GameCube Coders Caught Out By Gigantic Memory Card

Thanks to GamerFeed for its news story discussing compatibility problems with some GameCube titles and the new Nintendo Memory Card 1019. The news story explains: "The [official Nintendo-produced] card has 17 times the memory capacity of the original Memory Card 59", and describes issues, some due to the card's four-digit block size, with a number of more minor third-party games, including Sonic Adventure 2 Battle ("If there are more than 999 free blocks on the Memory Card 1019, the game cannot display the amount of free blocks"), WTA Tour Tennis ("The game does not recognize the Memory Card 1019 properly, and should not be used"), and, disastrously problematic for many memory cards, Mary-Kate And Ashley: Sweet 16 ("Graphics sometimes will not display properly if a file is loaded and restarted after quitting the game.")

Comments

Re:Nintendo Tech Requirements Checklist

[shadowcabbit]

That's the thing-- from what I can gather/infer/guess there was never a capacity cap to begin with. Remember, Nintendo promoted a SD Card adapter when the Cube was first announced; they had to be ready for the possibility that an SD card would eventually be larger than the largest standard memory card they could produce, and as a result they would have made sure games were ready for this, probably by providing standardized memory card libraries for their developers. With the exception of SA2, most of the games listed were by off-brand developers who would be more likely to tweak the memory card libraries or ignore them completely in favor of their own versions, not realizing that Nintendo's code was ready for whatever would be announced. (I suspect that Sega used an older version of the library or was using a "homebrew" one for SA2 as it was one of the first Sega titles for the Cube. IIRC, when I had SA2 it for whatever reason did not like the off-brand 2x size card I had, but that was a good ten months ago or so.) As for why NOA missed the memory card thing, I imagine it was because they themselves didn't have such a large memory card, either in prototype form or otherwise.

Huh?!?

[wheresdrew]

"Heck the PS1 games I have freak out that the PS1 memory card is not in slot 1 (there was only 1 slot on the PS1) and will refuse to boot unless you move the card."

Where on earth did you see a PS1 that only had one memory card slot? Every model of the Playstation, from the SCPH-1000 (original model with AV connectors on the back) to the PSOne, has had two memory card slots. There's one above each controller port.

Now, there are certain games that insist on the card being in slot 1, but that's a coding issue not a hardware issue.