Only thing that keeps bugging me is I always heard of the "toaster" as the top loader
The original NES (us) was always more VCR.
I agree.
I think "what the f*ck, who came up with this toaster shit? Have you ever seen a toaster where you put your bread in horizontally sideways and then closed a lid?" Not the case with toasters I know, which are all and throughout top-loaders. I could only imagine the small electric mini ovens might be somewhere called toasters as well.
As you said, the original US/PAL NES is much more like a VCR. Heck, even on real VCRs, the cassette usually gets pulled in, then lowered down on the spools, and the front lid closes. How is that for a comparison.
EDIT:
Adding to the Multi-out discussion:
In France, a SECAM variant of the original NES was sold with an output, which closely resembles the later Nintendo Multi-AV out. It has an RGB transcoder or something inside, which converts the blurry composite video from the PPU into blurry RGB video. So the RGB picture still looks like composhit with all the dotcrawl and colourbleed. A friend of mine accidentally bought such a thing. He couldn't made any use of it since he was lacking the needed cable, and sold it later on to fund a regular NES.
