Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

You can talk about almost anything that you want to on this board.

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
DRW
Posts: 2225
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 2:59 pm

Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by DRW »

Is there any place on the internet where I can find pdf scans of Famicom games?

In the moment, I'm looking specifically for the manuals of the following games:
"Cross Fire"
"Nuts & Milk"
"F-1 Race"
My game "City Trouble":
Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/Eee0yurkIW4
Download (ROM, manual, artworks): http://www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
User avatar
rainwarrior
Posts: 8734
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:03 pm
Location: Canada
Contact:

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by rainwarrior »

replacementdocs.com sometimes has them.

Of those 3 you asked, it at least has F1 Race: http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.7725
User avatar
koitsu
Posts: 4201
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:28 pm
Location: A world gone mad

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by koitsu »

These got released today by Nintendo themselves. Sadly, no scans of the games you want, but I wanted to mention it since it's pretty close to what you're looking for:

NES: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/en/index.html
Famicom: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/ja/index.html

For the NES: two (2) kinds: Electronic Manuals -- which look like someone who just took a Shitty Web Design 101 101 class designed them, i.e. awful (okay, they mimic "Wii style" of things) -- and the Printed Manuals (cleaned up scans of the originals).

For the Famicom: look like cleaned up scans of the originals. I only have a manuals for a couple FDS games, so those would be what I'd have to compare them to.
User avatar
DRW
Posts: 2225
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 2:59 pm

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by DRW »

Thanks for both links.

Looks like the Nintendo link is about the manuals for the games of that new mini NES. That's why they are so few.

If anybody knows of another place where to get "Nuts & Milk" and "Cross Fire", this would be great.
My game "City Trouble":
Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/Eee0yurkIW4
Download (ROM, manual, artworks): http://www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
User avatar
koitsu
Posts: 4201
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:28 pm
Location: A world gone mad

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by koitsu »

Best I can find right now for Nuts & Milk are just "generic scans of the manual", not in PDF format: http://ameblo.jp/neo-izayoi-onepiece/en ... 15600.html

CrossFire may be a bigger problem.

The way I find this stuff, BTW -- just passing on the general search approach -- for Famicom games, find out what the actual game title is in Japanese. Example: Nuts & Milk is ナッツ&ミルク. Then go to Google and throw that in there, then over in the upper right, pick the gear/tools menu and pick Advanced Search. Scroll down to Region, and pick Japan. Then navigate to the Images tab (for Google Images), and start going through stuff. Eventually you'll find things that look like Famicom manuals (I shouldn't need to explain what these look like, haha), or equally as good (as far as leads go), pictures of the box.

The situation becomes a little more complicated with games that have names in English or Romaji (CrossFire is a good example -- especially because the game title reads "CrossFire" so it could be "Cross Fire" or one word -- so you get to look for both, whee). The trick here is to try and find a web page in Japanese that actually has either has the game name in katakana (representing English) -- which can also vary based on what the person thought was the best equivalent (IMO, it varied more wildly in the 80s than now, so there's that...) -- or in a Japanese character set but with full-width English letters (ex. CROSSFIRE). This can be troublesome (there's also a half-width set), so adding an additional term like ファミコン (Famicom) to the query can help. Other times (hold on to your hat), the Japanese choose to just write "FC" or FC (great, thanks!). You get to try all the different character set combos. And to make things even MORE fun, sometimes the string encodings are in JIS or EUC rather than UTF-8 (very common on Geocities Japan pages -- tons of Famicom stuff there), so that's just adding further insult to injury.

So, for CrossFire, Googling CROSSFIRE ファミコン lead me to this page: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/hzk/kommander/rvcfire.html -- which says the name of the game, despite having an English title screen, is クロスファイヤー (that's CrossFire in katakana -- so okay, that makes it a little easier). クロスファイヤー ファミコン (CrossFire Famicom) and Images gets me a ton of box and cart pictures... but most of them are auction sites. I went through several pages, and after about the first 3 you stop finding relevant results. So, back to the start, trying different character sets, using "CrossFire", etc... The combinations are many. I haven't had good luck so far -- and to be honest, I've never heard of this title until now. So it may be more obscure, thus even less likely that someone has scans of the manual.

I know this process sounds convoluted -- anyone with knowledge of Japanese and/or a IME will be like "are you serious? This is what you do?" (yes, it is -- or I ask others, as I'm surrounded by more people that know Japanese than I know what to do with. Irony: I'm the guy that learned Chinese and Korean :P) -- but it's what I've used for years with pretty good success.

