God, I miss cartridges

[desura]

Yes, I know there are limitations, but cartridges were really cool. Like, modern consoles feel like...computer systems...and you have to update them every other week which is annoying...but cartridges were like...analog watches, you know? Especially when games like Yoshi's Island included custom chips in the cartridges which allowed for some custom processing and effects...that was really cool.

In other words, there was more mystery with cartridges, and that made games better.

 

[purbeast0]

i just like how fast cartridge based consoles started up. put a game in SNES or TG16 and you were playing within like 5 seconds of pressing the power button.

 

[mjaweeka]

I hear you on this. I was lamenting the fact that modern consoles have multiple updates and game patches that require an online connection to someone the other day, and comparing the current state of things to buying a cartridge game, bringing it home, and being able to play it with no strings attached. Coupled with nostalgia, this simplicity is what caused me to start a small retro game collection. My only concern with older games is with trying to guess how long the programmed chips will last.

And yes, I do remember being thrilled with seeing what special chips could do on some games (SuperFX for example).

 

[alkemyst]

Especially when games like Yoshi's Island included custom chips in the cartridges which allowed for some custom processing and effects...that was really cool.

In other words, there was more mystery with cartridges, and that made games better.

May be a cool read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips

 

[PieIsAwesome]

I miss the absence of loading. Banjo Kazooie on the N64 had large maps with no loading. There were some situations where you hit a trigger in one of the game worlds that would cause something to happen back in the main world. When this happens, the game switches to the other world and shows the change. Its immediate, no loading in between.

It would be like hitting a trigger in Mass Effect on one planet, and then the game immediately showing the results of the trigger occurring on a totally different planet, with no loading in between.

Or like hitting a switch in one dungeon in Zelda, and then the game immediately showing the results occurring in a totally different dungeon.

 

[zerocool84]

Yes, I know there are limitations, but cartridges were really cool. Like, modern consoles feel like...computer systems...and you have to update them every other week which is annoying...but cartridges were like...analog watches, you know? Especially when games like Yoshi's Island included custom chips in the cartridges which allowed for some custom processing and effects...that was really cool.

In other words, there was more mystery with cartridges, and that made games better.

We had CD based systems that didn't have to get updated every week. I'm glad cartridges are long gone, small amounts of memory which holds back games, expensive games as well even when not counting inflation.

 

[Doppel]

A current console could load those olds games nice and fast if they were loaded onto it.

I assume that a good PC with an ssd could more or less remove load times from a lot of games.

 

[Oyeve]

I too miss cartridges, what I DONT miss is the slight bump-to-console-cartridge-freeze.

 

[desura]

I wonder if like a rerelease of the original NES and cartridge games would sell well? Of course, drop the price some...

 

[alkemyst]

I wonder if like a rerelease of the original NES and cartridge games would sell well? Of course, drop the price some...

What they do now especially in the Grey Market is just make a console with all the images burned into it. You get like a fake SNES with 10+ built in games.

 

[smackababy]

I too miss cartridges, what I DONT miss is the slight bump-to-console-cartridge-freeze.

Or the extra cost for certain cartridges. Or the flawed design in loading mechanism. Or the extremely limited size.

Disc based media (and HDD based media) might have some flaws in loading time, but that is about it. Cartridges are dead for a reason!

 

[smackababy]

What they do now especially in the Grey Market is just make a console with all the images burned into it. You get like a fake SNES with 10+ built in games.

I believe they have carts that connect to some modern storage and you can essentially have every SNES rom on a single cart.

 

[Lil Frier]

I can't say that I really miss them TOO much. I prefer blowing in a cartridge as a fix than having to go buy a cleaning product for a disc scratch, but as a whole, I'll take the discs. There's more storage on the discs (though I guess we don't know what a cartridge would hold), we don't have to worry about save restrictions as much, and the discs take up less room in storage.

 

[purbeast0]

I can't say that I really miss them TOO much. I prefer blowing in a cartridge as a fix than having to go buy a cleaning product for a disc scratch, but as a whole, I'll take the discs. There's more storage on the discs (though I guess we don't know what a cartridge would hold), we don't have to worry about save restrictions as much, and the discs take up less room in storage.

that was all a myth and didn't help anything, and actually probably did damage in the long run.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hunterschwarz/blowing-into-your-nintendo-cartridges-didnt-actua

 

[cmdrdredd]

You all know you blew in your games because they gave a black screen. That's gone now which is welcome for me. Personally I kept a box of QTips and some rubbing alcohol to clean the contacts on all my games when they didn't work.

 

[smackababy]

You all know you blew in your games because they gave a black screen. That's gone now which is welcome for me lol.

