Tito Restores Sharp’s Twin Famicom, the Licensed Console That Nintendo Never Sold Itself

Nintendo almost never hands another company the keys to its hardware. In July 1986 Sharp walked out of that arrangement with a Japan-only console that stuffed a Family Computer and a Family Computer Disk System into one box and charged ¥32,000 for the privilege, more than buying both Nintendo units separately. Sharp already had a working relationship with Nintendo through Game & Watch production and a Famicom built into a television, and Sharp even held an older “Famicon” trademark from a convection oven. That history, plus a license, produced the Twin Famicom: a 60-pin cartridge slot, a disk-card slot with a yellow eject button, and a switch under the cartridge bay that locked one format while the other ran.

Sharp combined both formats on a single power source, plugged in composite video and mono audio via RCA connectors, and included a handy external RF modulator for older sets. Hardwired controllers remain attached to the unit, player two retains the microphone Nintendo employed in a few titles, and the back of the casing features a few small storage wells to keep the paddles from roaming all over the place.

There is an expansion slot on the side that can support extras such as the Beam Gun or a second Famicom that shares the disk drive via the original FDS RAM converter, which is a valuable feature. Early AN-500 units came in either red with black trim or black with red trim, although this altered later on. The AN-505 was released in 1987, and it straightened out some of the case lines, adding a power lamp to the majority of them, shortened the controller wires, and installed several turbo switches on the paddles. Later shells came in either black with green trim or red with beige accent.

Four official colors never hid the same job. The Ricoh 2A03 is still going strong at 1.79 MHz. Cartridge mode is simple, with 2 KB of work RAM and 2 KB of video RAM. Disk mode unlocks a whopping 32 KB in addition to the Disk System’s 8 KB requirements. The resolution remains the same at 256 by 240. Disk cards could be overwritten at kiosks in Japan, keeping the program cheaper than a brand new cartridge for a while, but the drive included all sorts of extras such as belts, a read head, and alignment that cartridges never requested.

Sales figures appear to have been about a million units before Nintendo discontinued Disk System support due to widespread copying. However, convenience has a cost, and it may still be found on workbenches today. Streamer Carcinigen paid around $100 for a black Twin Famicom and delivered it to Tito of Macho Nacho Productions, knowing the disk side was completely dead but the cartridge games still worked. A Zelda disk would light up the activity LED, spin around with the incorrect noise, and remain on the loading screen. The video on that side began to look washed out before it settled in correctly, a classic indicator of worn-out electrolytic capacitors after nearly forty years, and the controller cables had developed a permanent kink.