Sunday, April 29, 2018

The Nameless NES to Famicom Cartridge Adapter

For NES owners who want to play Famicom games on their console the internet has documented numerous amounts of adapters that will allow you to do just that. But what about the Famicom, or as we prefer Famiclone, owner who wants to play an NES game on their Famicom/clone? Don't fret, there is an adapter that allows you to play the bountiful array of NES games on your 60 pin console!

The Nameless 72 to 60 pin adapter, front (top) and back (bottom).
In most parts of the world NES games are fairly easy to come by, and in some parts of the world Famiclones are just as prevalent, if not more so. It's in the parts of the world where these two situations meet that Famiclone owners needed a way to play the 72 pin cartridges on their Famiclones. That was when Nameless Company stepped in and created this fine adapter.

Since the adapter is essentially the same dimensions as a Famicom cartridge, except it has a 72 pin connector at the top, it works in much the same way. You simply plug the adapter into your Famicom or Famiclone, line up your NES cartridge's angled edges (NES label facing the back of the console), and plug that into the adapter. Voila! You're ready to play NES games on your Famicom or clone console.
The quality of the adapter seems very sturdy overall. With a cheap, nameless adapter one could assume you may run into situations of accidentally bumping the console and getting a vomit of pixels and colors upon the screen. I can't say with complete confidence as I've never given it a thorough testing but I have used this in a handheld Famiclone, which included a lot of movement, and never experienced any adverse effects, glitches or disturbances to gameplay.

Since I don't want to break the adapter open and see the inner workings I've never seen what's inside. Considering this is a bit of a Schrodinger's cat situation, I'm just going to assume this is a straight pass-through device that connects all the necessary pins down from the 72 to 60 and onto the system. As such I've never had any incompatibility issues.

Using the Nameless adapter to check the
functionality of a Super Joy 3 that doesn't have a housing.

Sadly there isn't much information I can offer in the way of how to find one of these. At the time I bought mine, about 4 years ago, they were readily available on foreign ebay sites such as MercadoLibre. Currently I can not find any, but that's not to say they won't make a comeback in the future at some point.

I find this little adapter to be very useful for my needs. If I want to play a Famiclone and later on I want to play an NES game, it's far easier for me to just pop this adapter in and put the NES game on top of it and play. No need to fidget with my NES for a few minutes before it decides to work. I'm quite happy with this little adapter, even though the company who made it clearly wasn't, because they didn't even bother to name the poor thing.

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