I discovered that I only had to remove it and put it back in, so I stopped. My NES later had trouble reading anything that wasn't using my Game Genie. =(

 

[Oyeve]

You all know you blew in your games because they gave a black screen. That's gone now which is welcome for me. Personally I kept a box of QTips and some rubbing alcohol to clean the contacts on all my games when they didn't work.

I still have and use my nes/snes cleaning gadget. It had cleaners for both cart types and even for the consoles. For the NES there was a little handle to push/pull when you inserted it. Still works great.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I discovered that I only had to remove it and put it back in, so I stopped. My NES later had trouble reading anything that wasn't using my Game Genie. =(

I had many NEs systems over the years. One wouldn't lock down in the tray so I had to wedge it, one I had to just barely insert the cart so it barely fit in the slot when you pushed the tray down to lock it and the front of the cart rubbed on the edge. One was a top loader and had no problems.

 

[smackababy]

I had many NEs systems over the years. One wouldn't lock down in the tray so I had to wedge it, one I had to just barely insert the cart so it barely fit in the slot when you pushed the tray down to lock it and the front of the cart rubbed on the edge. One was a top loader and had no problems.

I think the top loaders were the later models and solved a lot of the early problems. Sadly, I never got one. Luckily, I could leave my Game Genie in the console and just switch carts, so it wasn't that bad.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I don't necessarily miss cartridges, but I do think todays consoles leave something to be desired. They are slow, clunky, buggy, and locked down in unnecessary ways.

They have basically taken away all the things that were good about consoles and given them all the bad parts of a PC w/o the flexibility.

 

[boomhower]

Updates are a good thing. I don't see fixing bugs and adding features being a bad thing. Yeah, most games are rushed out riddled with bugs these and DLC is getting to be almost a requirement but all in all I look at it as a good thing. Curious if installing an SSD and downloading your games would have a similar effect.

 

[mmntech]

Cartridges were okay but they were just too cost prohibitive by the time the N64 rolled around. They still are today to a degree. Especially if you want the kind of read rates that give instant loading times to complex games.

That said, there's nothing quite like slapping one of those into a console. They also had the added feature of being extremely durable. Optical discs used to scratch so easily before Bluray came out. Wonder why they never thought to put a hard coat on them before then.

 

[Anarchist420]

the main reason carts took less time to load was because they had less data. and many super nes games disguised their loading by clever slogans or even just by neat screen fades (like Fatal Fury 2 for the Super NES)

and really, the Sega Saturn (nights, die hard arcade, and even rayman both loaded rather quickly and there were more games closer to those than the few games that took longer to load or had inappropriate load times plus the model 1 saturns didnt use bad components or design like the PS did) was the best of both worlds between the PS that took forever to load (Doom took a minute from turning the power on to the start of the first level) and the N64 (loading times were noticable in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, it had game-stopping glitches, it was missing some content from the PC version, and the game still looked vastly inferior to the PC version depending on the settings and hardware you played it on) just as the first Xbox didnt have loading times that were all that bad.

 

[Aikouka]

Cartridges were okay but they were just too cost prohibitive by the time the N64 rolled around. They still are today to a degree. Especially if you want the kind of read rates that give instant loading times to complex games.

Eh, I can't really agree. I mean... for full-fledged, AAA console games, you would be right since you'd have to use 32GB SDHC or 64GB SDXC cards. Those aren't terribly cheap and would probably be similar to the cartridges of yore in regard to overhead (especially the latter). However, cartridges work fine for handhelds because of the smaller game size. If I remember correctly, the largest Vita game that I've seen is about 2GB. Games also run off the Vita memory cards just fine, and those aren't even as good as a Class 10 SD card.

 

[mmntech]

Eh, I can't really agree. I mean... for full-fledged, AAA console games, you would be right since you'd have to use 32GB SDHC or 64GB SDXC cards. Those aren't terribly cheap and would probably be similar to the cartridges of yore in regard to overhead (especially the latter). However, cartridges work fine for handhelds because of the smaller game size. If I remember correctly, the largest Vita game that I've seen is about 2GB. Games also run off the Vita memory cards just fine, and those aren't even as good as a Class 10 SD card.

The thing with handhelds is solid state media is really the only option. Sony tried the optical discs but they were just too impractical.

The main benefit with optical discs is they offer the highest storage density at the lowest possible cost. The technology has been perfected over the last 100 years, back when they were making records. Stamp the data onto a polycarbonate disc, add reflective metallic layer, then coat the top in varnish. Three parts. All of which can be done in entirely automated factories that can produce over 100k discs a day. So a ton of data that costs pennies to make instead of dollars. Which is why the technology was embraced so quickly.

All this is becoming moot though as downloads are taking over distribution, which is even cheaper than pressing discs. You could swap out the hard drive in the PS4 for a high speed SSD right now and simply play everything off that. Though it would cost more than the console itself, SSDs are getting cheaper each year.