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I think like most people, when I think of cartridges I think of Nintendo. I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. One advanta

I think like most people, when I think of cartridges I think of Nintendo. I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. One advantage of cartridges over discs is that you can put specialized chips on the carts that each game can take advantage of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_c... At the bottom of the above link you'll see a list of super Nintendo games that used extra chips. The list is astonishingly long. Of course this was back when most 1) things were done is software 2) these chips were cheap 3) RAM and data bus connections were much faster relative to the CPU than they are now.

Htsthbjig 12y ago
"I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did." As far as I remember, people did not like optical media. When Sega added a new optical attachment for their Sega Genesis, nobody bought it. Optical media required loading. Interactivity was lost. You had "Dragon's Lair" kind of games that had tremendous quality but felt prefabricated. It was only much later with he first PSP that people started using them, after PC era of CD shareware like doom or dune. The advantages(immense amount of memory, distribution easiness, and PIRACY) overcame their drawbacks.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  > Interactivity was lost. You had "Dragon's Lair" kind of games that had tremendous quality but felt prefabricated. That's a product problem though, not an engineering one. Games suddenly had all this space but nothing to do with it because graphic engines were, for the only time in the history of video games, running behind hardware capabilities. So we got those awkward "uncanny valley" type FMV games/interactive movies and what not because those were the only ones that justified the need for optical discs.
drawkbox 12y ago
Cartridges were also really durable. Back when people didn't have many electronics, cartridges helped defend the chips inside. Atari and Nintendo were essentially 'toys' back then. You could toss a cartridge around but not a disc. Nowadays, any physical disc or cartridge is a pain. Digital games are the only way like Steam.
Torgo 12y ago
That and, until the CD-ROM came along, what were your options, floppy disks? (Yes, I know that the Famicom had a floppy drive and that there were piracy decks for other systems to load from disk. And they sucked.) Also, the first CD-ROM devices were 1x and were very slow to load games. It definitely felt like a step backward in many ways, and in fact this is the claimed reason that Nintendo went with cartridges for the N64.
kalleboo 12y ago
> 2) these chips were cheap I don't think it's was so much that the chips were that cheap (chips are definitely way cheaper now - $5 for a wifi chipset?!), but rather the games were very expensive - when the game costs $100 or more in today's money (and you hadn't already blown your budget on a development team of hundreds of artists), you can justify a $2-$5 budget for an advanced chipset that'll double your sales.
- bluedino 12y ago
  ROM chips were not cheap at all. The bigger your game, the more chips you needed and therefore the more your game would cost. The 'big' games on SNES were 16 and 32 megabits which ended up with $69-89 pricetags.
Figs 12y ago
> I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. Well, they tried to start getting CD tech in the mid 1980s but fucked up badly. Sony and Nintendo were going to produce an add-on for the SNES so it could load data from CDs. The licensing agreement would not have worked out well for Nintendo. That led to drama at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show when Sony announced the product one day, and Nintendo announced that they were partnering with Philips instead the next day...[0] After more false starts and some lawsuits, Sony basically then went on to produce the PlayStation without Nintendo. [1] As for Nintendo's partnership with Philips -- that didn't work out either, though I don't know the details. I do know that Philips developed a system called the CD-i (which flopped), and got the rights to use some of Nintendo's characters. Philips later contracted other companies to produce games for the CD-i, which is why Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure exist.[2] [0] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-philips-deal-is-a-slap-at-sony.html http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-philips-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_%28console%29#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_%28console%29#Deve... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zelda_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_...
userbinator 12y ago
I think the biggest advantage is a cartridge provides basically true random access with no seek time (maybe a few hundred nanoseconds of extra delay when switching banks, but that's still nothing compared to hundreds of milliseconds seeking a disc.) They're also much cheaper to interface since they can be mapped directly into the address space of the CPU; contrast that with the extra hardware and firmware required for an optical drive - plus the additional RAM that would be needed for the CPU to execute from.
code_duck 12y ago
I think of the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64 and the Sega Master System, all of which also had cartridges in the early 80s. One of Nintendo's stated reasons for choosing cartridges for the Nintendo 64 versus optical media was to discourage piracy.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

