Resurrect the cartdridges!

[Bad Jim]

I can't wrap my head around games being written with hard-coded load times. What if your PS1 was dying and loading took longer than expected? What if your PS1 was brand new and the drive was just a little faster than expected?

Well, let's say you're a PS1 programmer. To speed up loading, you compress some of the data. You divide loading into three parts and code it like this:

-Part 1 must be decompressed, and loads first.
-Spawn a thread to decompress Part 1
-Part 2 is then loaded.
-Part 3 is then loaded into the RAM that was used by the compressed version of part 1. Remember that you don't have much RAM to play with.

Now the right way to do this would be to wait for part 1 to decompress before loading part 3. But as far as you are concerned, that's only theory. You 'know' that part 1 will be decompressed long before part 2 finishes loading. You have a fixed platform with a slow CD drive and a comparitively fast CPU. And unlike Windows, there are no background programs that might hog the CPU and slow down decompression.

Since the program will only fail on a system that is significantly different to a real PS1, you have no reason to write extra code to safeguard it. It's not a hard coded load time, it's just a race condition that will always be met on a real PS1.

For really bad programming, there were a lot of DOS games that ran as fast as the CPU let them, so that the next PC you bought would run them at a ridiculous, unplayable speed. This includes action based games like Wing Commander. It's quite easy to limit the speed of games, but they just didn't bother, even though it was obvious they would become unplayable.

 

[Terramax]

The only way that steam will lock you out of the games you have purchased is if they go bankrupt...

What if they get bought out by another company?

 

[Something Amyss]

For a PSP or a DS maybe, but consider what you'd need for a full game here.

There's absolutely no reason you would need to go larger than a thumb drive or SD cart.

Also, I like using my system as a DVD player as well. Makes it so I don't need to hook one up to my TV. We go back to cartridges, we'll either lose that ability, or have the cost of consoles rise even more because they'd have to install a DVD Drive as well as the one for the cartridges.

This, at least, is a fair point. Doesn't have anything to do with the industry, but it is a mild inconvenience.

 

[Something Amyss]

Oh god, "Mission" packs they called them, basically bug fixes + reskins.

And they charged it as if you were buying a whole new game.

And a lot of people bought 'em. Kinda makes the current Bethesda model look benevolent. XD

 

[Epona]

I never thought that until this gen. I bought Populous: The Beginning in 1998 and I installed it and uninstalled it at will. I played it online and offline at will and I could even install it on my friends PC and play a LAN game without asking for permission so as far as I was concerned, I owned the game. Same with console games. Now, I couldn't make copies and sell them for a profit but then I can't do that with anything I buy. I can't copy my Hoover vacuum cleaner and sell it either. The ability to do make copies of something and sell it on the open market is not a requirement of ownership. By those rules you wouldn't own anything except that which you crafted yourself. It's absurd to say that you don't own your TV because you can't make copies and sell them.

And you still just bought a license. A license that allowed you all that (simply because back then it was not really possible to enforce this) but it changes nothing.

Game = Software => License.

The problem is that since DD and the possibility to enforce stricter license terms (or actual the ability to enforce them at all) increased with the internet people are starting to realise this or, in your case, deny that it was always this way.

In loose terms speaking: Yes, you "owned" the game. In the terms of the ability to play it wherever you like to play it.

I owned it and I still do. Even with current technology I can still treat Populous as I always have.

I love how you (as in people) have to change the rules in order to explain a software license. It just shows how ridiculous it is because the new rules don't work with anything else. "Why yes, you never really owned your TV, you only thought you did. If you owned it you would be able to copy and distribute it."

So you go on believing that but the fact is that no one can take away the old console or PC games you OWN. What they can get away with tomorrow depends largely on how well they brainwashed you today. This generation has been full of anti-consumer stuff and this is a the top of the list. They started out simply charging you $10 more because of license fees to Microsoft and Sony and will end with activation codes. You, like many others, will eat it up without even questioning why none of this was necessary last gen.

 

[RatRace123]

I like it, and the DS and Vita have shown that they can still be a relevant form of hardware in this day and age. The 3DS can pump out Gamecube/Wii level graphics and the Vita boasts PS3 level, so looks wouldn't take a hit.
I don't think companies would do it though. But I'd like to see it done. And in some cases it would be more practical than discs. We're no longer at the point where you'd need to blow on them to get them to work properly and it's much easier to scratch a disc than it would be to seriously damage a cartridge. (I think, don't quote me on that.)

Movie Bob did a Game Overthinker episode on this very topic, and he was (unsurprisingly) also in favor of it.

 

[Epona]

I owned it and I still do. Even with current technology I can still treat Populous as I always have.

I love how you (as in people) have to change the rules in order to explain a software license. It just shows how ridiculous it is because the new rules don't work with anything else. "Why yes, you never really owned your TV, you only thought you did. If you owned it you would be able to copy and distribute it."

