Up close and personal with the Sharp AN-500R (Twin Famicom)

[seagull]

Hi;

I have some things I need to know about this system, but before I begin I notice there are relatively few high-res photos of the console readily available. I seek to alter this.
My schoolboy photoshop skills and my parents'-money camera put me in a prime position to help document this rare gem.
Note: If you speak Japanese, please help translate some of the labels on this machine. It is strange in that almost everything bar the letters A and B are in Japanese, as opposed to the far more common method of occasionally using English.
High-Resolution bandwidth notice - Click for larger pictures

The system from the front.
http://i.imgur.com/YFtzJ.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/Egm38.jpg)

Top view with the controllers.
http://i.imgur.com/Lh1X0.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/Zf5Mq.jpg)

Close-up of a semitransparent label just below the cartridge port. Can anyone translate?
http://i.imgur.com/EgvcH.jpg

Rear view. On the underside there's a thin black plastic cover shielding the port connections between "A" and "B". I suspect it connects the disk drive to the cartridge port. There's a proper photo of the underside after this one.
http://i.imgur.com/DJMOe.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/IVttu.jpg)

http://i.imgur.com/rIFb8.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/y1tTH.jpg)

If anyone fancies translating that for me, I'd appreciate it. I'm in the UK and I want to know what sort of setup I'll need to use to plug it in and use it here. Please tell me if you know anything.

Here's a picture of the side ports. My console has the red cap covering port A that's often missing in these.
http://i.imgur.com/lJg2N.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/o5S8l.jpg)

Higher-res picture of the side ports, cap removed.
http://i.imgur.com/wnwYr.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/ZRdx6.jpg)

Like it? Let me know.
Please tell me if you know how I can set this up for UK use. Anyone got a link to a place I can buy an adaptor and/or converter from?
Cheers!

[HEX1GON]

I nearly bought one of these sexy machines! Take good care of it :)

[takeshi385]

Very nice!

[Yakumo]

At is different between the black and red unit? I see loads of both when i go game shopping at Manga Soko but never knew if there was a reason for the different colours.

Yakumo

[seagull]

Just cosmetics I believe. I hear the green/blue versions have turbo pads, but this was the one I found so I bought it.
Yakumo, any chance you could take a crack at figuring out what all these stickers and labels say?

[ave]

I think there were just 2 colors available so people could choose. It never seemed special to me, but now that you made me point it out I really recognize how nice this must have been for the time. 1986 and you can choose your own console's color. This would not be common practice all the way until 1998 or so when the different colored N64s came out.

There was a black and a red unit of the first version, the AN-500. They released a model with a revised design later (AN-505), and also two version were available (black/green and red/gray). So all in all you can collect 4 different Twin Famicoms (plus the Titler model)!

[seagull]

Yeah, the AN-505. I hear these referred to as Famiturbos.