"I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did." As far as I remember, people did not like optical media. When Sega added a new optical attachment for their Sega Genesis, nobody bought it. Optical media required loading. Interactivity was lost. You had "Dragon's Lair" kind of games that had tremendous quality but felt prefabricated. It was only much later with he first PSP that people started using them, after PC era of CD shareware like doom or dune. The advantages(immense amount of memory, distribution easiness, and PIRACY) overcame their drawbacks.

scrollaway 12y ago
> Interactivity was lost. You had "Dragon's Lair" kind of games that had tremendous quality but felt prefabricated. That's a product problem though, not an engineering one. Games suddenly had all this space but nothing to do with it because graphic engines were, for the only time in the history of video games, running behind hardware capabilities. So we got those awkward "uncanny valley" type FMV games/interactive movies and what not because those were the only ones that justified the need for optical discs.

drawkbox 12y ago

Cartridges were also really durable. Back when people didn't have many electronics, cartridges helped defend the chips inside. Atari and Nintendo were essentially 'toys' back then. You could toss a cartridge around but not a disc. Nowadays, any physical disc or cartridge is a pain. Digital games are the only way like Steam.

Torgo 12y ago

That and, until the CD-ROM came along, what were your options, floppy disks? (Yes, I know that the Famicom had a floppy drive and that there were piracy decks for other systems to load from disk. And they sucked.) Also, the first CD-ROM devices were 1x and were very slow to load games. It definitely felt like a step backward in many ways, and in fact this is the claimed reason that Nintendo went with cartridges for the N64.

kalleboo 12y ago

> 2) these chips were cheap I don't think it's was so much that the chips were that cheap (chips are definitely way cheaper now - $5 for a wifi chipset?!), but rather the games were very expensive - when the game costs $100 or more in today's money (and you hadn't already blown your budget on a development team of hundreds of artists), you can justify a $2-$5 budget for an advanced chipset that'll double your sales.

bluedino 12y ago
ROM chips were not cheap at all. The bigger your game, the more chips you needed and therefore the more your game would cost. The 'big' games on SNES were 16 and 32 megabits which ended up with $69-89 pricetags.

Figs 12y ago

> I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. Well, they tried to start getting CD tech in the mid 1980s but fucked up badly. Sony and Nintendo were going to produce an add-on for the SNES so it could load data from CDs. The licensing agreement would not have worked out well for Nintendo. That led to drama at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show when Sony announced the product one day, and Nintendo announced that they were partnering with Philips instead the next day...[0] After more false starts and some lawsuits, Sony basically then went on to produce the PlayStation without Nintendo. [1] As for Nintendo's partnership with Philips -- that didn't work out either, though I don't know the details. I do know that Philips developed a system called the CD-i (which flopped), and got the rights to use some of Nintendo's characters. Philips later contracted other companies to produce games for the CD-i, which is why Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure exist.[2] [0] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-philips-deal-is-a-slap-at-sony.html http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-philips-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_%28console%29#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_%28console%29#Deve... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zelda_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_...

userbinator 12y ago

I think the biggest advantage is a cartridge provides basically true random access with no seek time (maybe a few hundred nanoseconds of extra delay when switching banks, but that's still nothing compared to hundreds of milliseconds seeking a disc.) They're also much cheaper to interface since they can be mapped directly into the address space of the CPU; contrast that with the extra hardware and firmware required for an optical drive - plus the additional RAM that would be needed for the CPU to execute from.

code_duck 12y ago

I think of the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64 and the Sega Master System, all of which also had cartridges in the early 80s. One of Nintendo's stated reasons for choosing cartridges for the Nintendo 64 versus optical media was to discourage piracy.