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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.")
OK, at first glance of the list of incompatible games, the only one that even strikes me as worth playing is Sonic 2, and that's just a minor glitch (copy/move all your other game files to the 1019 and you'll have no problem, especially if you have an Animal Crossing game going). Darkened Skye was just plain terrible (played it on PC for about five minutes before realizing it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for Skittles candy, I kid you not), and I'll spare my criticism of the MK&A game simply because it's been done to death.
It looks to me that Nintendo did something very very smart when they initially set up the design of the memory card system, ie allowing it to be any arbitrary size (as opposed to the old PS1 cards which were 15 blocks, take it or leave it), and these are just poorly-coded games (SA2 included, though it pains me to admit). It's not that big of a deal in the long run, but of note if you happen to have the games mentioned.
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Or good coding by making things as small and compact as possible to fit more on the disk?
Personally if this had been 20 years ago, I could understnad where the problem came from..... but it being 2004 and these DVD holding a good chunk of space that the code for bigger mem cards would hardly be more than a few lines, if at that, I highly doubt those games use, I am banking toward the bad coding idea.
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I've not worked on GameCube, but all the console manufacturers have huge checklists covering memory card use, naming conventions, screen use, demo lengths and all kinds of miscellaneous details. All games must meet these requirements before they are approved for publishing. It sounds like Nintendo hadn't specified an upper limit or that capacity could increase in the future, and definitely weren't checking titles for behavior with larger capacity memory cards.
Console hardware is generally predictable, so what works today will work tomorrow. If this large memory card was part of Nintendo's road plan from the beginning, it should have been clearly documented and tested from day 1, even if the consumer hardware is not yet available. If the documentation states that the largest capacity was memory card 251 and developers work to those specs, then this is more Nintendo's fault. If the only limit on larger capacity cards was cost, then Nintendo should be stating the maximum capacity handled by the hardware and testing to that limit instead.
An ATI video card and a PPC processer is considered proprietary? If anything Sony's setup is more proprietary then the GC.
By the way, why would Nintendo need to quit makine consoles and concentrate on the portable market when they already dominate it.
This is Nintendo's fault. They should have tested this new card with a number of games, old and new BEFORE they released it to the marketplace. Nintendo should be working on either a workaround to trick games into seeing a smaller card or a full solution that allows it to be seamless to all games.
Come on, LOOK at the list! It's not like those games are primary candidates for testing new hardware. I mean, if they were to test it with every game on the system they'd have a few hundreds to go through. Very likely they simply took their own games or maybe the top sellers on the system (probably 90% their own games...) and tested the cards against them, who can blame them for forgetting a few mediocre-to-extremely-bad third-party games that were ported from other systems, anyway?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"I honestly do not know anyone that owns a gamecube. Most people I know have PS2 systems or nothing at all."
This is called the Pauline Kael syndrome. "Nobody I know voted for Nixon, so how could McGovern have lost?"
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They could have the second slot as a fallback, i.e. if there's no save on the first card, try the second. That way you could have two cards and the stuff about handling what goes where is absolutely transparent.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.