It's funny that you mention hotels potentially renting Switch docks. This is because in several hotels located around Universal Studios Japan, you actually can rent a Switch dock for in your room.
How does renting a Dock even work?? Like… do you get just a Dock and no Switch? (In theory would be Cool since when you have Limited Space during a Trip, it can be useful instead of carrying the Dock.
@@nitinanku well, as a big Nintendo Fan, I took my Switch with both Dock and even 3DS to a Europe Trip, so I’m sure other people would do that (Yes, I was willing to sacrifice Suitcase Space for a Dock)
This reminds me of the n64 they had in a hotel when I was a kid. I desperately wanted to play Kirby 64 because we didn’t have it at home and my mom took one look at the rates and said absolutely not.
I remember several of the times my family went on vacation to NH the hotel we stayed at had a rental N64 setup in the mid 2000's and I habitually played Mario Tennis on it knowing it was just such an oddity playing a late N64 game we didn't have back at home. Fast forward to a couple years ago when I was on vacation with my switch and portable dock and I had the brain blast to get some nostalgic wish fulfillment going by booting up Mario Tennis off the switch online N64 on a hotel TV yet again.
I have had both the famicom box and super famicom box for many years now....this is the best video I have ever seen on it...I can not read Japanese so it was nice to know the other options in select and with the keys...great piece of history..love the coinbox.
Hey, I see myself at 0:20 👀 Glad you made this video, the Super Famicom Box is such a fascinating device! Even more fascinating is the fact HAL developed it and how the music for it sounds straight out of Dream Course! I'm a big fan of that game's soundtrack, so that was a fun surprise.
Yeah, kinda surprising how Kirby's Dream Course or even Kirby Super Star weren't ever part of the Super Famicom Box line-up despite Kirby's presence in the boot-up screen... That aside, this is a really well researched video! Nicely done as always!
Honestly really cool! I’m glad the SFC Box can be preserved! (Unlike LodgeNet, which required a central server). Maybe you can get a Famicom Box and make it a second channel video or something?
Great video! I was really curious about the Super Famicom Box after seeing it on your Super Mario Bros. video! It's unfortunate that we don't have devices like this anymore, as they are quite unique.
I remember there was one hotel my family went to on trips and they had something like this!! Not sure if it was a “homemade” one or an official one but it was how I first played Mario World.
Wait a minute, I am pretty sure it is 2 systems in a trenchcoat. I suspect timing, game switching and misc things are done by a second more primitive(?) system, which can overlay it's own text on top of NES signal, reset SNES and switch rom banks. Would be interesting to see a technical breakdown of how it is achived, but I am pretty sure that games haven't been altered much if any. I wonder if second system is also SNES or more primitive MSX style computer.
they are modified slightly, the system needs additional header data to work with the timer/overlay and menus, but thats about it, additionally each cartridge has a "main" chip that tells the system what is on the others chips
You should honestly do the FM Towns Marty. It's basically a computer based console manufactured in Japan only by Fujitsu. It was released in 1993 which is a year before the PlayStation. Its hardware was really impressive at the time as it used an AMD CPU, but it didn't really sell well in Japan. Heck, the Marty's CPU speed was half of the PS1. The Marty also can basically run burned CDs, as well as the Car Marty which can be used for cars.
We never got anything this good at the fancy hotels I went to when I was a kid back in the 90's which all we got was a TV with boring ass advertisements for the hotel and the weather channel but Japan got this.
As the Yakuza / Like a Dragon community says, “BEST MAHJONG STRATEGY TIP: Quit”. It’s honestly so cool seeing stuff like this, we don’t really get anything as nifty nowadays! Although a hotel I went to once had a small arcade room in the lobby with Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., which was pretty cool.
3:36 - that's probably for those regions of japan that were still transitioning to the 100v standard. Also, it's just good hardware designing etiquette. Usually the PSU is the first to fail.
Such a cool iteration of the Super Famicom. Weird cartridge system, they probably went with this instead of individual cartridges probably to stop hotels from buy retail carts to swap games out at their leisure and of course to charge a premium from these cartridge sets. I wonder though, if you swap the Super Mario All-Stars rom chp out with one from a retail version of the game that has Super Mario world included on the rom, would that work? I would try my self, but I don't have $300+ to splash out something is cool! Butt I would want one if I could, so cool! But am I guessing the FamicomBox uses retail carts and can they be switched out at will?
i would imagine the f-zero and pilotwings cart went unreleased because both of those were only singleplayer while all of the other games all had some multiplayer component (except the mahjong game i think? (and starfox lol) though it was prolly just included for casual appeal like the golf game) either that or they were both just placeholders
My friend owned a hotel in hakuba, Nagano back in 1995-1999 and all his hotel room TVs were super Famicom TVs. You could rent games from the front desk or bring your own. I wonder if he still has any of them as he could put them up for export to an NTSC region.
its not a very secure lock, two sliders and thats about it, plus its plastic so if you really wanted to its not difficult to just force the issue. the pinning portion of the two keys is actually the same, but the master key lacks the tall fin which falls into a notch limiting how far it can rotate, its actually laid out such that there are eight possible permission levels depending on how that fin is cut
this is so freaking cool, it would be awesome if one day someone figured out a way to actually add more games or maybe even the rest of the snes/sfc library onto it and actually it got me thinking if you can disconnect the controllers you could potentially use the 8bitdo retro receiver with the snes classic controll for the switch for this. this just seems so awesome!
ive got all three option carts for mine, as for that unknown counter, it seems to be some sort of error counter, since it seems to mention the watch dog timer, but as far as im aware no one has ever documented what actually set its off. oh and there actually is a fourth payment system, but its disabled in the vast majority of units, however it does still appear in the menu, its the central management option, which would have been an automatic billing system, however this requires an updated version of the onboard bios card that actually has the required parts populated and i have only ever seen two pictures of this card. if you want to make the coin mechanism work its fairly trivial, all the coin box does is bridge two pins on the unused three pin header behind the faceplate, ive actually connected a button on wires up to it on mine and it works fine
3:58 hold up, the one you should of highlighted was rf out, because rf out is the super famicom box rf signal while ant. in would be (japaneese) analog signals, however, the analog signal in japan was shut down on July 24th 2011, way later than america's ntsc to atsc june 12th 2009 shutdown, however, if you experiment, you can report back, just an fyi.
Despite having some knowledge on the Super Famicom Box, I actually haven't seen the brochure before. Also I find it surprising that no Kirby games were made available for it considering who developed the software.
Hm, I wonder, given the chance to have an in person look at the cartridges if I could manage to reverse engineer them and get custom roms loaded on them?
