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The earliest games released on the Famicom suffered from significant hardware constraints due to the way the Famicom was designed: limited memory addressing (which meant games had a small maximum ROM size), how the graphics were loaded onscreen, just the native sound processing was available, no saving... To solve this problem, Nintendo came up with two solutions:
* The '''Family Computer Disk System''' (FDS). A Japan-only [[#PeripheralsHardware features and accessories|add-on]] that played games from a semi-custom variant of Mitsumi's Quick Disk format. It offered slightly higher data storage and slightly enhanced sound processing. It also had a microphone never found anywhere else. There were plans to release it in the US; however, since the NES had its launch delayed to late 1985, and the mapper solution obsoleted it, the [[#PeripheralsHardware features and accessories|add-on]] was never exported, and some of its exclusives were ported as regular cartridge releases.
* '''Memory Management Controllers''' (MMC), also known colloquially as '''[[#Mappers|mappers]]'''. They solved every aforementioned problem with bank switching for much more data, onboard FM audio chips, and much more. Most games released after 1986 that really pushed the system to its limits used mappers. A similar solution was used for the Game Boy.
! scope="col"|[[#Hardware_variants|Hardware<br/>Variants]]
! scope="col"|[[#Enhancements|Enhancements]]
! scope="col"|[[#PeripheralsHardware features and accessories|PeripheralsHardware features<br/>and accessories]]
! scope="col"|[[#Mappers|<small>Mappers Support<br/>Level</small>]]
! scope="col"|[[Emulation Accuracy|Accuracy]]
===Comparisons===
*[[Mesen|Mesen]] is a [[Emulation_accuracy|cycle-accurate]] NES emulator. Also, it is very user-friendly and supports lots of [[#Enhancements|enhancements]], [[#PeripheralsHardware features and accessories|peripheralshardware features and accessories]], [[#Hardware_variants|variants]] and [[#Mappers|mappers]] that other emulators are missing. It also supports [[GoodTools|goodmerged]]. Latest versions require [https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet .NET 6]. This is the most compatible NES emulator of the cycle-accurate variety.
*[[puNES]] is another [[Emulation_accuracy|cycle-accurate]] NES/FDS emulator. It is deemed as the second most compatible NES emulator of the cycle-accurate variety.
|-
| rowspan=4 | Misc
| [[Netplay#NES|<abbr title="Should not be confused with Famicom Modem emulation, see #Peripherals Hardware features and accessories section for more information.">Netplay</abbr>]]
| {{Y}}[https://www.mesen.ca/docs/tools.html#netplay *]
| {{Y}}
