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.
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!
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.
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.
