Some of you may have read the rant hidden in the Famicom game 'Pachi Com'. [SFW, but the MSX version's rant is slightly less so]

Overall, it seems to be a angered dev blowing some steam, but there's a rather interesting little line in the game that seems to point to the identity of the computers Nintendo possibly used when developing for the Famicom/NES:



Mr. Y.S. then goes on to hawk some sort of custom ROM. That's not what i'm asking about here, though. Our Angry Developer Friend mentions a company that can be reasonably inferred to be Nintendo developing on a computer called a PROS80. The Identity of "I" is a bit less obvious here, sadly...

I've done some googling, and i can't seem to find any details on "I" or the PROS-80 -- do you guys know anything?

Could 'I' be IBM?

My guess is that it was a typo by said angry dev, and that he meant to type TRS-80, a model whose external floppy drives were known to be unreliable and had read/write issues.

TRS-80 never had 3" floppy drives though. It also never was powerful at anything and in fact was discontinued in 1981.

Fair point. It was just a guess anyway.

Given that the NES uses a Ricoh-manufactured derivative of the famous 6502 CPU, it's reasonable to infer that the PROS80 uses a 65XX-architecture CPU...right?

That could be a possibility, but with the suffix -80 it sounds to me like it would use a Zilog Z80 processor.

There was no standard development kit for the NES (nor SNES for that matter, excluding what third parties used themselves). I have a few blank PCBs used by RARE for the SNES, which was one of the first console "dev kits"