Argument for Cartridges

It does when people bother to compress.

In modern times? Yea. Flash storage is increasingly cheap to produce. A multi-gig cartridge would be fairly cheap and easy to produce, would drastically improve load times without using space on the consoles storage medium and may allow saving progress on the cart itself.

There was a period of time that discs were superior, but that time has passed.

Nintendid it.

Durability of the storage medium
Durability of the console due to fewer moving parts
Faster load times (Not ram or processor cache fast, but faster than a disk)

Saving progress/state to an external hardware would be better non?

uhh ok
so how and where are you instantly uncompressing this data?

compression is a massively CPU intensive operation and it has to output it somewhere while simultaneously streaming it in elsewhere making a a super heavy IO operation as well.

Compression sucks dick for performance.

Then why do old FMVs load faster than new FMVs, smartypants?

Depends. If the console is using a storage medium of shorter lifespan, say an HDD, then the ability to save to the cart would generally be more resistant to data loss. It would also allow you to take your save with you and load it on another console.

Downside being that it is more vulnerable in case of theft of the game itself, the game probably being easier to steal then the console. In the end, the ability to save progress on both cart and console would be best, as you have best of both worlds.

This isn't magic we are talking about, decompression uses the CPU, you pull the compressed files from the storage put them in the ram decompress them and place the uncompressed files in the ram to use, this takes time as well, and I've already proved this but uncompressed content is a meme that few games did to save processing power for other things near the end of the last gen, compressed files and archives are the standard for games these days, they are big thanks to the move to 4k textures, that require 4x the space of 2k textures and the trend of pre rendering in game cutscenes.

Also holy SSDs or even cartridges aren't comparatively as fast as they were during the N64 era, ram speeds and cpu speeds have gone through the roof, Solid state is only now getting somewhere, and if you want to go fast you really need to pay and you will still sit well below ram speeds.

Also the carts in the Switch are about as fast as the HDD in the PS4/Xbox 360 with one major difference in that I think all data can be accessed at 100MB/s on the Switch cart/internal storage whereas the further out you get on an HDD the longer load times become, I'm unsure how slow they become across a 500GB HDD with however many discs are inside it.

look you can come up with all sorts systems that make data handling better, and they have.

It doesn't change the fact that everything will have to go through the bus->cpu->bus->memory->bus->cpu-> etc cycle.

A cartridge package isn't going to solve this. You only have so many options to load the data onto the bus while dealing signal loss that slots introduce on a high frequency bus.

Right now memory sockets are an issue because dimm slots are a source of signalling loss and thats why you are starting to see more and more surface mounted memory.

Instant load games are just not a reality with the current architectures.

It doesn't just make the system quieter, it actually contributes to the longevity of the system itself. For one thing, the lack of moving parts means the parts themselves are less likely to wear through constant use and constantly being turned off and one. There's a lot of PS1's and Sega Saturns out there where the actual system components are intact and working, but the cd drive no longer works.

No moving parts also means that you can bolt everything down and cement everything in place much better. That's one of the main reasons why you can take an N64, tie it with a rope to your bicycle and drag it around the block a few times and there's a good chance it will still work no problem. Of course, this may also just be a testament to Nintendo's own knack for durability, as the Gamecube can take a few sledgehammer hits and still work.

Discs are fragile, smaller in capacity, and larger in physical size. They also degrade more quickly than carts, making archival more difficult.
The only argument for using a disc is cost.

I think you are responding to the wrong post. I never said it would be instant loading, I said it would be FASTER loading without using space on the consoles storage medium. There is a reason disc based mediums want to install to an HDD, HDDs have better bandwidth and response times when discs, and solid state has better bandwidth and response times then HDDs.

It would improve things on the hardware side of things, but it still wouldn't be instant.

Well then, put SSD's in consoles.

Problem solved.

This thread was about the myth of the modern day cartridge though.

Also, as mentioned, their access times are pure garbage.
Totally instant game loading a la old consoles will never happen again, but with discs it's fucking awful.

At that point, you might as well have the game delivered digitally, there would be no point to a physical storage medium.

If you want to keep a physical storage medium, then some form of flash storage will always been superior then a disc in every way save for cost, a disc costing pennies and flash storage costing a few bucks.

kinda reminds me of how datatape started making a comeback

Do you think it's possible then that the Switch might be a foreshadowing of things to come, where games are either on a cartridge or digital only and disc ends up becoming obsolete?

yes.

In fact what I hear that was a plan until someone smacked silicon valley over the head and reminded the world's internet is generally shit.

In the archiving business, tape never went away. For bits per cubic centimetre, there's still no better medium at that volume of data.

Discs get scratched. Cartridges don't.
Also no load times.

retard

I don't think things will ever become 100% digital delivery for consoles. It ignores one of it's few real advantages over PC, that being it's designed as a potentially offline experience. PC gaming assumes at least a decent internet connection, consoles can function as an offline gaming experience, which is still valuable and useful.

Then again, the people making these things seem to insist on making them shitty gaming PCs, so who knows? I don't think it's a good idea to discard one of your major advantages, but what do I know.

Does this mean we get to go back to the 90's?

xD

more durable, no (or at least faster) load times, no moving parts means less likely to malfunction, longer lifespan.

Load times, can be cheaper if done correctly, can offer greater storage sizes than discs, even Blu-Ray, can be made to look a bit cooler than a round disc.

I'm sure they only use DVD/BluRay nowadays so they can justify it as a media player for movies and music as well.

Well, since everyone is slowly adopting solid state storage and phasing out CDs (SD Cards, flash drives, Nintendo using cartridges exclusively again, SSDs) I'd say the advantages are self-evident

why are you so afraid of batteries? It's just a bit of solder, pop a new one on, and you're good. I've heard a ton of user's mention batteries in cartridges here like it's some horrible thing.

Nigger it takes 30 seconds to solder on a new one, and you can get the batteries with the pins that go right on the cartridge for super cheap.

While that's true, I think you're forgetting that you can put hardware on a cartridge.

One of the Street Fighter games from forever ago did that to handle prettier graphics, I believe. The only drawback was that it made the cartridge pretty hot, but never enough to damage anything. They also put weird shit like solar sensors on them for games like Boktai.

Digital only will literally never happen because of Retailers.
And before you say "Digital Vouchers at stores"
No, those don't sell for shit.

What really? Dont tapes decay?

I really hope digital only never takes over. It's the worst thing that can happen to consumers and the PC scene is proof enough.

It won't
The issue is negligable on pc as it can be worked around as it's still an open environment

Not without cracks, and even then physical >>>> shit sitting on your hard drive. If you want to own legitimate copies of something, you're stuck with steam, and steam licenses for games have been revoked in the past just like they say they can do in the EULA.

That to me is the saddest fate.

Cartridges are quickly outpacing compact discs is why. A lot of laptops don't even have CD Drives anymore

One of the Street Fighter Alpha ports did that so graphics weren't horrifically compressed in comparison to the arcade version, yes.

