alternatehistory.com

Given the history of home console gaming after the start of the '90s, it may be surprising to some people that the company with the earliest history of disc-based console games may be Nintendo. Yes, the company with the last significant cartridge-based console (the N64) was one of the first adopters of the disc (or strictly speaking, 'disk')-based storage medium when it came to games.

For many Japanese people growing up in the '80s, this would be a very familiar chime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F_vTOZQLxY

This was the start-up screen of the Famicom Disk System, a peripheral to the hugely successful Family Computer, or NES in the west, that played proprietary floppy disks.



The disk allowed (or seems to allow) more sprites, more/better sound effects, (compare the the title screen of the NES version of the Legend of Zelda to the FDS version) and the ability to save data on the disk itself (only certain NES cartridge games supported save states). The disks used were cheap and easily produced. However, for those very reasons it was notoriously easy to pirate Famicom Disk System games, so much so that the planned NES counterpart was never released, Nintendo instead opting for new cartridge chips to make up for the lack of disks.

Let's say that Nintendo worked out sufficient blocks for pirates, such that they felt the next system, the Super Famicom in Japan and the Super Nintendo in the west, should exclusively use floppies, or a proprietary form of such. This would put it at odds with the more established Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and its cartridges (with an attempt at CDs later on with the Sega CD). What would its general capabilities be, and how would it effect the famous "SNES/Genesis" console war?
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