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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 low maximum ROM size), how the graphics are loaded onscreen, just the native sound processing is available, no saving... To solve this problem, Nintendo came up with two solutions:
* The '''Family Computer Disk System''' (FDS), a Japan-only add-on which played games from a special proprietary magnetic disk semi-custom variant of Mitsumi's Quick Disk format strongly reminiscent of floppy disks of the time. 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 itself had its launch delayed to late 1985, and the mapper solution obsoleted it, the 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'''. They solved every single problem above 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.