*Read speed
You can read them faster but it can still take long to load if the CPU or memory is slow or if loading requires doing a lot of uncompressing or some other processing.

You do realize that EULA is unenforceable in most of the US right?
And abroad their ability to actually enforce it is even more limited.

Legitimate in the future will mean streaming and mobileshit.
Stop pretending like owning a chinese plastic bundled physical version stuck to one hardware that will inevitably die and be replaced is any different than owning that shit on an HDD or burning it to a disk.

they'll outlive you, you sad little man

No.
howtogeek.com/196541/emmc-vs.-ssd-not-all-solid-state-storage-is-equal/

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don't forget to authenticate your offline mode games before you go offline unexpectedly, goyim :^)

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Right, that's the one. And since then, I think we've had twenty-something years of progress.

I don't know about you, but it makes me wonder what could have been if we'd stuck with cartridges instead of going for discs. Imagine how 2D engines would have been if everyone on the planet hadn't jumped on the 3D train.

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did I just predict the future?

Idiot, what do you do about games that require always-online authentication?

You don't need to authenticate to run in offline mode.
And again, nigga, you'd be dead period if there was an actual nuclear war.

Fuck games with always online, and they always fail.

This also excludes what Sony did as a company in itself outside of Video Games.

So many more, but whatever. Console war shit. I even hate the n64 as well, that system is a whole another story.

All you need is a Sega Genesis, Nes, Snes and PC. The rest is garbage.

Have a nice day.

MAKE BETTER THREADS

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
Why the fuck did it space all my fucking sentences. Fuck this place.

That fucking coffee stain still haunts me whem I sleep.
Go fuck yourself, non DRM cucked digital is the future until a company with balls start printing copies on demand and creates a market out of it.

take care of your shit, jesus. that or learn about back up solutions.

In the case of N64:
-No moving parts
-Saving to the game itself
-Minimal/Nonexistent load times
-Expandability through bigger sizes, enhancement chips
-No licensing fees that lead to money going to competitors and jacking up the SRP

Hi newfag

That disk has been sealed since 2011 and never had any impact or heat into it.
6 fucking years untouched by anything or anyone
Eat my shit

don't buy shit memorex burned copies? Real distributors use pressing for discs. I have CDs from the 80s that are working fine.

20 to 30 years.
The big thing is space. Tape can hold A LOT more than anything else, and it's cheaper per TB.

I think you misread my post.

What I mean is that if physical media is going to continue to exist alongside a digital delivery system and digital exclusive games, is the Switch perhaps more representative of the future where it's more expensive yet more reliable cartridges + digital as the primary medium while disc is tossed out.

I forgot to add that CD-ROM in the '90s rarely added more than jock-rock soundtracks, shitty voice acting, and FMV cutscenes with garbage acting, writing, and camera work, and that most developers took until around 1998-99 to take good advantage of the added storage space.

PlayStation's success with CD-ROM also followed the failure of the CD-ROM-based PC Engine CD, Commodore CDTV, Commodore CD32, Sega CD, Magnavox CD-i, 3DO, LaserActive, Apple Pippin, FM Towns Marty, PC-FX, and Jaguar CD. 3DO was even manufactured by a bigger company than Sony, so other than the surprise third-party support between PS1 and Saturn around 1995, there wasn't much reason to suggest that PlayStation would succeed when it first came out.

I'm not even American you dumbass

I could tell

There are some arcade games that if the battery on the board dies it stops the game from ever working again. You have to replace the battery in like 30 seconds of removing it or the board is bricked.

There's also the concern of old carts that kept data in RAM losing the data. An old Chrono Trigger cart might store your save and then forget it one day.

My old Gameboy Color won't boot up, but I'm wondering if my Pokemon Blue original save is still in there. My Blastoise is long gone, but maybe some of my other fellows are still in there.

My sister bought me the new ((Star Wars Battlefront)) for Christmas and the box was literally empty except a little piece of paper with a download code. I think they did that with Battlefield 4 as well.

The PS1 memory cards were shit, but the PS2 ones could hold a bunch of saves.
Obviously you can't really save to a CD in the game sense, but the CDs did offer 10 times the storage (64mb was the max for the N64 and 700mb was the max for the PS1). Imagine how many carts it would take to make Metal Gear Solid.

Here's a random picture because fuck it.

This is weird, but I see it isn't consumer friendly.

those are just cps3 games iirc. there's also modern techniques for hot-swapping batteries while the game is powered on. There's a guy in Japan who has kept his umihara kawase game running for over 20 years on his super nintendo because he doesn't want to lose his save, and last I heard of him, he hot-swap replaced the cartridge battery while the game was running.

Really, all anons should learn to solder.

All PS4 games and AFAIK most Xbone games install to the system's hard drive for faster loading and random access. The day of games playing directly off of discs is over. Disc based games are basically the same as digital downloads now, only you don't have to wait for tens of gigs of content to download, and you at least have a disc to resell, transfer across consoles if you lose your account, etc.

The advantage of a flash or mask ROM-based cartridge is that due to their decent access speeds, you can play games directly off of them without having to install to internal or external storage. This makes them the obvious choice for the Switch, which has portability requirements and limited internal storage to work with. And Nintendo is used to targeting smaller storage mediums and less expensive art styles than their competitors, and will have no problem fitting their games into the available space.

In contrast, PS4 and Xbone are all about muh AAA, muh 4K. Cartridges would be prohibitively expensive for games with assets that large, as would SSDs large enough to hold more than a handful of games. So discs and HDDs make perfect sense for their market segment as well. The only change I can see Sony or Microsoft implementing in future consoles is using an SSD alongside the HDD as a transparent cache.

Another advantage of cartridges over discs is in the perception. Not just that carts are neat and feel nicer to own than a bunch of fragile discs, but that even normalfags are starting to get turned off from the idea of disc games being glorified install discs. Search for "PS4 install" and you'll find lots of people wondering why the hell they're purchasing a physical copy if it's just going to be installed to the HDD like a digital download. This is causing people to undervalue these physical copies and pushing them in the direction of digital only. But the fact that you play games directly off the cart on a Switch or 3DS makes consumers much more satisfied with buying physical copies of these games. There's a physicality to owning a game that you can pop in at any time that is disappearing from the other platforms.

sony can't reclaim your physical copy of bloodborne when your license expires. They can do it with your digital copy.

you need to rethink everything, you're entirely wrong.

Naturally, the read speed is complete garbage because the tape needs to physically wind to find the data.
Sony made a tape cart a couple of years back that can hold 185 TB, but I don't know if they ever made them for sale.

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You could still say that is more or less the case. I mean, how much of the greater memory space afforded by video game technology these days is ACTUALLY utilized for gameplay and not for all the other shit like cutscenes.

FF7 is only 1.3 gigs and a good chunk of that is just the cutscenes.

