/vr/ - Retro Games

Carts, forever.
CDs are convenient and cheaper, but fuck loading times.

>>6444846
No.

>>6444846
CD's just aren't the most resistant stuff. Although I can't imagine what would've happened to consoles if they didn't use CD's at the time they did.
It's a great media, it's just that they're not the most reliable stuff to keep working after 3 or 4 decades of use.
My SNES tho lmao my cartridges look like I just brought them home from the shelf and I've played countless years of each and every one.
Both my psx and my ps2 are long departed.

CD are easier to copy and make backups of
If a cart dies you might have it dumped but you're not likely to be able to make repro of it. Hope you got a flashcart and it's compatible with your game

>>6444873
I'm dying to buy a flashcart for my snes, they go around for quite a bit of money where I live but I have the console in perfect state and this CRT I'm not using.
I haven't done it yet because they say it'll fuck your console up. Are there any good sources for that?

Carts end up with the production issue where developers start cheaping out and picking the lowest option they can go. Just look at the Switch where you end up with game compilations only having one game in the cart and the other as downloads.

>>6444886

just do it

>>6444846
CDs
>you can always keep burning them
>easy to scratch, even normal play on some consoles gives them scratches over time no matter how you handle them
>life expectancy lower than cartridges
>some consoles (mostly non /vr/) have mods for replacing the disc drive with disc images on a flash drive or external HDD
Carts
>little to no loading
>no need to worry about lasers and motors
>pretty much every console has its equivalent of the Everdrive
Yeah I think carts win.

I have 300 CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, and DVD-RWs. All blanks. All Verbatim. All the good shit. Yes, it's worth my time. Flash memory, which is what I assume you meant by "cartridges", is an unknown quantity with which I have yet to experiment with in any large-scale capacity. The lack of hard data on long-term reliability will likely have me steer clear for a good long while.

>>6444846
Cartridge

>>6444939
>I have 300 CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, and DVD-RWs. All blanks. All Verbatim. All the good shit.
All dead

Romsets stored on your ssd are the best I reckon.

>>6446134
They work just fine for me, Anon. Petty jealousy is unbecoming.

>>6446139
ROMSets, yeah. SSD? Not so much.

back then? cds
now? carts

Carts. Nintendo made the right choice by sticking with carts for N64.

>>6446231

>>6446240
Nigger

>>6444939
Probably the most cringe larp I've seen in a few weeks

I would not recommend buying disc based games unless the disc is in near perfect or perfect condition. A little scratch is all it takes to end up with a choppy fmv or level where the music cuts out. Or one little pin hole on the data layer and you now have a dead data sector and the game won’t progress beyond that point because you’ll lose picture or the game flat out freezes. I got a copy of Saga Frontier 2 that was seemingly in perfect shape, not a single scratch. Half way though the game at the same spot every time the game freezes. Held the disc up to light and sure enough there was a tiny little pin hole the light shined through. If you are buying a disc game hold it up to light and look for parts where light shines through.

Then there’s the lasers and disc motors that go bad. Disc just has too many variable points of potential failure, all these thing need to work to play the game.

Cartridges on the other hand are a tougher and reliable medium, you can stack them and you don’t have to handle them like they are glass eggs, the main point of failure with carts are connector pins. Those can usually be remedied with taking tweezers and moving the pins back closer together again, and cleaning the cart contacts. Cartridge games and systems will long out live disc based games and systems.

That said a well cared for and properly stored disc will last as long as you will, but same can be said of cartridges too.

>>6446168
SSDs all the way.

>>6446246
I'm sitting here looking at them as we speak, Anon. Each one in 50-disc spindles.

>>6446291
Okay, I'll bite: show me a reliability study of at least ten years covering no less than three completely separate models. Each model must have a capacity of no less than 100GBs and the tests must have been performed by an unrelated 3rd-party.

Go on. I'll wait.

>>6444846
Ironically, cartridges ultimately came back. The Switch is basically a cartridge-based home console system.

>>6446281
Yeah, this is one of the main reasons why I stopped buying games for my PS2 and opted instead for McFree boot. I thought I had an issue with the disc drive dying, but all it needed was a bit of lube. Overall though, I would agree that in principle disc-based systems are not as durable merely by virtue of having moving parts. But there are also mechanical watches that are over 50 years old and work fine. Obviously metal is more durable than plastic, but having lubricant makes a difference.

CDs are infinitely better in every meaningful way and allowed for more and better games to be produced.

>>6444849
carts have loading times.

>>6446464
>carts have loading times.
ok.

>>6446472
>he never played quake64
>he never played an nes game

>>6446464
>allowed for more and better games to be produced.
More? Definitely
Better? LOL

>>6446475
Sorry I can't hear you over the existence of rhythm games.

>>6446473
ok.

>>6446324
Judging from your post you don't fully comprehend how NAND works and how its reliability is measured.

>>6446479
Some of the best rhythm games were on Nintendo DS cards. Why do you think CDs are needed to have rhythm games? N64 even had a DDR.
Arcade rhythm games were PCBs, no CD whatsoever.
Even Famiclones have their own DDR-like bootlegs lmao.