So you go on believing that but the fact is that no one can take away the old console or PC games you OWN. What they can get away with tomorrow depends largely on how well they brainwashed you today. This generation has been full of anti-consumer stuff and this is a the top of the list. They started out simply charging you $10 more because of license fees to Microsoft and Sony and will end with activation codes. You, like many others, will eat it up without even questioning why none of this was necessary last gen.

Sorry, but the way software purchases were handled is older than this generation and just because you just got to know it this generation doesn't mean that it is so "new". There are no new rules, there are just actual ways to enforce it. It may be not pretty but nothing changed in the way software was purchased.

And no, purchasing TV is not the same as purchasing a software. But since you don't seem to even want to understand this all I'm not gonna even bother to explain it.

And technically speaking: All you have is a license to play Populous.

I simply refuse to believe that the software industry is special. I love how nothing can be compared to the software industry, not even books or movies because everyone says it isn't comparable. Here's a thought, if it isn't comparable to any other industry then that should be a clue that something is terribly wrong. Where's the red flag that should be going up in peoples minds?

I understand what you are saying, I am just poking holes in it because it is so easy to do and I think more people should be poking too. No hard feelings.

 

[Epona]

I simply refuse to believe that the software industry is special. I love how nothing can be compared to the software industry, not even books or movies because everyone says it isn't comparable. Here's a thought, if it isn't comparable to any other industry then that should be a clue that something is terribly wrong. Where's the red flag that should be going up in peoples minds?

I understand what you are saying, I am just poking holes in it because it is so easy to do and I think more people should be poking too. No hard feelings.

Then you probably misunderstood one thing: I am just stating how it is, I am not taking the side in the shit people try to enforce with the license agreements nowadays (looks to Ubisoft). But I simply understand that there is a difference in virtual goods (i.e. software) and other goods.

I suspected you weren't endorsing what you were saying. I know that it's different with virtual goods but with physical goods (like carts and cds) you should own it and the only reason you don't is if you let them take that from you. After all, with virtual goods there is a service to maintain and at some point it may be gone. The only way I will lose Mario 64 is if I do something to it and with that in mind, there is no reason to give control over to someone else. Despite what Nintendo may say, they cannot take back the cart or control what I do with it. That is the past and it should be the future IF people refuse to accept the shit game companies are throwing at them. It's like me saying that I own your car, you would laugh at me, why not treat game companies the same way?

 

[masticina]

Mmm pricing of an 32 Gbyte SSD versus a blu-ray.
It only has gotten steeper really in the past with the N64 the games we're yes more expensive due to the price of the Cartridge design.

If we want to put games requires allot of space on cartridges I see issues. Don't get me wrong a simple basic RPG with stylized art [think zelda windwaker] in HD sure! That probably will fit a big cartridge And load quicker etc..

The issue is price and economical lets just say there is a reason there are limitations. PS VITA now has cardridges to.. and there is the trustes DS and 3DS.

it isn't dead but it certainly is put in the area with limitations are more excepted. For an MW4.. I don't see how people want to go back to cardridges!

 

[Something Amyss]

Yeah, you remember how Nintendo went out of business after releasing Super Mario Bros. 3, which tripped balls frequently and could decide to completely crash on you at any time?

Well, they couldn't have gone out of business then, because they already did when they released a console that actually destroyed itself, IE the NES. You know that problem with getting the games to run? It was because, while you pushed the game down when inserting it, the connector didn't move, so that got bent out of shape and after a while it didn't make contact with the cartridge properly. Yes, they actually knowingly designed a console that broke itself with regular use!

Yeah, it's a shame Nintendo went bankrupt in the 80s. Could you imagine what radical new ideas they might have had they hung around? I bet they'd have tons of creative new franchises.

Seriously, though, I remember most of the problems with the NES. I never had the contacts bend sufficiently to break it, though. I don't know why. Probably just one of the lucky ones. I do remember the buggy games, a lot of them what would be considered "AAA" titles these days. I remember having to take out the games and blow on them, though the blowing was really unimportant in the process, though we didn't know that at the time. I remember the games or system having a tendency to go "fuck this" and freeze--back when passwords weren't even standard, let alone save files.

Worse, I remember how little information there was on most games. Even the game magazines couldn't cover everything. With no internet it was hard to find opinions from your peers unless your friends bought the game. I don't know about large cities, but rentals were a joke around here. You had to buy (or not buy) games more or less blind unless they were a decent sized release, and if you got stuck or hit a bug, you not only couldn't update the game, you also couldn't see of there was a work-around. Hell, some of the places I thought I was stuck turned out to be glitches and bugs screwing me up. A door that was supposed to open, or a key item that wasn't there.

