The AVS is incredible. I love this thing so much and it's allowed me to finally do something I've wanted to do my entire life. 

Load a saved Excitebike track using my childhood cartridge. 

As a kid, I'd sit there after having worked on a track for I don't even know how long, and nothing would load. As an adult I discovered that it had to do with a tape player interface that never made it to the US. Now, 20 years later, I've finally loaded an Excitebike track using the very same cartridge that caused me frustration before. It's cathartic to say the least.

It's also fascinating from a technical standpoint. There was no doubt that American cartridges could work with a tape player, but I don't think I've ever seen an example of it online anywhere so I uploaded a video of it to show that yes, this works. 





The AVS is perfect for this kind of thing due to it's inclusion of the Famicom expansion port, which is neccessary to plug in the Family BASIC Keyboard in, which in turn is needed to plug in the Tape Player. It makes the entire thing a relatively viable thing to do as well, if you're willing to deal with some clutter on your entertainment stand and tape loading speeds. 

It does look rather complicated to get an excitebike stage to load, but I'm not very nostalgic for that particular game but I've been eyeballing the AVS for a few months but I have to wait until I start work again.

Holy cow. Will it work with Mach Rider and Wrecking Crew?

I thought about using the expansion port for the two player mode in Arkanoid II where you need two Fami Vauses (Vausii?) to work. I highly recommend it, especially since the firmware issues are largely sorted out. There's some neat things you can do with one.

 

The AVS has never let me down once. It's mindblowing just how capable it is. Highly recommended. Also for Excitebike specifically this method is archaic and uneccessary anyway. VS. Excitebike for the Famcom Disk System is a far better game and allows you to save your tracks directly to Disk without messing around with tapes.

I didn't notice initially but it looks like the Tape Data also saves the fastest track time.

And yeah, it works with all three US released Programmable Series games.

Sweet. Not that I'm rushing out to get a Fami keyboard and tape player, but still nice to know you can get the old tech to work.  

 

You're better off just getting Vs. ExciteBike.    

- Two Player mode 

- Background Music  

- Track editor is a bit more sophisticated I believe.  

Cheapest way to play it would be with the Ram Adapter and FDSStick or just an Everdrive. 
 

Unless you wanna program in BASIC it's probably not a good investment. Haha. this was just an added perk.


Actually, the only problem iI've ever had with the AVS is with Family BASIC. It ocassionally sent me back to the AVS menu when I tried to run a large program with syntax errors in in it. I needed to use a real Famicom to debug the program before using the AVS again. I can't reproduce it immediately because I taped over the program after fixing the issue.

I only had the problem once with that one program. It's never happened again since.

Wow, I had no idea about this relationship between "nintender tapes" and actual cassette tapes...that's pretty crazy!

This was awesome. I didn't know anything like this existed, so thank you for making a video showcasing it!

Wow! Had no idea that this was a thing. Very cool.