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Will Game Cartridges Make a Comeback?
sk8pmp writes "With the cost of solid state memory going down, will we see the return of the game cartridge? Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? This editorial explores the beginnings of the cartridge vs. disc battle of the '90s and theorizes a second one in the future. 'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"? You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge. The nostalgia is killing me!'"
Blowing into a USB port just isn't the same.
I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD. And there are even still new NES games coming out, like Sivak's Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril and ProgAce's Bio Force Ape vs. Dur Butter.
No, no, no, the ever-popular UMDs!
Downloadable content is the future, not bits permanently etched into chips or optical disks.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...for solid-state media, for my tastes. It has connotations of low capacities and clunky housings.
But it does bring up a good question - what's the next media format? Is Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD the last family of media formats (since they can all be read by BD devices) before we go to all-online distribution? I suspect that we're done with cheap universal physical media formats in the near future.
Music stores are pretty much on their last legs, as much as it pains me to admit that. When physical game software dries up (PC or console) It has the added supposed-benefit (to the software industry) of eliminating the second-hand software market, which is something the industry has been trying to quash for what, 20 years?
The medium switched to disks because they were cheaper to make, held more information, and worked. If cartridges take on these qualities, then there would be no reason to avoid them.
What is this NES you speak of?
The only way to clean your Atari 2600 cartridges is to blow in them. Wiping is for butts.
Many people accidentally leave their doors unlocked, garage doors open, etc. In fact, you can easily open anyone's garage at any time. Or break their large bay windows.
But you don't see people being robbed all the time due to these facts.
Locked doors are little more than security theater for our own minds. If someone *really* wants to rob you, they will.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Practical experience reigns of theoretical in this case. As 25-35 year old can tell you, you could pull and reseat NES cartridges till the cows came home and they wouldn't work. A blow from the side though (and usually a 2nd cartridge wedged into the unit to hold the loaded one against the contacts tighter) would get it going in a jiffy.
Seems the NES was the only system with this problem though (no doubt due to their goofy front-load spring-loaded design). SNES, Genesis, N64, etc worked every time you tossed a cartridge in.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Doesn't necessarily have to be. Discs are dirt cheap, but solid state is getting cheaper too. The original reason CD's took over was because they held a lot more than solid state and they were a LOT cheaper. Cartridges were faster and more durable, but that wasn't enough.
Today, solid state still has faster and more durable, and they've actually exceeded plastic disks in capacity. About all that's left is raw cost, but the difference is shrinking. If it gets small enough, it's not unrealistic to expect that the optical disc could fall out of favor.
That said, the disadvantage that BOTH of them have (namely being a physical item requiring shipment) will IMHO cause both to fail compared to downloaded content.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Pressing a BluRay disc costs less than 3$ per disc (price for just 1000). Such a disc can hold 25 to 50 GB. A DVD is around 1$ and holds 5 to 9 GB.
A 16GB USB key is at 30$ and 8GB is 15$ on Amazon. I know this is rewritable but a ROM version won't cut its cost by 90%.
So we won't see SSD replacing discs on data heavy console games anytime soon.
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People who try to put them into their film projectors? ;)
What is this NES you speak of?
The only way to clean your Atari 2600 cartridges is to blow in them. Wiping is for butts.
Your mom likes blowing
Bow-ties are cool.
Blowing is a horribly inefficient way to clean cartridges.
That's why you suck.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
true story:
>
Once upon a time when I was 14, I wanted to clean the connectors on my NES cartridges... reading the NES instruction booklet, and the booklets of the individual games, I learned that I shouldn't use water or alcohol to clean with, because these solvents may damage the circuit board. So instead of a $.99 bottle of alcohol, I paid $10 for a tiny bottle of cleaning solution with a crappy applicator, because it had the NINTENDO seal of approval. Ingredients contained in the cleaning solution: alcohol mixed with water. FUCK YOU NINTENDO.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
We had a rule, though...you could pick Oddjob if you wanted, but whatever your kill count was at the end of the round, we got to punch you that many times.
We had two rules when playing GoldenEye. 1) Quit your bitchin. 2) Don't break the controller. Everything else was fair game.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
It really is important to clean with 99.999% pure 2-propanol and deionized water mixture to clean off orange Dorito stuff and grape jelly from the pristine edge connector :)
I believe this is partially due to the variability of PC hardware. You can't just program the game to load on the fly due to the fact that you can't target a certain known disc speed. The person's hard drive could be nearly full (hence a commensurate reduction in seek time due to fragmentation) or what not.
What I see happening eventually, is that every console will come with a high speed 32GB SSD as a loading cache. What will happen is that at the beginning of the game there will be a long load, and then in the background the game will continue to load the entirety of the pertinent data into the SSD while the game is playing. Video cut scenes and such will remain on the disc.
This would eliminate the vast majority of load times, because as you're wandering into a new zone, the console can dynamically load the pertinent information from the SSD to the memory as you're walking there. A 10 second load time from a bluray disc (which I believe is roughly 20MB/s from an optical disc, to a dynamically cached system where pertinent data is just copied on the fly. Modern SSD's can saturate modern consoles memory banks in about 2 seconds flat. Even the 'value' 32GB SSDs run about 190MB/s. By guaranteeing a minimum baseload speed (A freakishly fast one at that) load times could permanently be eliminated as the player could never travel through the game world fast enough to outstrip the loading speed of the SSD.
And since the drive would likely be emptied and trimmed every time the game was done, drive performance would remain consistent. The lack of a swapfile would mean that the IO load on the disc would be low, meaning it would probably outlive most components on the console.
Additionally, they could sell a separate 'quick load' accessory which would slide into an external slot, and be another 32GB SSD which when put in there would allow maybe 10-15 games have the initial data for start up be present on the disc, with the primary caching SSD still there. This would allow initial game data to be read off the quick load disc and while you would still need to have the game disc inserted in the drive, would all but eliminate all semblance of long loads from the beginning of the game to the end of the game.
To sum up, all modern games have long load times because they either have a fixed (but slow) loading media for loading on the fly, or a medium speed (but of inconsistent space/speed) media, where you have to assume the lowest common denominator. Having a quick SSD, solely dedicated to caching the content for one game at a time, would give you a blistering fast minimum baseline from which you could design your game from the ground up to take advantage of, and with modern games saturating RAM would only take about 2-3 seconds, meaning that it's unlikely that the gamer would ever interact with the game in a manner that would outstrip the SSD's ability to load this.
Additionally, this would allow game developers to create more rich, vibrant worlds as less of the level would have to be in memory at a time to ensure loading times remain reasonable, allowing higher LOD within the game world being rendered at the moment, and the guarantee that when the player moves the SSD will be able to keep up the pace. Additionally, it would free up more memory by allowing certain things (like textures of the landscape being rolled in) to be streamed from the SSD instead of cached in RAM, as well as pretty much all audio samples, giving more memory available for game objects being immediately interacted with.
A small, 32GB 200MB/s read SSD would likely give the developers a LARGE amount of leeway in ensuring that loads NEVER have to happen, save a small bit at the beginning of the game, while freeing up a lot of memory (brought in by the fast pace of streaming from the SSD, and quick access times, broadening the scope of what can be streamed) All while ensuring that games don't need to be packaged with 30GB of ROM, thus saving the costs of the ROM packaging, and probably paying for the SSD in 3-4 games versus the cost of ROM.