Yeah, I think we're probably better off now. "Release and patch later" may be a dodgy idea, but it beats "release a broken game and NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Some companies aren't the best at patching games, but they probably would have still released broken games in the 80s.

And we would have bought them.

Well, most of us.

But yeah, it's funny how things don't change, but people sort of insist they have. NES is one of the first consoles people think of, because it was one of the first breakthrough consoles. And it had a known, inherent design flaw. But people at like hardware problems are a Microsoft/Sony thing.

'Course, Nintendo was pretty ruthless back in the day. Price Fixing, "standards" approval (play our game our else!) and so on.

 

[Conza]

Before you pick up that torch or even consider giving more edge to your axes and pitchforks, let me explain a bit. Consider everything I say as wild speculation that came to my mind while day dreaming, I'm no engineer or scientist and I seriously don't know if such a thing would be feasable for today's standards. Ok, here we go:

While watching my sister play a couple of Virtual Console games, I had a nostalgia trip, thinking about how easier it was back in the day to simply pop-in a cartdrige and a few seconds later you were already playing. Then, an idea struck my mind. Why doesn't the industry even consider the idea of returning to such a business?.

First a bit of backstory: back then, it was a serious hassle, as every arcade port made by Sega for the Genesis might suggest (just look at Thunderblade [http://youtu.be/GRBQe2xgwHc] and Super Thunderblade [http://youtu.be/KjYH6Uy8UtA]), back then, both the Genesis and the Snes' cartdridges had a limit of 4 mb per game, not every single game used that capacity, but the heavier ones did, like Chrono Trigger or Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles had 2 mb of space each and combined with the lock-on feature, had the maximum capacity available for a Genesis cartdridge).

One generation later, we had the N64 cartdridges that were seriously expensive to manufacture and expensive for the customer, those ones had a maximum capacity of 512 mbits, or 64 megabytes (Resident Evil 2 and Conker's Bad Fur Day were the heaviest ones, both figuratively and literally) and they had a huge advantage against it's CD based competition, data transfer speeds.

After the N64, the use of cartridges were unheard of for 2 generations, except for the handheld realm, wich they still thrived. GBA's cartdridges were much easier to manufacture and held much more space than an Snes cart, holding a maximum of 64 mbits, or 32 megabytes, not too shaby for a platform that was more or less a portable SNES. A generation later, the NDS "cards" had much, much more space available, with a maximum capacity of 1gbit or 512 megabytes (there's still not a single NDS game to reach that maximum capacity, the heaviest ones use 256 mbytes of capacity).

Today, both the 3DS and the PS Vita still use cartdridges with a lot of space, as far as I know, the 3DS' carts have a maximum capacity of 8 gb and the Vita 8 or 16 gb, we've reached much more capacity and data transfer speeds than we had back then.

With all of this said, I think it's time for the industry to start re-considering cartdridges as it's main form of distribution for consoles. Aesthetically speaking, it doesn't have to be the clunky design of a 90's cartdridge, or even the same size of those, I'd be happy holding in my hand a copy of, say, Rage (a game that's the size of 3 DVDs or an almost full BluRay disc) in something in the size of somehthing similar to an iPod Shuffle.

Just think about it, the data transfer speeds would increment exponentially, something similar to an SSD [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive], combined with a boost in ram memory, it could make the use of harddrive discs almost unnecessary, except when you need to download DLC, but then, the developers could save a bit of space into those things to store all of your DLC into that same cartdridge, in the case of downloadable games, I don't know, maybe include some form of an incredibly big Nand memory into the console, making it almost a gaming SSD. Also, the lack of movable parts to read the device would hugely increment the longevity of both the game and the console (no more scratched discs!).

I really don't know how much it would cost to manufacture these in the long run and I think making a DVD or a BD is much more cheap than to make these things, but then, we've already reached to the point where an USB thumb drive [http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Flash-Drive-SDCZ36-008G-A11/dp/B001T9CTRS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328417057&sr=8-1] of 8gb costs $3.

So, what do you think about my wildly speculative and uninformed idea?, share your thoughts!.

You are so close to a good idea, let me give you the end result.

Removable media will always be the dictating factor of consoles going forward, period. This has been the case basically since the Sega CD/Playstation 1. Then it was DVD, and now we're into Blu-ray, likely to be Blu-ray for the next generation, sorry to burst your bubble, but the following generation is when it becomes interesting.

Imagine, when we all have terrabytes of internet a month to use, speeds are in the 10/100s of megabytes per second, and there is no removable media?

A stop gap to this scenario, which perhaps it will never be at a high enough ratio to download full games (though people do it today on steam, it isn't super fast, nor cheap enough to use that level of internet allocation as well), so, the removable media may become compact solid state drives - or cartridges.

