Bought a third copy of Gyromite today...

[Ichinisan]

I thought of another question, since you seem to have a lot of the history down.

It seems like the NES cartridges were bigger than necessary given that they were able to fit an entire famicom cartridge with adapter in it. Was that just a happy coincidence they took advantage of, or was the size of the NES carts intentionally made that large to accommodate these early famicom + adapter games?

I imagine because of the addition of the CIC chip the NES carts were always going to be wider due to the extra pins, but they're also a lot taller.

I would guess that part of the reason was to make the game feel more substantial, like a VHS cassette. It's no secret that Nintendo wanted to differentiate their "entertainment system" from systems like the Atari 2600 that crashed the whole industry with poor quality titles. That's the whole reason for the front-loading mechanism (to make it more like an AV appliance, like VCRs of that time). That cartridge loading mechanism turned out to be the greatest weakness of the USA design. They still had to work against that design idea by bundling a toy robot so toy stores would actually carry the system.

The only thing I've seen that uses most of the extra space inside carts is a prototype board that has EPROM chips along with circuit traces for SRAM with a coin cell battery. I didn't realize I owned a prototype copy of Xexyz until CZroe opened the cart and saw exactly why ours was so heavy...

 

[Ichinisan]

At the flea market today, I came across a vendor with a nice small collection of NES games. Clearly, this was someone's collection and it hadn't been completely picked-through. Saw the Gyromite and looked at the pins. The little feeler things were offset. I knew this was almost certainly another with the adapter inside. The vendor said the games were $5 each.

That would be a bad deal for a regular copy of Gyromite, but one with the adapter is worth $30 or more.

I bought it. Opened it. Confirmed it has the Famicom adapter inside.

That's the second one I've gotten from this flea market in a year

 

[Ichinisan]

I made a shell for the adapter with my 3D printer. I'll try to get a picture of that.

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Since I posted this, my 2 flea market vendor friends have both missed the adapters at least 2 more times. Each time I tell them: "See this game you have priced at $3? It's actually worth $30 because it has an adapter inside."

Some of you may have seen my recent thread after my brother and I found suspiciously heavy games that contained packets of who-knows-what (probably drugs). The vendor those came from is one of the guys who keeps missing the Famicom adapters in Gyromite. He's my friend. When I pointed one out to him over 1 year ago, a customer overheard me telling him it was worth around $30. The customer immediately offered $25 and bought it. With the recent drug find, my friend couldn't find his gamebit screwdriver to open the suspiciously heavy games, so I bought them and promised to show him immediately whatever we would find inside. I've been to the flea market several times since and he still never found his gamebit screwdrivers, so I gave him an extra set I had.

Today, I went to a place called "Zero Gravity Games" in Fayetteville and bought a slightly heavy copy of Pinball. Took it home and opened it. Sure enough: It has a Famicom adapter inside.

So I've finally found the adapter in something other than Gyromite.

 

[Ichinisan]

...
Today, I went to a place called "Zero Gravity Games" in Fayetteville and bought a slightly heavy copy of Pinball. Took it home and opened it. Sure enough: It has a Famicom adapter inside.

So I've finally found the adapter in something other than Gyromite.

Today I went to Goodwill and found a suspicious copy of Excitebike.

That's another one!

So: Pinball, Excitebike, and several copies of Gyromite. Also Stack-Up, but that game is uncommon and I think every copy has an adapter inside.

 

[CZroe]

Pro-Tip that's often not thrown around. If you want a better connection and less frustration getting it into a toaster, load your Famicom cartridge and converter onto a Game Genie.

This solves the problem of longer Famicom games being unable to press down, but I’d rather cut the peg that hits in inside of the NES. This peg would normally fit into the Game Pak notch that you push down on after loading the game. That’s why the notch is indented on both sides including the rear/bottom and not just the front/top.

I thought of another question, since you seem to have a lot of the history down.

It seems like the NES cartridges were bigger than necessary given that they were able to fit an entire famicom cartridge with adapter in it. Was that just a happy coincidence they took advantage of, or was the size of the NES carts intentionally made that large to accommodate these early famicom + adapter games?

I imagine because of the addition of the CIC chip the NES carts were always going to be wider due to the extra pins, but they're also a lot taller.

That could have been a consideration, but they also probably realized that they couldn’t make bigger cartridges if they needed more room for extra hardware. The entire cartridge had to fit into the part of the tray that lowers in. They wanted to make sure that it had room to grow, so they made the standard cart oversized. In Japan’s Family Computer game carts were all shapes and sizes to accommodate larger boards with more electronics. There are a few NES games without the adapter that really fill it out the shell, so they were definitely on the right track.

As for the extra pins, there are also extra pins that pass straight through to the EXT port on the bottom for potential expansions that they never made. I don’t think the CLK pin was ever used so it may not have been there on the Famicom (not even connected on the toploader NES-101). IIRC, there are 15 pins you can remove without consequence for official games, which includes the audio pins that actually were used on the Fami (no connection here in the NES).

Not sure if you saw what Ichinisan said later in the thread, but...
Speaking of a “happy coincidence,” drug dealers figured out that the empty space was perfect for smuggling illicit goods... which we discovered first hand: Found $22,600 of heroin inside two NES games earlier this year.