>Disc based games are basically the same as digital downloads now, only you don't have to wait for tens of gigs of content to download, and you at least have a disc to resell, transfer across consoles if you lose your account, etc.
Literally the same sentence.

you misunderstand completely.

Not if people keep forcing always-online bullshit on their consoles/games.

fortunately no console has done this yet. MS backtracked hard with the xbone and sony has yet to do it.

Yeah, and it has little to show for graphics. This is a game that could just as easily run on 3DO, or Sega Saturn with the MPEG card.

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Yeah, but you can bet your ass they'd do it all over again if they saw the opportunity. Honestly seeing them drop their spaghetti so hard was pretty entertaining.

Also in the case of N64:
-Maximum 64mb of space
-Higher manufacturing costs
Yes, because we all know about those PS1 games released at a price of 70 dollars

I can solder pretty damn well. It has been a while, but I fixed my sisters laptop power supply. I told her it was temporary, but she just used it until it broke.

That's a radio by the way. I didn't bother compressing it because I'm a lazy fuck.

I understand that you can't read.

Nigger no it couldn't.
Barely. You'd have to completely change shit, like turning transparencies into dithered meshes.
Also

Lynch yourself nigger. Red book audio was fucking glorious.

It is true that the vast majority of storage on FF7 and FF8 were cutscenes. You could remove most of that and have a much smaller size, but damnit I like that FF8 dance scene.

Resident Evil 2 was about 600mb between two discs and Capcom, Angel and Factor 5 were able to somehow fit that into a nintendo 64 cartridge WITH THE CUTSCENES and Shinji Mikami and the RE development staff had every intention of designing Resident Evil 0 as a Nintendo 64 exclusive or timed exclusive and presumably it would have on about the same scale as 1, 2 or 3. For really experienced developers, the 64 cartridge space was never that huge of an obstacle and clever use of said space could allow some developers to make better looking as well as smaller games.

I don't know about FF8, but FF7 probably could have been force fitted onto a 64 cart or at the very least split into into two parts that could have been sold separately for more money.

Are you EE? because thats same radio kit my prof. gave us.

But you can already played FFVII-IX on a PSP

Maybe

Everyone gets that kit, and it collects dust forever after you get a 100% for not fucking it up.

Except it was, because not every developer employs programming wizards like you get from Factor 5. And even, the cutscenes look like shit, and the sound is noticeably down graded. Maybe if Nintendo aided developers more in how to work around the 64s space limitations instead of going up their own assholes in how to develop hardware that they know their internal studios and second parties will figure out at the expense of everyone else, maybe we could've had more PS1 like games on N64.

I had a bad transister at the 2nd AM amp. That was fun to figure out.

Dead laser diodes

N64 also had a weird problem where the RAM was separated and you could only use a small block of it for textures. It was something like 1024k and you couldn't exceed that. The N64 had more RAM than the PS1, but the PS1 didn't have that problem. Maybe that's why N64 games look fuzzy and PS1 look pixelated. The PS1 had a ton of problems itself. All the texture would twitch and wobble, because of slow registers or something.

As I wrote earlier, only a handful of PS1 games used more than 64MB space for anything other than jock-rock soundtracks and shitty FMVs.
For the cartridges. The console was cheaper because they didn't have pay Sony and Philips to license CD-ROM, nor did they have to maintain the moving parts of a CD-ROM drive. They also didn't have their first wave of consoles fuck over because they jewed out on said CD-ROM drive.
That was the SRP of a handful of later N64 games. The price of a PS1, just the system without any games, would get you an N64 and two games in 1996.

PS1 had no Z-buffer. This is why PS1 games look like dogshit when scaled to a higher resolution than the usual base 256x224. Even PS1 conversions like MGS1 had this problem when ported to Windows.

N64 games, on the other hand, pretty seamlessly upscaled to 640x480 when remade for the Gamecube and Wii, or when emulated.

No, that was because the N64 employed an early form of anti-aliasing, which when applied to games rendered in small resolutions like 240p smears the shit out of everything.
It basically had no floating point precision for vertices, and no texture filtering which makes textures look jumpy from certain angles.

It's not about being a programming wizard though, it's just about understanding how to properly use space and compress data on this particular medium and back then, more people were experienced in just that sort of thing because cartridges had been the primary format for video games and the devs at companies like Square, Capcom, Konami etc. had spent years mastering all the different techniques. For people who knew cartridge technology intimately, it was just a matter of spit-lubing your hands and rolling up your sleeves. What hurt the 64 more was not so much the space issue as it was the cost of cartridge production itself and the cost for the development kits along with the royalty fees to Nintendo. Ultimately, these costs simply made putting PS1 style games on the N64 not worth the extra effort, especially when one considered the meager sales of the 64 compared to the Playstation 1.

Most CD based games gave using red book audio by 1997 dipshit. Games like MGS1 and FF7 used audio generated by the PS1 and other means of compressed sound files. THis in turn freed up a lot of space that N64 carts didn't have.
Way to avoid the argument.
You mean the only N64 games in 1996, and even then Mario and Pilotwings 64 were 70 bucks at launch, 20 dollars more than Ps1 games. So that's 340 dollars, enough for a PS1 and one discounted game, maybe two.

You missed the point, they didn't use that extra space meaningfully in the first place.
$299 is more than $199. Do the math.
The games were $60 at Funco Land and Mario was bundled with N64 at Costco, Fry's, and Sam's Club, so even if the price for all of the games was $70 and if we're going by your bullshit numbers, getting one with Pilotwings 64 is still $30 less than a PS1 without any games or the required memory cards.

I only see this kind of extra spending justified by raging Apple or Sony fanboyism.

In what way op? Cartridges will never be cost efficient compared to discs. Depending on the hardware, cartridges can effectively upgrade the system by add more ram or cpu powers for that game anyway and allowing it to do shit it was never able to do, but it wont be cheap. Is money an issue?

wait, they had Costco back then?

The equivalent might have been called 'Price Club' in your region at the time.They merged with Costco in 1997.

Costco and its inferior Walmart equivalent, Sam's Club, date back to the 80s. They started selling consumer electronics in the early 90s. It's a one-stop shop where you can get a 20-pack of toilet paper, a gallon of windshield-wiper fluid, some swirl frozen yogurt, a $6 freshly-cooked rotisserie chicken, and a games console.

I'm aware what they sell. I fucking love Costco. I just didn't know they were around in 1996

Yeah, I wrote that for anyone who hasn't seen it or was scared away by the membership. If you eat there at least once a month, you'll make back the $60 in savings.

I wonder if they have the Switch in stock.

Fucking nerds.

Last time I went to bum all the free samples at my local Costco, I didn't see anything. I got mine at Target at launch. I'm guessing Costco is waiting until Nintendo produces enough.

Costco is pretty good for picking up controllers at too, last gen I got a couple of 360 controllers at Costco for $20 canadabux cheaper than anywhere else

Hardware upgrades.

Is this some kind of meme? Batman: Forever for the SNES took upwards of 20 seconds to load some rooms. And you know what the loading screen said? HOLD ON

I like CDs better. Popping a CD into your computer seems way more comfy than inserting a USB.