I will ask a couple of my friends who are fluent in Japanese and Famicom enthusiasts to dig around too. Some folks here on the forum (there are several who are Japanese-fluent or live in Japan) might be able to help too.
User avatar
Banshaku
Posts: 2417
Joined: Tue Jun 24, 2008 8:38 pm
Location: Japan
Contact:

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by Banshaku »

What do you want to find in the manual for crossfire? I have the original somewhere and it may have the manual but I bought it a long time ago so I don't remember in details. I remember I had the box but not 100% for the manual.
User avatar
DRW
Posts: 2225
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 2:59 pm

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by DRW »

koitsu wrote:Best I can find right now for Nuts & Milk are just "generic scans of the manual", not in PDF format: http://ameblo.jp/neo-izayoi-onepiece/en ... 15600.html
Thanks for finding it and for the general hints.

What grinds my gears about this link again: Why did THIS IDOT leave out pages 2 and 3? He scanned page 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, so it's not like this was just a sample of 2-3 pages. He scanned the majority of them, but not all. Dammit, the world is full of stupid morons.
Banshaku wrote:What do you want to find in the manual for crossfire?
Just general curiosity if anything interesting is written there. Especially controls (to make sure there's nothing that I'm missing, like in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" where I played the whole game without the manual and only realized later that you can press Select to transform into character types that can do special attacks) and the story (to show it to somebody who knows a bit Japanese to see if there's a reason why the main character fights in all these countries and what the final town Shatol is supposed to be).
My game "City Trouble":
Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/Eee0yurkIW4
Download (ROM, manual, artworks): http://www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
User avatar
Banshaku
Posts: 2417
Joined: Tue Jun 24, 2008 8:38 pm
Location: Japan
Contact:

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by Banshaku »

Found CrossFire by luck and the manual was inside. Doesn't have a scanner available right now so I took some screeshot with my phone and made a pdf of the result. Not great but better than nothing.

The pages about controls would be when you don't have a gun:
CrossFire4.JPG
and when you have one:
CrossFire5.JPG
Have fun.

P.S. If this cause an issue with nesdev to share a manual directly then I will just remove it.
Attachments
CrossFire.pdf
(773.24 KiB) Downloaded 270 times
Great Hierophant
Posts: 780
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2004 9:35 pm

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by Great Hierophant »

http://www.videogameden.com/ has a good number of manuals attached to its Famicom and Famicom Disk System reviews.
User avatar
DRW
Posts: 2225
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 2:59 pm

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by DRW »

Thanks a lot to both of you for the scans and for the link.

By the way, making a PDF out of the pictures wouldn't have been necessary. These manuals are not for some file list of mine, I simply want to have alook at it and ask someone who knows the language whether anything interesting is in it. So, in the end, I don't care about the format.
My game "City Trouble":
Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/Eee0yurkIW4
Download (ROM, manual, artworks): http://www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
User avatar
Banshaku
Posts: 2417
Joined: Tue Jun 24, 2008 8:38 pm
Location: Japan
Contact:

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by Banshaku »

I just converted to a pdf since sometime it can be used easily in most phone with the book reader or other app. I didn't format the pdf though, just printed the selected picture to a file. I still have the pictures if necessary.

The last page explain something about game play too but I didn't read in detail yet. The japanese is not that complicated so it should be easy to translate.
Pokun
Posts: 2681
Joined: Tue May 28, 2013 5:49 am
Location: Hokkaido, Japan

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by Pokun »

koitsu wrote:These got released today by Nintendo themselves. Sadly, no scans of the games you want, but I wanted to mention it since it's pretty close to what you're looking for:

NES: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/en/index.html
Famicom: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/ja/index.html

For the NES: two (2) kinds: Electronic Manuals -- which look like someone who just took a Shitty Web Design 101 101 class designed them, i.e. awful (okay, they mimic "Wii style" of things) -- and the Printed Manuals (cleaned up scans of the originals).

For the Famicom: look like cleaned up scans of the originals. I only have a manuals for a couple FDS games, so those would be what I'd have to compare them to.
Thanks for that link! Yeah looks like scans, I haven't compared them to my original manuals but can at least see that Excitebike manual still mentions that you can save with a Family BASIC keyboard (which of course doesn't work on the Famicom Classic Mini) while the English version still says that saving and loading is programmed in for a possible future expansion. The FDS manuals still have all the FDS related information. But all the manuals comes with a note that say that they may have minimal edits in order to apply more for the Classic Mini.
User avatar
rainwarrior
Posts: 8734
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:03 pm
Location: Canada
Contact:

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by rainwarrior »

Ran across this site today: No scans, but seems to have detailed transcriptions of many Japanese manuals. The missing art and screenshot photos seem to be painstakingly replaced with emulated screenshot crops.
Pokun
Posts: 2681
Joined: Tue May 28, 2013 5:49 am
Location: Hokkaido, Japan

Re: Where to find pdf scans of Famicom games?

Post by Pokun »

Yeah looks like they basically remade the manuals into HTML documents. Although they won't replace scanned manuals I guess they are nice for finding information. Plus since it's typed out, it's easy to copy paste or to process with Babelfish-style translators.
Post Reply