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The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge
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.
[Insert joke containing sexual innuendo about blowing into NES cartridge here] Seriously, though, without cartridges we would have been using casettes or vinyl. Imagine Playing FF7 on 30 vinyl records. Has anyone actually successfully used vinyl to store data? I wonder how many MB one record could hold!
The internet has too many stories to tell, few to none its own.
USB Flash Drives are Cartridges reborn.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
that's all, on a card-edge bus connector. God already invented it before, just didn't patent it.
What else would you possibly store on vinyl?
Superior analog video, of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
MOS Technology did a big business in manufacturing ROMs for Atari's cartridges (both the 2600 and 400/800 /XE line). They also made the 6502 variants used in the 2600 and 400/800/XE and in Atari's main competitors (Apple and Commodore).
Eventually MOS was purchased by Commodore and stopped making ROMs but cranked out the 6502s and SID chips.
For some reason they never got around to making a followup to the 6502 and let the next generation business go to Motorola. Greed does that.
Another fun fact: The original VCS games were programmed on a PDP-11 using a cross-assembler (!) and soon enough Atari upgraded to a VAX. When a game was finished they sent program tape to MOS who made the metal mask. The ROMs were pre-processed up to the metal deposition step. Then the final metal pattern was defined by whatever program was being written to ROM. This is one reason how MOS made them so cheaply: they mass produced ROM blanks and then programmed them with a single mask. I talked with an Atari old-timer about the process a couple of years ago. Great stories.
I worked with lots of embedded systems in the '80's that stored their program on banks of UV-EPROM chips that we'd have to upgrade using a a chip-puller (screwdriver) and a chip eraser and burner.
The sockets would eventually fail, requiring repair/replacement of the entire CPU board (about a square foot in size).
When we saw our first game system with replaceable ROM cartridges, there was much forehead slapping, since we were already using board-edge connectors (on a bus very similar to the S-100).
No one would have done that, because FF7 came on CD.
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.
That was true until roughly the Nintendo DS. It uses a seek and read protocol, similar to parallel ATA or SD, to read 512-byte blocks of game data from the Game Card. Even the N64 and GBA used a seek and read protocol, but the console's memory controller abstracted it away from the CPU with wait states.
In theory, a (crazy) person could take an old SNES console, and with a very purpose built cartridge, turn it into a playstation.
I don't see how. There isn't enough bandwidth over the Super NES cartridge bus to refill video memory every frame. That's part of why the agreement between Nintendo and Sony to make the Super NES CD peripheral broke down, and Sony took what it had and revamped it into the original PlayStation. There's the MSU1 coprocessor designed for streaming video, but video from that isn't exactly full-motion.
As a kid my family had a Channel F and a boatload of cartridges for it -- plus 2 built-in games! The last one I remember getting was "Galactic Space Wars", and then the Atari 2600 showed up thus relegating the Channel F to the closet.
The graphics weren't great, and the games were something that a beginner could code up on an Atari 800 of the same era in BASIC. But they were fun enough. The Channel F did have a really unusual controller: the joystick could be moved about in a normal axis (up,down,left,right,diagonals) but also twisted, pulled up, or pushed down. The damned things broke a lot and were hard-wired into the console itself.
Get off my lawn.
Dang, I was hoping for an untold story.
We figured out the Atari cartridge was nothing more than a popular PROM (2716?) with one of the control signals reversed. We made our own cartridges that used an EEPROM, then used our EEPROM burner to read cartridges and store the contents on a floppy. We'd then burn EEPROMs of the games we wanted, and pop them into the ZIF socket on our home made cartridges.
These "untold stories" are always great. It's not like you could go pick up any book on video games - like, say, Buckwalter's "Video Games" - and read that the Channel F was the "first programmable video game," in particular a "programmable game with plug-in cartridges."
But the author makes a stronger claim: that the Channel F marks the "invention of the game cartridge." Is that actually true? A lot there depends on how you understand "cartridge." Anyone who has seen a Magnavox Odyssey from 1972 will readily note that it has something suspiciously similar to a game cartridge slot on it. From the Wiki: "The Odyssey uses a type of removable printed circuit board, called a game card, that inserts into a slot similar to a ROM cartridge slot." There were twelve such game cards for the original Odyssey, four years before the Channel F.
While the story of the Channel F is interesting and important historically, it is a bit of a stretch to suggest that its inventors came up with the idea of game cartridges entirely. There are crucial distinctions between the contents and operations of Odyssey's game cards and those of the Channel F - but the way this article is written completely ignores that the fact that Odyssey's usage of game cards obviously inspired the Channel F's cartridges. In fact, it tries to explain this away by saying the Odyssey "had been built primarily to play a game of video ping-pong, but could be expanded by using a series of jumper cards." Sure... so, if you take out the ping-pong card and put in another card to play a different game you are merely "expanding" the Odyssey, and those cards aren't game cards or cartridges, they are "jumper cards." To make the case that this Channel F usage invented the concept of game cartridges would require a lot more 'splaining than this article provides.
Then the articles goes on to say that, after cheap Intel microrocessors became available, "It was in that climate that Wallace Kirschner realized that considerably more sophisticated video games could be generated using software running on a microcomputer with a bitmapped display rather than using dedicated hardware." But the Channel F didn't come out until the end of 1976, and by the beginning of 1976... you could buy a PC. You know, like an Altair. You could program it in TinyBASIC or even buy your software from Bill Gates's new-fangled Micro-Soft company. There were whole software companies making games. The way this article tells it, the only other technology that existed in the world then was closed-architecture Atari game systems (again, you could buy those in 1975). At the end of 1976, the Apple I was already out. The release of the Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET were now just months away. The idea that you could play games on a microcomputer was not then a unique revelation.
Yes, the Channel F was important, and its cartridges made the Channel F the first programmable game console. No need to paint it as way more innovative than it was. The good people at Magnavox (no, not Baer personally) invented the idea that you could plug a card into your game console and it would change which game you are playing.
You'd put the A/V out on the cartridge containing the PlayStation
At that point, you're just using the Super NES as a power supply and controller reader.
Maybe you could even go all 32X
Better yet, go all Saturn, dropping the old hardware entirely because an S-Video output and SPI inputs are probably cheaper than all that circuitry to interface with the legacy console. That's what led Sony to success with PlayStation: it skipped the 32X stage.
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