That makes me wonder: Did the guys who ported the game to the SNES run into trouble with the system? The Genesis version didn't have any bullshit loading times, and had the better controls (assuming you had a 6-button pad).
I guess that it's just that Genesis does what Nintendon't

The SNES version of SF Alpha 2 also had load times before fights for decompression. A vast majority of cartridge-based games don't have load times, however. Batman Forever has load times because everything related to it is dogshit.

It's unironically my favorite Batman movie, but then I grew up watching it.

I modified all my carts with coin cell holders. Takes less than 5 minutes, and from now on swapping a dead battery will simply consist of opening the cart and replacing the battery like anything else, no need for soldering from that point forward.
It's actually overkill considering I've seen cart batteries last 25+ years. You'll be on your death bed bed after the third or fourth battery change in a cart as long as you use decent batteries.

That image hurts me nearly as much as this one.

This, I fucking hate the PS2 because the lasers can die in a couple years with moderate use. You legitimately have to keep a stock of replacement lasers if you want to keep the damn thing running well into the future.
GameCube lasers seem almost unkillable though. I've never seen one fail outside of noticeable physical abuse of the console.

Solid state media is fucking fast. Discs are goddamn archaic. What the fuck is this, 2005? What computer even needs a disc drive these days?

Fortunately for us, you’ll die first.

I did the same almost 20 years ago, as indicated by these prehistoric potato photos.

I miss those days. Their soldering irons were borderline disposable but it was awesome to be able to get components without having to order them direct from the manufacturer. It was also cool if you got into shit like police scanners and HAM radio. Last time I saw a RadioShack was a couple years ago, it was a glorified smartphone store with some toys, then it closed permanently.

Most old cartridge have a slower Read/Write speed than modern Hard drives.
webm related is loading in an SNES game.

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Do you mean to tell me that technology advances in some way, user?

CDs were still massively cheaper than cartridges even in the 90s.
Cartridge games retailed at around 90$ whereas with CDs you could actually have budget games.

cool factor.

Still a far cry from "No loading times" on those 2mb ROMs.

bullshit. The average cartridge game was between 40 to 70 dollars, unless you bought at jew stores.

Years ago
Cheaper and more reliable than laser disks.

Today
Solid state storage is much faster and offers more storage than laser disks.

I really want physical copies to be shipped on solid state media and honestly have no idea why it hasn't become the standard for PC.
Yes they are slightly more expensive on large scales but it's an extra cost many like myself are willing to pay

The game showed in my webm retailed at 9800yen for the SNES, got a Saturn rerelease with more content for 6000yen and a budget rerelease for around 3000yen.

So, what then, millions of Sata ports? Front-loading-Sata-drives?

As someone that brought a CD drive in the early 90s I can tell you they were fucking expensive, the only reason Sony was able to sell the original PS at a reasonable price was they made the drive in house.

It's not that complicated.

I guess, still seems inferior to download if you live in an area with good internet.

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when games HAD to come on those tings they sucked but memory has increased so hard I can put entire collections of games on a solid flash drive a quarter of the size. disks were always shit, scratched easily too.

online distribution does not mean you always need to be online. always online was never a good idea.

For consoles it does.
Console users have taken always online requirement lying down. Its not like they have any other choice.

I agree that the convenience of downloads can't be ignored and I rarely buy physical copies myself but on the occasion that I do buy physical I would much rather a SD card than an optical disk especially seeing my HDD write speed is over 10 times the maximum DVD read speed.

Now that's a term I haven't heard in a while.

fuck off, retard. $60 is $60 relative to that time period, and have remained the baseline for new releases (that aren't indieshit) to this day. Unless you're hopping into a time machine and having your entire wallet converted into 1993 dollars, it's a moot point.

your fault man

They allow for trickle upgrading of consoles. This is really the big one that most people don't think about.

Biohazard on the n64 was low-res, and that's where the tradeoff was. I mean don't get me wrong, Biohazard for PS1 wasn't ultra real looking or anything, but they had to reduce the resolution on the textures. You can see it pretty clearly in Rebecca herself, she has half the resolution density as her Playstation rendition. And her icon looks like something from a Final Fantasy game.

Good one schlomo
Back in the 90s the average consumer bought less than 6 games every year, That isn't the case anymore.

In this day and age where they hire hundreds of people instead of dozens, money is an issue yeah. The overhead of a cartridge's cost is the most prohibitive thing. There's an obvious way to offset this, which is to just use a flash-based system, flash storage is fucking cheap as all hell, but companies don't want to do this because they think that elaborate hardware designs will prevent piracy. Kind of like Nintendo didn't think anyone would hack the fucking NES Classic and add the entire library of NES games to one of their units on the day the system launched.

It's inferior in most ways, but it feels better in the hands, and nothing can quite compare to the feeling of the cartridge locking into place.

I think the point is though that, low-res or not, Resident Evil 2 64 showed the N64 was definitely capable of keeping up with the PS1 in many ways and that had games like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy 7 been originally designed with the 64 and it's individual limitations and potentials in mind, we could have had more games of that caliber on the system.

And if we imagine that Resident Evil 2 had originally been designed for the 64 exclusively rather than the PS1, I could imagine everything else being the same except for the cutscenes perhaps needing an overhaul to ease the burden on the cartridge. Had Zero actually been finished for the 64, this probably would have been the situation, where there might have been less emphasis on the quality of the 3d graphics of the cinematic cutscenes and perhaps a slightly shorter campaign in order to ensure the in-game graphical and audio quality was at its best. I highly doubt RE2 would have been on the same scale had it been originally for the N64, but I doubt the difference would have been that huge if Shinji Mikami and the RE staff still had more or less the same vision.

Back in the 90's, video games were still seen pretty much niche toys for children, degenerate teenagers and shut in NEETS watching bootleg anime on VHS in between playthroughs of Myst.

Those degenerates and NEETS are what made vidya great in the 90s, they were willing to learn so didn't need game mechanics dumbed-down like today.
I miss the days when it took a willingness to learn just to get a game to run meaning everyone playing was willing to learn.

Blu-ray isn't helping. I miss HD-DVD.

PC-FX, PC Engine, Sega Saturn, Sega CD and Laseractive all have this issue pretty regularly too

cartridge with flash memory anyone?

No argument there. I agree. I'm just saying that it's not like video games were the mass market product back then that they are today. We take for granted that a video game system is a staple of the middle-class American home now. It goes hand in hand with the TV and in some cases is the family's primary entertainment box. So of course people buy more games now because the primary consumers of video games are no longer children saving up their allowances or social drop outs.

Personally I miss those days, when video games were either fancy party favors for those big get togethers, hitech toys for kids or some kind of avante garde thing (back then that was the way PC gaming felt since stuff like the point and click adventure was the thing). When PS1 beat 64, it wasn't just one company winning over another or the victory of a particular format, it was the emergence of a different culture of video games, I think. Just look at the design of the two, you look at the 64 and you're like "this is a toy" and you look at the PS1 and it just has this design that made fit in more with the row where you found the panasonic laser disc players and magnavox stereo receivers.

adjust the pots.

