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The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge

Posted by timothy on from the complete-with-diagrams dept.

harrymcc writes In 1973, an obscure company which had been making electronic cash registers looked for a new business opportunity. It ended up inventing the game cartridge--an innovation which kickstarted a billion-dollar industry and helped establish videogames as a creative medium. The story has never been told until now, but over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards chronicles the fascinating tale, based on interviews with the engineers responsible for the feat back in the mid-1970s.

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And we are back to them again... by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes a USB Flash Drive is more complex than a Cartridge, being that it is going threw a Universal Bus and is Read/Write (However Zelda use to be able to save data).
    But compared to other forms of storage after cartridges downfall after the Nintendo 64. The USB Flash brings up many of the core Ideas of the Cartridge. A device that has no moving parts that is made to be constantly inserted and removed.

    The Ford Model T is also very quite different than a Ford Mustang. But still they are classified as cars.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. Re:And we are back to them again... by wierd_w · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Clearly, you do not understand the implications of what I said.

    USB storage requires an entire operating system to even access. It requires a kernel OS process, a driver for the specific USB chipset attached to the system, and yet another driver for the filesystem stored on the device. In addition to this, it has to have multitasking capabilities to switch between reading and decoding the data on the device, and executing the read program code.

    In stark contrast, a game cartridge requires no OS at all. The CPU simply jumps to the address location where the cartridge's ROM chip is logically assigned, and the CPU treats it exactly like it was fetching from RAM. The game is the ONLY thing running.

    The better comparison would be "USB is the new data cassette!"

    You can put all kinds of crazy things inside a cartridge that you simply could never put inside a USB stick. Things like additional RAM that runs at full speed, Whole new CPUs, an additional peripheral bus connector-- you name it.

    In theory, a (crazy) person could take an old SNES console, and with a very purpose built cartridge, turn it into a playstation.

    Really, the comparison you are drawing does not really reflect what a cartridge actually is.