lord.jeff said:
CrystalShadow said:
Durananrananrananran said:
I'd like to see games go back to cartridges. Seriously. With 16 GB flash cards costing around £15 now, it could be more expensive, yes, but just think of how beautiful the minimal loading times would be.
I know how you feel, but £15 is a fortune.
Cartridges were abandoned for 2 reasons: Small capacity. (now not such a huge issue), and incredibly expensive compared to the alternative.
If they were mass-produced ROM flash memory, I suspect the price could be a bit lower than £15, but contrast this to the cost of mass-producing a DVD/Blu-ray disk, which is about £0.10 a disk, and you can see where the reluctance comes from.
For cartridge games, the cost of the cartridge was typically $20-30 per cartridge for games being sold at about $60
That's 30-50% of the cost of the game.
By contrast, when they shifted to CD's, the cost of a CD was about $0.10-0.20 which isn't even 1/100th the cost of the game.
Considering they didn't change the prices, you can see where that led...
Still, you are right though. It would be great to go back to near zero loading times.
Money would be saved on the pirating protection thou, and the flash drives and SD cards are cheaper to produce then the old cartridges were, overall the cartridges would cost more but not nearly to the extent your stating.
If the Nintendo DS is any indication, I wouldn't put too much faith in cartridges being all that useful for piracy protection.
Although... To be fair, all the various ways of pirating DS games exploit other features of the handheld.
On the original DS, the GBA slot was used to allow games stored on SD cards to be played.
The DSi removed the GBA vulnerability, but made it redundant by including an actual SD card reader.
Flash memory is just a storage medium, so yes it'd probably be quite a bit cheaper. But how much cheaper isn't so clear. Comparing the cost of a thumb drive, memory cards, SSD hard drives, and DVD's, it's quite obvious the relative cost is huge. For a given capacity, flash memory seems to sell at about 100 times the cost. That's not trivial.
Cartridges obviously are even more expensive than that, although they had some amusing features due to how the interface was designed. (SDIO ports suggests to some extent flash memory readers can share some of these abilities.)
Over time, I've seen cartridge based game systems contain quite a few odd features.
The game boy had cartridges containing gyroscopes, a digital camera, a light sensor... Among commercial piracy related developments they've been adapted to read SD cards and compact-flash.
In homebrew development I've seen a digital oscilloscope, and an interface to connect a standard 3.5" HDD (To a game boy advance - Complete with a custom version of DOS)
Going back to the SNES, the was the GBSNES, which allowed an Snes to play game boy games. (by plugging them into an adapter that plugged into the cartridge slot)
The Super-FX chip that made starfox possible was perhaps a very early example of a 3d graphics chip...
And it was part of the game cartridge, NOT the console.
Similarly, Megaman X-2 and X-3 had vector graphics processing chips which made graphical effects possible that the SNES itself couldn't cope with.
For that matter, the Sega-32x took that to it's logical extreme and upgraded the mega drive/genesis, turning it into a 32 bit system by creating a 'cartridge' with basically what amounts to entirely new console in it.
Cartridges really were quite an impressive concept when you think about it. Even though it looks like a storage device, in reality it has more in common with a PC expansion card that just happens to have a read-only storage device built onto it.
Still, with all that, I don't know what the relative cost of a flash-memory based game would be compared to a CD (or newest equivalent) based game...
That a return to flash memory doesn't seem to be a direction anyone is taking suggests there must be some kind of reason, but who knows?
Nintendo was the one company that didn't like CD's, and they got burned pretty badly for insisting the N64 used cartridges...
Would anyone take the risk? It'd be interesting to see it...