When I was at uni basically every floor on the dorms had at least one PS4 and xbone. barely anyone played vidyas, they were mostly used to watch movies and netflix.
I still have some kid's netflix account on mine and watch anime on his mom's like section of the account heh.

Does not help if the dioed is dead

yeah, nobody back in the day had ever really dreamt that would be the future. The culture of games was just different.

Even the Sega Saturn, while the American marketing team wanted to compete with Sony in pushing the Saturn as 'the next generation of electronic entertainment. are you ready for the new millenium, motherfuckerz!? You can't get more hitech than this shit. Bitches will want to suck your dick just to be near it's hi-tech awesomeness", and while the Saturn could act as an audio or video CD player, the marketing strategy in Japan was still basically to market the Saturn to children and anime nerds. The lyrics to Segata Sanshiro's song are even this:

The message Sega Japan wanted to send? "Stop being a disgusting fucking normalfag". Video games may never be this pure again.

Are those lyrics legit? Would love a real company for once loudly declare "no casuals allowed".

I think the effect of the playstation can best be summed up by my dad. I got into vidya in '89 and my dad hated it, vidya were a waste of time and useless. Come '98 he brought a PlayStation with steering wheel and pedals for Gran Turismo and loved it.
The PS was the console that not only got my dad to stop hating vidya but actually enjoy them.

replace the laser, it's $10. saturn lasers especially rarely die.

Well in that case, I gotta tablet you'll gonna love…

The PS1 outsold PS3, Xbox 360 and even the Wii
What kind of revisionist bullshit are you trying to sell chaim?

Yeah, those are the lyrics translated. And if you watch the Japanese Sega Saturn commercials, you kind of get the idea.

See the PS was the turning point.

You clearly weren't paying attention to the argument made earlier that the PS1 was the system that helped push video games more into the mainstream. see

The PS1 was released in the 90s. Your entire argument was that games were considered niche toys for children despite one of the best selling console getting released during that time period.

All of those except for Saturn have worse issues thanks to cheap surface mount electrolytic capacitors that leak. PC Engine will self destruct from corrosion if you don't do a full recap, but I've only came across one for a refurb in all these years.
I've heard people now swap out Saturn lasers with boards that use SD cards to load games, kinda like a flash cart. I've been meaning to look into that for another project. The only time I even play one was when I borrowed one from a friend along with a copy of Dragon Force.

A decade is a long time in vidya, see pic related and you will see it was the late 90s that the best selling PS games were released. Due o this major shift in the market when those of Holla Forums talk about "the '90s" they are generally talking about the early '90s.

my entire argument was that the biggest consumers of games in the 1990's by either children, teenagers and NEETS and yes that was still very much the case with the early PS1 days and even a good handful of the best selling PS1 games were still games that very much appealed to this crowd and had that traditional sensibility while enjoying more mass appeal than was normal, Final Fantasy 7 for example. But like the other user said, the PS1 was probably the first system where your dad who previously was telling to constantly to stop playing that dang Mario & Sanic so much was now buying a game system for his own overpriced living room entertainment center

When I was growing up, most serious players, like people for whom it was a regular hobby, were either kids, druggies and hood rats with too much free time (like my brothers), anime & comic book enthusiasts, programmers and hackers. That's kind of where the image came from that video games were a degenerate form of entertainment for losers living in their mom's basement, geeks and delinquents. Mature "respectable" people didn't play fucking video games, at best they were just kids' stuff you should learn to eventually grow out of and at worst they were a waste of time and money which could potentially lead you into the arms of Satan or make you go on a school shooting.

N64 games had better textures than PS

Even if it's not instant it's still magnitudes faster than any disc media making your point moot, faggot

I also remember that a lot of people back then had doubts the PS1 was going to make it. For one thing, previous attempts at CD based gaming outside of PC hadn't enjoyed very much success with the Saturn only enjoying a bit of success in Japan and having only the smallest cult following in the NA. Sony was also an outsider and not really a veteran of the gaming scene. It felt at first like another big company trying to make a quick buck off the video game market. And the early PS1 library was extremely lacking with some early games being nothing more than downgraded ports of PC adventure titles and aside from some gems like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider (which also had PC ports) as well, there wasn't that much worth playing on it. It didn't really have that much appeal either to children, who were still a large segment of the home console market at the time. In 1996, the PS1 was your dad or big brother's private console.

They're just cooler. Discs are flimsy and gay.

They are superior because they are faster. it's basically loading a game on a ssd rather than hard-drive.

SSD's are too slow. We should just load the entire game into RAM and run it from there.

About 30 pounds in England.
Budget ones went down from that too - rereleases and so on.
Most expensive brand new releases were 40 pounds.
Maybe the dollar was worthless at that time though.
Can't remember the budget prices though.

NO YOU FUCKING NIGGER! Sony wanted rights to the CD portion of sales because Sony was the one who developed the CD technology.
Nintendo were being jews and decided they wanted rights to not only cartridge based sales but also CD based sales.
behind Sony's back Nintendo went to philips and got them to develop a console, when Sony announced the nintendo playstation. Nintendo backstabbed them and said they are working with philips. Sony got pissed off and decided to make the console on their own. that is where the playstation came.

Nintendo was successful because they had a monopoly, not because they were good. Nintendo even to this day makes it hard on 3rd party.

cartridges were fucking shit you dumb fuck, A single CD could hold 650MB of information while a single cartridge was limited to only 4 Megabytes of information.

are you retarded?

Go fucking KILL yourself you pathetic shit, next time you want to talk shit learn some facts idiot!

The ones sold in racks in places like Woolworths and Asda were fifteen to twenty quid

when cd based consoles released cartridges could hold at least 20MB, probably closer to 32MB. that 650MB was subject to horribly slow read times and most of it was used for shitty movies and higher definition sound.

are you retarded? so are you saying that if you bought a house in the 50's for $5000 that you actually spent $200,000.

you dont understand inflation or how money works.

Don't confuse Megabits with Megabytes.

A cartridge could only hold 4 MEGA BYTES of information not 32 Megabytes, MEGABITS.

what else is new

450 is standard isn't it

Sony actively sold the console to the older market with games like Gran Turismo and Syphon Filter being marketed at adults but it took Final Fantasy 7 and MGS to be released to have a killer app and a clear advantage over the N64 aside from its CD quality audio

some n64 games were >18MB, which cd console are you thinking of?
that isn't even getting into the solid state boards in arcades.

can you go a single post without being objectively wrong?

