hey guys this isn't Linus so what's one of your favorite childhood memories
maybe eating sugary cereal while watching saturday morning cartoons
sucking capri sun out of a pouch or getting weird love notes from that super
awkward kid you know who you are well if you were like me it's blowing dust out
of my old game cartridges which would magically make them work if they'd been
misbehaving and because all of our old consoles the nes sega genesis gameboy
etc all use cartridges this is a near universal rite of passage for young
gamers back in the day but fast forward to modern times and game cartridges have
largely disappeared nintendo is still using cartridge-like game carts for
their 3ds and switch consoles but the ps4 and xbox one which are meant to stay
in the living room still use optical discs and so did all of the predecessor
consoles it's actually been a long time actually was the n64 was the last time
that there was a proper game console that was based in your home that still
use cartridges cds guys they're the future
water so why have they disappeared and why were they popular in the first place
well although we usually think of game cartridges as older tech do you remember
how quickly games used to load compared to modern titles on optical media i mean
right now you take a game you put in your xbox and now you have to install 50
gigs to your hard drive then you have to download another 20 Gigabyte patch
whereas with super mario on the nes you just put it in
and you play
please don't use that well not only were the cartridges relatively durable other
than the aforementioned dust issues but the way they interface with the console
made them very fast you see when you insert a cartridge into a console the
system effectively treated its content as part of the system's memory imagine
how fast modern pc games would load if they were just sitting on a stick of RAM
that you insert in your motherboard instead of a hard drive or SSD with slower loading times of course it's not
a perfect comparison game cartridges contained mostly read-only memory or rom
that stored the code for the game itself whenever you saved your progress the
save file will be stored on either a small amount of volatile memory that
needed a coin battery to maintain the data or a special memory chip called an
eeprom that doesn't need a constant supply of power but could only hold a
very small amount of information so if cartridges were faster and could hold
save data unlike optical disks then why did they almost disappear unsurprisingly
as with many great things in life a huge part of the equation is the cost gain
cartridges and the rom they contain is a lot more expensive to manufacture than
optical disks which can be produced for only a couple bucks including their
packaging and documentation although to be fair they don't really include much
documentation these days you gotta be eco aka cheap and not give me a cool
manual to remember how to beat the boss or something i don't know
what to figure i don't really ever think i found any use at all in manuals
even though data discs are much more susceptible to things like breakage and
scratches it was a worthwhile trade-off for the console manufacturers especially
considering that it's a lot easier to create a high-capacity optical disk than
create a high-capacity cartridge when games became more complex the optical
disk also allowed the likes of sony and microsoft to push more games to market
prior to digital distribution because those optical disks were so much cheaper
to produce if you released a game that turned out to be a giant dud in terms of
sales it didn't automatically mean that you were going to be a completely bankrupt company of course physical
media isn't exclusively in the form of optical disks these days anyone who
owned a sony disk within the 90s will know just how much of a pain taking an
optical disk on the road can be so for portability reasons the aforementioned
nintendo 3ds and switch use game cards something that nintendo has been able to
get away with thanks to the following costs of solid-state storage and their
high margins on the first party titles and i guess third-party titles too if
you think about it i wonder how much nintendo makes for every switch game
they sell i bet it's a lot at least seven
what seven dollars seven percent
seven cents at least okay but it should be noted that modern game
cards are quite different from the game cartridges of yesteryear they don't
become part of the addressable memory for the console as instead they're much
more akin to something like a modern sd card that means load times can still be
slightly long but there is good news nothing stopping you from blowing the
dust off of those nintendo cartridges and living the days before your failed
relationships and crippling student loan debt but if you want to get that
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