If we compare your 8GB 3DS cartridge to a 9GB DVD, sure, not much loss there, when we compare it to a 25GB BD, well, the 3DS cartidge is smaller right? So for a television console size to storage ratio would be greater wouldn't it? Say, 100GB? Well, if it picked up for movie rentals, computer games and a music media all at the same time, it might have a chance, but how to pull any of that off in this industry would be a real challenge.

In short, the disc era will continue for a while, hopefully the next generation of consoles have minimum 500GB of storage, preferably 2-3TB, so we can insert our discs the first time, copy them to the drive, then each time we want to play the game, insert the disc for verification, and thats it, play the game directly from the drive, but I think that's about as close as we're going to get any time soon.

 

[t3h br0th3r]

I am just waiting for something a little hardier (like maybe flashdrives) to take over for CDs. I can't stand those overly fragile pieces of crap. My floppy drives could take trips in my pocket, my flashdrive lives in my pocket but my copy of oblivion is moving ever so closer to FUBAR status.

 

[pearcinator]

Yes! Bring back the cartridges! Death to load times!

I think it could easily be done...if one of the big 3 decide to push for cartridges then I am sure the other two will follow.

 

[Olas]

Ya, I honestly can't think of a reason switching to cartridges WOULDN'T be a good idea. I hate disks.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Those cartridges from the 8- and 16-bit era were ROM chips happily sitting on what could be described as a pluggable expansion cartridge... access speeds were brilliant (still are), because you have virtually no loading time. It's what still makes playing NES/SNES/GENESIS/NEO GEO so much fun. It just works.

All our widely available pluggable storage media are read-and-write by default, and they aren't anywhere near the longevity or performance of ROM-based carts. The cost of, say, high capacity Neo Geo ROM cartridges was the reason why games would easily cost $300-400 when they came out, which wasn't exactly boosting sales.

The PSX with its cheap CD-based games sold darn well, but when other, already existing ROM-based tech, such as the Neo Geo CD tried to jump on the bandwagon of actually selling lots of games, the drawback of optical media became apparent: ROM-Neo geo had no loading times, CD-Neo Geo introduced loading screens... and "please wait while loading" felt so 1980's C=64.

I am not quite current with all the tech aspects of modern flash-based storage media... but, unlike our collection of old console carts, I wouldn't expect them to still work, what, twenty years from now.

I think we're pretty much stuck with magnetic harddrives and optical media (DVD/BluRay)... not too certain why sony decided to sell Vita cards at a premium, I'd hope they offer top-tier speed and reliability. There's so much product piracy and crap flash media flooding the markets, it's really hard to predict where the industry will take it from here. But I don't think standards-conforming flash media to make it far beyond portable gaming.

 

[geK0]

You aren't a real gamer unless you've suffered having to blow into a cartridge and then the console to try and get it to work.

I used to get my SNES and N64 games to work by smacking it into the console as hard as I could.... I'm amazed I didn't break either of them!


OT:

I'd actually love to see cartridges come back! I have this terrible habit of ruining my game discs. I've lost so many fucking wii games to circular scratches it almost makes me cry(damn Wii eating all my games)! PS3 blu ray discs seem to be pretty durable though.

 

[Erttheking]

Meh, CDs have really grown on me, personally I'm happy with them.

Off topic: blowing into cartridges has been replaced with wiping the back of your CD with a paper towel...the more things change the more they stay the same.

 

[Domehammer]

I would be glad to not use a cd. In all my years gaming with cartridges from super nintendo to n64 I never had a cartridge just die. I've lost three copy's of oblivion to disc getting scratched and 1 copy of GTA IV to scratching with just 360. Granted 2 discs can be credited to stupid fact consoles going upright was just a disaster plan, keeping them laying down now when in use. Rather have cartridges that work but might need to blow dust out then a disc just not work after treating it perfectly.

 

[Gmans uncle]

Errr... hate to break it to ya bro, but Moviebob already kinda said this long time ago...
...minus the part about the ninjas of coarse...

 

[Waaghpowa]

I simply refuse to believe that the software industry is special. I love how nothing can be compared to the software industry, not even books or movies because everyone says it isn't comparable. Here's a thought, if it isn't comparable to any other industry then that should be a clue that something is terribly wrong. Where's the red flag that should be going up in peoples minds?

I understand what you are saying, I am just poking holes in it because it is so easy to do and I think more people should be poking too. No hard feelings.

Then you probably misunderstood one thing: I am just stating how it is, I am not taking the side in the shit people try to enforce with the license agreements nowadays (looks to Ubisoft). But I simply understand that there is a difference in virtual goods (i.e. software) and other goods.

How old is that court case where the judge ruled that the person purchasing a game only owns the medium on which it's delivered, but not that actual software? I know it exists, but the name of it eludes me at the moment.