The largest cartridge was 48 megabits which was 6MB

since he was going on about nintendo playstation i was talking about the SNES.

ahh so you're just retarded

Then how were there 32mb games on the n64 then

tbh he made a small mistake but is right about everything.

because by the time the N64 came around they improved technology, the N64 cartridge could hold 144Megabits of information

No, the largest cart was 512 megabits. Or 64 MB. Like Conker's bad fur day. You fucking retard. It's like cdfags are physically unable to say anything right. No matter what the fuck you say you always get something important wrong.

I was talking about SNES not N64

that's still fucking shit compared to 650MB.

incoming fags that cry about load times that never actually played on the original hardware

anyways many people have tried to reintroduce cartridges but they are basically wasting their time. everything is digital now.

I love techmoan for his coverage about obscure audio tech and his appreciation of god tier display tech: crt

The real "issue" nowadays is that video games get patched. You would need a bunch of extra space for patching. It's why there are some people who have gone to making their own cartridge-looking hard drive bays for their consoles as a joke reference to oldschool games. I saw a site with a guy who made his hard drives for his console look like Sega Genesis cartridges, and every game he had a different hard drive for said game, so he basically took to putting plastic shells on each hard drive that resembled Sega cartridges.

Or devs could just make the games right the first time and stop with the DLC bullshit.

The old joke was "Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got cell phones."
I knew they were dead whent their electronics component section was relegated to a rolling chest of drawers, and white LEDs were $5 a pop.

Remember when you had to deal with modem initialization strings to optimize your connection, and replace all of your in-home phone wiring to keep corrosion from fucking with your speed?

Not easy. There are hundreds of thousands of diode variants, and they're not hand-installed into the assemblies they're part of. I found some low-rent Chinese warehouse that sold laser diode assemblies that are too close for kissing, to a Goldstar 3DO. I've been dragging my feet on actually replacing it, but getting laser assemblies for any optical system is an order of magnitude more difficult in most cases that buying even a mod chip.

Like that will ever happen. The wrong people run the show for any good changes to come down the line.

I like that you think that games back then didn't have patches. There are revision copies of old games. Final Fantasy had 4 revision copies, and even then, there was bugs that could not be fixed. Final Fantasy VI had bugs that never got fixed in any version of the game, like how Evasion% did nothing, instead everything relied on the MEvasion stat. You know, stuff that got patched by RPGOne, a translation group.

And back during the SNES days, Nintendo actually had an online service that downloaded games and even patches to said games. It was never available in North America, only in Japan.

So in closing, fuck you, you're a dumbass, try writing ten thousand lines of code and not making a single mistake.

its called deadlines, not making mistakes,You cant make mistakes in a product you intent to sell especially video games.

that is why they used to employ video game testers to test the game for weeks before release.

What about extra content that was not originally planned and comes as a legitimate effort to give more to the players, like FTL Advanced Edition, or the Ultimates for Killer Instinct, etc

The last time I went into a Radio Shack I was picking up a simple RCA->3.5mm jack that I had priced only for about $1. I was willing to pay the mark-up to have it the same day so I went in to see if they had one for less than $10. When I entered the store I found:

Browsed around for a little while and didn't see what I needed. I decided to ask the normalfags at the register for help and they just starred back at me blankly. Finally, one of them said they'd fetch the manager. I was expecting another idiot when this guy came walking out from the back who looked like he hadn't updated his wardrobe since 1978. He leads me right to what I need and starts showing me where all the old good stuff is stored. It was in a few drawers next to unrelated crap and it was all covered in dust.

I explained that I wasn't going to pay that much for something I could order for $1. He shook his head and said that he knew I'd say that. He handed me the part and told me not to worry about paying.

If you're out there Radio Shack-user I hope you're doing well.

Are you seriously that naive? Dungeons & Dragons has erata for a reason. There's a reason why there's updated versions of various things on a yearly basis, such as the Star Wars Encyclopedia, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary has had to fix definitions between years, etc.

Mistakes happen. You CAN sell a product with mistakes. What you can't do is claim thing that is untrue and use that to sell a product. There's a huge difference.

You sell a vehicle with faulty airbags, and then later on you do a recall on said airbags to fix them. It's the same concept as a fucking patch. It's not that you ran out of time to make the airbags work right, because that's just retarded to think that. They test the fuck out of cars before they go to showrooms.

As a person who actually develops software, I can tell you, no matter how meticulous and careful you think you are, and no matter how far back your milestones or "deadlines" are (even with NO deadlines), you are going to fucking write at least four lines of code that are going to completely fuck your product up .. and even with a testing group of 1,000 people you'll never see those fuck ups. But increase the number of users to 10,000,000 people and you'll find out about those fuck ups pretty quick.

Learn about what you're talking about before you talk shit.

I don't believe it, but I do think it's a nice story user thank you for sharing. I'm happy to go to my local radioshack and still find broadcast equipment I need for my pro monitors

if it makes you any happier a lot of the hobbyists into this stuff either work in a field where they can express that knowledge (I do, retro video game store, technician in the back focusing on repairs, I fixed a coleco gemini the other day, it was a lot of fun) - so we're still out there and there's tons of forums where likeminded people gather.

Over discs sure, over HDDs maybe but there are arguments for both, over SSDs fuck no, hell by now it's likely a good idea to just look into Ramdisks.
But even then most of the time the bottleneck for any single application isn't from disk I/O so it's pointless top go for higher numbers.

Also I wasn't implying that they intentionally sell faulty airbags, only that even in the best testing environment you'll never catch every problem.

I'm not saying bugs don't happen, it's part of computers. but you cant sell a piece of shit with a ton of mistakes and claim its finished product.

he just wanted a friend and you crushed his hopes, he committed suicide friendless.

It's true but I can't prove it. We talked about a lot of things, HAM Radio, early computers and consoles, and tons of other stuff. He said he was happy to see a young person still interested in stuff like that. He even wanted to know what I was going to use it for. It was for piping audio from a console through the mic-in port which was an requirement back in the early days of justin.tv. Really cool guy and he knew all about my old TRS-80 and even gave me some stuff to keep it going.

I've thought about opening my own shop too but I don't know if I'd have enough traffic given the area I live in.

The Linux community would beg to differ, although their defense is that you can download their stuff for free. Microsoft sold a product too called Windows ME.

Damn, that's miserable. I get all of my stuff from Jameco now, but I have thousands upon thousands of resistors and capacitors I cannot use, because they sold them by the hundreds.

I would ask what's wrong with you, but the answer probably isn't terminal cancer, so I don't really care.

Damn, wish I still had my TRS-80, because buying one now is a bit of a logistical nightmare. I should still have a CoCo2 somewhere, but without any means of loading data onto it (no suitable and also working tape drive/decks), it will be relegated to cart usage.

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It was my first computer so I didn't know it was trash for many years.

Fair.

I agree with you on loonix

In regards to HL2, do you have the video where I believe it was GabeN who pointed out that they ruined the maze sequence of HL2 because of literally ONE PLAYER who kept turning right at every junction?

No, it's called cutting corners.

