hours, a lot of times they’d hog the Genesis to where we kids barely got to play lol
Love that you got a crt for it too!
Essential! I bought it from an older lady down the road months ago in anticipation of buying some retro consoles. I also have a PS2 phat on layaway at the pawnshop that I’ll be grabbing in the next month. It was suprisingly only $60. The cool thing too is there is a gaming shop downtown that sells retro games for pretty cheap. I spied Gran Turismo 4 down there for $8 (the only GT on PS1/2 that I never really got to play). Funny thing is, I’ve actually taken to preferring to watch stuff on the CRT with a DVD player versus using my laptop. I get DVDs from the library and with where the TV is positioned it’s more comfortable to watch from my bed. I don’t get great internet where I am too, so it’s often the only way to watch something. Definitely worth the $7 I payed for it :D
Absolutely badass. I’ll make do with my shaders, but you’re living the dream.
Ever play Faxanadu?
No, I never have. I’ve heard about it vaguely, but that’s it. I’ll have to check it out sometime.
I loved that game.
I didn’t have it but my mom’s friends son had it and I would be STOKED when we were going over there.
9/10 my mom would be like <son> won’t be there so you might be bored, but he has a Nintendo….
It’s my favorite and apparently it even inspired Hollow Knight devs. OG metroidvania but punishingly difficult.
My American toploader has those really grating vertical lines running through the picture - as all of them did apparently. It was a rare known defect that Nintendo just rolled with rather than recalling and fixing them. I’m still a little bit salty about it.
These days I play through other means, but I definitely understand wanting to use original hardware.
At the time, if you bought a new US toploader then complained to Nintendo about the video quality, they would replace it with a revision with no jailbars. There’s also a very rare US toploader with the composite AV port and no jailbars!
It’s baffling to me why the toploader didn’t have AV ports in the first place. Hell, the US NES had them, I don’t see why they went with RF only on the first release. I wasn’t even aware of that fact until I looked into getting one, I always assumed the NES Control Deck had them.
I never even thought to do that. I was angry that their previously-perfect track record for quality hardware hadn’t carried over to that purchase as well. I did exchange my first unit for a second new one, but obviously it was no better.
I still have it. I don’t use it, so I’m going to sell it in the near future.
I’ve read that it’s fairly easy to AV mod those US toploaders. I’ve seen people mention it online. Although, I know it requires some simple sodering to do. There are also RGB mods out there for it as well.
Which is what makes it valuable enough to sell. There is an HDMI mod too.
Makes sense. The Famicom AVs on Ebay were anywhere from $95-$125, while the NES toploader was at least $140-160. That’s why I opted to get the Famicom AV instead.