Stop posting your stupid video around Holla Forums you fucking shill.

wew

I guess that's what allows you to walk/ride/glide from one area to another in a seamless way in Breath of the Wild (I remember how this was done in Elder Scrolls).

You still need to wait for half a minute when teleporting or when exiting shrines, though.

Tell that to the pokemon game that had load times in between fights. Oh right, we ignore history when it defeats our arguments. :^)

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Well, theoretically they should have much quicker loading times and overall have better performance than CD/DVD based vidya, the drawback obviously is that it costs much more, it's much more susceptible to indirect damage and generally speaking games programmed for cartridges drive away third party support since they require ports of their games to work around the cartridge's limitations.

That's less about the media format and more about precaching, efficient assets, and efficient asset use. Since BoW reuses most textures and models, and uses lightweight textures and models, more of the game can be in memory.

While cartridges can also be called "memory", it's a different quality of memory with higher capacity and slower access times. Like how you can get 1 TB SSDs, probably not more than 50 GB of RAM, and probably not more than 5 GB of VRAM.

Memory media is still better than optical for speed, and there's a good case for the cost-effectiveness of it.

Keep yelling that he's being "passive aggressive", I'm sure reddit can spot that shit from a mile away.

no but i'll post some.

Oh, rebbit spacing, that dank meme that crossed the pond to this place from 4chan, no thanks.

I dont think i've bought 6 games in the past 6 years

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STOP

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I love that it goes to their parents, it's a little snitch-bot.

Stop giving rights to objects. It's not alive, it's machinery and a basic set of instructions humans have given it.

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Joke are funny.

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maybe during the NES era, but the Megadrive outsold the SNES in both hardware and software sales in the North American market.

The reason Nintendo has survived and Sega didn't had everything to do with the fact that Nintendo's quality was much more consistent and predictable and as a company it was a lot more efficiently run than Sega.

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Out of curiosity I just checked if anyone seriously thinks robots should have rights, while I know my search results are biased by my other searches I couldn't find anything.

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I just played the first 2 chapters to record these.

So the source is just enabling commentary? I was just about to ask where you got them.
My hatred for play-testers also increased 10 fold on this day.

There's reason we shouldn't get hit, and it's not because it hurts, it's because it can cause damage to us. Pain is just the brain's way of telling us: "Dude this shouldn't be happening stop it RIGHT NOW". Enjoying pain is a literal brain dysfunction.
Taking abuse can damage the robot, so it's best if it avoid it instead of coping with it.
Programming a robot to enjoy pain would lead up to robotical masturbatory suicide.

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Look for tags such as Trans-humanism

I can't deal with that level of stupidity, I'll just trust you that people are that ignorant.
I have a friend that actually believes in the "technological singularity".

Get better friends. he would literally kill you and himself to become a slave.

I have a small core group of friends I have had for over 20 years, we are a weird mix as over the years most of us became interested in science while a few became conspiritards and hippies.

They are good people but so misguided I can't help but laugh, I even spotted one in a conspiracy debunk video the other day.

What's up with her eye?

just how the artist drew it.

I still cant get over this.

She would have more pointed/pear tits because their burgers are square

when did this wendy meme begin

Here's a case over disk

here is the fucking retard guy who went in circles for 30 minutes, they interviewed him.

How is this even a discussion? Solid state hardware has a higher data capacity while being 10x smaller. There are no moving parts and perhaps most importantly - the reader is much smaller. Disc drives take up a huge amount of space inside the case.

carts let you defer computation from the console making for a cheap console and expensive games.
carts were only interesting in the "8 & 16 bit" era, as you could do a lot of trickery with co-processing, bank switching and cycle accurate scanline interrupts to extend the console.

That's a blatant fucking lie, you people disgust me with your continual cocksucking up to Nintendo as if they're your underdog.

I had an opposite problem with first Halo. I kept thinking that I'm going in circles through the same room, but no, turns out it's just a Bungie's idea of level design.

Sega fell apart because SoA ended up taking 58% of the US console market with the Genesis, and the keystone of that coup was making Sonic the Hedgehog a pack-in title. SoJ's executives caught ABSOLUTE HELL for letting some dumb barbarian gaijin out-samurai them in business, and they made it their mission to fuck SoA over at every opportunity thereafter. That's why Sega seemed to go retarded right around the launch of the Sega CD, all the way through the Dreamcast.

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This is cringe as fuck. It's really good for the company though, so props to that.

Corporate shitposting has lead to plenty of comedy gold, it the first case I know of where corporations trying to adopt "youth culture" hasn't ended badly.

According to his posts, he regularly gets lost in mazes and caves in video games, and it's nothing new to him. Loser.

The worst thing is they seek out shit players when play-testing because they tend to cater to the lowest common denominator.

So I see people talk as if cartridges don't have load times. Well this will blow you out of the water. Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the SNES is plagued with them, just go and watch the bits before the fights start, there are long pauses to the cartridge decompressing data.

The point is that the narrative of cartridge = instant load times is bullshit.

Forgot the video.

Unsurprisingly Holla Forums is full of tech illiterates, cartridges read much faster than optical drives but don't magically increase the CPU / RAM throughput which is what leads to long loading times on old consoles.

Sure, sure, it's not that we think there's zero load time. Even on MS-DOS there was fucking load time. The thing is that there are methods and techniques to decrease load time, and the idea is to make load time transparent so that you never notice it. Capcom did this with the RE games by doing door transitions, which had the added benefit of making going through doors creepy.

Konami did this by using transition rooms in SOTN which loaded two areas and then when you went through either door it unloaded one of the areas. But to make the game seem "seemless," they always kept at least 2 areas in memory, the transition hallway and the current area.

C'mon now, that's less than a second of loading, and there might be only a few of those games where such decompressing is needed.
Compared to usual disk loading time this is nothing.

Also just saying but Flash storage having such high yields nowadays, we could store most of a game uncompressed, which would mean less need to compress the games beforehand. GTA5 is a great example of a game that has very little compression, you could store the whole game on a 100GB flash stick.

We never stopped using cartridges, user.

I don't see your point

Even fucking NES had load times you dumbasses. It's just it had to load fuckall data, it's whole RAM was 2 kilobytes. Of course you can memcpy 2048 bytes over 40 pin parallel port in a fraction of a second, even if it's slow as shit.

What? Those are transitions and last not even a few seconds? That's not loading screens.

Nintendo fans really are the best goyim.

Why do you think you can't switch them off when you can toggle literally everything else? Because then you'd be presented with a static loading screen instead.

Exactly. It's like the PS4 having a SATA2 bottleneck yet the PS4 can support SATA3 which would have decreased the loading times substantially.

Because is fucking lazy and inept? I mean, what the fuck do you expect to happen, having no transition between the field and a battle would be incredibly awkward and clunky.

Maybe I don't fucking want any animations to play and I want an instant change from field to battle and I specifically don't care if it's abrupt because I want it as quick and possible. Elsewhere in the game there are plenty of options that can disable shit like that if you so choose. But not the transition, no. Because you, being a faggot you are, think you know better what I want.

The fucking transition animations often finish playing well before battle screen pops up. You can't be as dumb as to think that this is an artistic choice or some other bullshit.

No, he's right, that WAS a loading screen. That shit's been confirmed for a long time. But it's s stylized loading screen, like the loading rooms for SOTN and the effect FF6 shows when you get into a random battle.

Spike McFang's loading times were short too, whenever you left one area and entered another there was a half second delay between rooms for loading. Streaming data didn't exist back then.

Pins on carts corrode, and people blowing on them just makes the problem worse. With everyone having been told to blow on carts over the years, they have been dropping like flies.

Disc rot is basically a thing of the past at this point.

Not really. I have Activision 2600 carts, INTV carts, C64 carts, Tandy carts, NES, SMS, Genesis, and Gameboy carts all with good contacts, and they've been exposed to open air for decades. The worst ones have minor oxidation, and the worst I've seen was corroded from exposure to extremely humid air. Any water from saliva that gets into a game from blowing into it tends to evaporate pretty quickly.

No, shitty manufacturing of discs will always be the Jewish/Chinese way, and that will keep disc rot active.

I can't think of any discs manufactured after 1998 that have rotted, other than burnable discs.

I could see this happening soon. The one thing I kind of hate with modern consoles that they dropped with the previous was having a means to save your save data outside of having it locked to console which becomes unusable if the system breaks or leaving it in the cloud.

As this guy was saying Sega beat Nintendo in the American market while Nintendo won in terms of international success across all three major regions during the SNES era, particularly due to the appeal of its RPG library and many well-marketed first party titles. But even so, the fact that Sega was such a formidable opponent in the industry at the time for Nintendo blows the whole "nintendo had a monopoly, that's the only reason they won. nobody could actually like their games" The only time Nintendo had something even close to a monopoly was the NES/Famicom era and that was just because of the "crash" of the 1980's that made it so their only real competition for a time was the Sega Master System, a niche console, and early PC games, which appealed to a completely different market. During the SNES/MD period, Sega and Nintendo were practically equals and during the 64/PS1/Saturn period, Nintendo was second fiddle to Sony, then second to last during the Gamecube/PS2/XBox/DC era and only managed to bounce back momentarily with the Wii until finally dropping back to last place with the Wii U. The only market that Nintendo has consistently been the dominant force in has been the handheld market.

Nintendo has survived because unlike Sega, it had a clear and consistent brand image, focused more on long-term stability, didn't have a confederate-like corporate structure that saw infighting between the different branches for control over the company's future and most importantly, made games of a fairly consistent quality that a lot of people liked.

Don't modern consoles allow you to transfer your save data to a USB stick, though? Pretty sure the PS3/PS4 do.

The Wii U allowed you to actually transfer the whole game onto a flash drive or SD card in order to compensate for the short changing on the internal memory, something the Switch is continuing.

Really?

Yeah, if you buy a game digitally on the Wii U or Switch, you can transfer the game data from the internal memory to an SD card. Not even the PS3 I think does that except for save data.

Just parallel a battery or PSU with alligator clamps while you are working this way they board is never un-powered.

You can install some games onto the PS3 to save time for loading, like MGS4… Only thing is, installing MGS4 on the PS3 took like 30 minutes. It was pretty ridiculous. And swapping data for the various acts of the game took another 15-20 min. I remember playing through MGS4. Between the 60 minute cutscenes between every fucking level and the installation of data to cutdown load times, I remember how fucking short each level was.

That's true, but from my experience with my playstation, you're not able to, out of the box at least, just straight up transfer that data to an external hard drive as a back up (unless I'm an idiot who just never noticed you could). Which is kinda irritating because you have a limited internal memory, which while large, can still fill up fast due to the size of many bigger PS3/PS4 titles. So if you're somebody who prefers to not have too many discs and cases lying around and you mainly buy through PSN, you run into an issue where you might have to constantly delete games off your console to make room for new games, then if you want to play them again, you have to redownload or install them. While if your system breaks down, you can always redownload your games from PSN, this does give off the feeling like you don't really OWN the game, but are more or less just streaming it. It's like they're forcing you to continue buying physical discs from Scamstop.

At least with the Wii U and the Switch, you can redownload the game, but you can also transfer the game data to an SD card, which gives that feeling of true ownership that comes with buying retail carts/discs.

Thing is you have to log in to verify your data on the Wii-U/Switch, I'm betting, which means that your 'hardware backup' is no more a 'backup' than say Steam or PSN, etc. Anyway, I don't do any kind of cheating, I don't troll, and I don't fuck around with things that can get me banned on Steam/PSN/XBL/whatever. So I've never been afraid about buying digital games. You're never going to get a 90% off sale at EB Games/GameStop/Game, etc.

And while you can play your shit in offline mode, you typically have to verify your data before you can load/reinstall it, so I just see it for what it is, it's just a method to reduce downloads but not a real solution to the idea of "not owning a physical copy." I'm not really worried about being banned, and I don't buy from sites like G2A, etc, so I'm not really worried that one day GabeN is gonna take my collection away. And the very idea that Steam could go out of business is ludicrous, considering how much money they make every year (and it kept growing even during the recession). If it was a failing business, I might start shitting my pants about digital medium, but I trust PSN/Nintendo/Steam/whomever, because the PR for fucking around is a real backlash. The only time Steam has ever revoked a game was when licenses were literally stolen, and I'm quite in favor of revoking those licenses.

I haven't really noticed anything like this. I know that Nintendo has a failsafe for the Switch where if you try to transfer a game to an SD card and then try to use that SD card on another Switch console, it won't work because the SD card becomes formatted exclusively for your Switch. But I'm pretty sure that as long as you're using the same system, you can back up the game on an SD card and then use it in offline mode across multiple user profiles as long as it is on the same console for which you formatted that particular SD.

More like as integrated graphics get smaller and smaller and internet speeds increase, "consoles" will be the size of a largish portable HDD and you'll play games from the cloud.

At the end of the generation, they narrowly outsold SNES in North America, Korea (due to some good marketing by licensee Samsung Electronics), and Brazil (same deal with a local company called Tec Toy). They were beaten by Nintendo in Europe and even moreso in Japan.

even were not that retarded…

What kinda retard doesn't think there are conspiracies….

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Yes.

normalfags are going to love being able to carry around "their" video games in something the size of a laptop battery, especially if they can use something like next-gen headsets to play it without needing a TV. A wireless data unit built into the console, a bluetooth controller and a bluetooth display - and the whole thing is running from inside a backpack, no wires needed. It's not going to happen in the tenth generation, or even the eleventh, but by the end of the 2020s it will be a reality. Maybe not as fully fledged as I've laid out, but it's coming. And we can't stop it.

When the Wendy's Twitter account tweeted a Wendy's Pepe during the election and Holla Forums took off with it, the rest is history :^)

Durability. Mask ROMs can last for centuries under the right conditions. Discs can't.