>>6446487
>Some of the best rhythm games were on Nintendo DS cards
compressed to shit and with huge losses, thanks CDs for inventing it and cartridges doing it all worse.

All you've done so far is prove cartridges ruined a great genre.

>>6446493
ok looney.

>>6446464
>like 1% of cart-based games have 5 seconds of loading, so that excuses that 100% of CD games have 60 seconds!
Not how it works.

>>6446305
That wouldn't even be impressible if it wasn't a larp. It's the whole thing where you larp about the mundane and pretend to know anything that makes it so cringe.

>>6446512
Not him, but I think it's possible for someone to have 300+ CD-R/DVD-R. Before the cloud era, burning CDs for backing up shit was normal. I must have around 20 or so DVD-Rs with backup, and they still work. I can imagine some spergo having 300+.
Anyway, I don't think OP meant to talk about CDs in that way, he's talking about CD-ROMs when it comes to video games, not the CD/DVD you burn your porn on. Oh also, of course CDs suck for backup, 700MB a shit.

>>6446506
>>like 1% of cart-based games have 5 seconds of loading, so that excuses that 100% of CD games have 60 seconds!
agreed, that's not how it works.

>>6444846
>Which is better?
Depends. Both have crucial pros and cons.
>CDs
+much, much cheaper
+up to 650 MB
+easy to copy, which means easy replacement when your CD is damaged
-long loading time
-terrible durability, reliability and longevity
-needs a CD player, which wasn't cheap back in the 90s
-can't save games internally
-easy to pirate

>Cartridges
+virtually no loading time
+internal saving
+hard to pirate
+durable
-a lot more expensive to manufacture, around $15 for a 1 MB cartridge, N64 cartridge was 25-30x the price of a CD on average
-very small storage
-back in the nintendo days before EEPROM they used battery powered SRAM saving, hence your data will be gone once the battery runs out, and nintendo was so retarded so they have backup power, and your battery is soldered to the board so good luck replacing it without losing your data

Yes, price is a huge factor. I think Sony chose the best storage method with the technology that was available at the time. Nintendo should've chosen a floptical drive or some other affordable magnetic storage format if they wanted to cut the cost of CD player. I think 3 MB 3.5 floppy disk would be great, just use simplified textures to safe some space and MIDI format for the music.

>>6446456
Shitch uses cartridges because nintendie is so jewish about of muh piracy.

>>6446706
>I think Sony chose the best storage method
Sony wasn't the first to use CDs.

>>6446456
Switch isn't really cartridge based. The contents of the cards is copied to the console's own RAM over a serial interface, not addressed directly. The last true cartridge system was G*me Boy Advance.

>>6444846
Cartridges are pretty nice when you don't have a lot of RAM to work with, because they enable immediate access to a lot of assets. It made Mario Kart 64's pre-rendered sprites possible. There's no reason to buy them today unless you're one of those miserable wankers who gets off on buying shit and then reverts to a default state of misery after the short lived high wears off. I know that's how it works because I dated one.

>>6444846
The thing about physical copies is they come with first sale rights. If you're someone who follows the rules instead of just "finding" anything you want, this can make console gaming more affordable than PC gaming. Many public library systems now offer current gen games you'd want to play.

Why haven't they invented a CD you can put an SD card in with a bunch of .iso files like they have with carts?

>>6444846
neither one is clearly superior.
carts:
+no loading times
+durable
-expensive
-battery backup fails over time (but can be replaced)
cds:
+cheap
+holds lots of data
-scratches
-need external memory

Cartridges are superior in all ways. Flash memory is just better. Switch games are the proof of it, discs were a relic and waste of time all along. Theyre good for mass media stuff like movies and music, but more expensive syuff deserves a better medium.

>>6446765
It's not technologically feasible, and it's preferable to replace the whole drive with something solid state.

>>6446774
Actual cartridges aren't flash, zoomer. Nothing current has actual cartridges.

>>6446778
He should've said "solid-state media" instead.

Carts are obviously superior. Consoles are going back to solid state storage because it is superior for gaming. It is just that optical media was briefly better for distribution purposes.

Games in the near future will be distributed on optical media because it is cheap to reproduce, but they are just an intermediate format to get the data to your SSD. We will see a return of cartridges once high-capacity SSDs become dirt cheap again.

>>6446769
>neither one is clearly superior
When carts were 30 times more expensive than CDs despite having less than 1/10 the capacity, you can see there's a clear winner here.

>>6446774
>flash memory
>cart

>>6446789
Carts were not superior in the 90s. Also carts and the SSD we have today function differently, carts were read only storage with battery or EEPROM data saving. Carts are definitely not gong back, why buy a cart for one game when you can have many on an SSD?

>It is just that optical media was briefly better for distribution purposes.
Actually starting in the late 90s, hard disks became a lot cheaper to produce. The reason game companies still relied on optical drives was as an anti piracy method. Xbox had 8GB of storage but you could only store game music there.

>We will see a return of cartridges once high-capacity SSDs become dirt cheap again.
We won't see carts ever again, as a game storage method. As a general storage method, external SSD's technically are the cartridges. What we will see soon however is the return of magnetic storage with at least 20TB capacity, 500 MB/s reading speed, and lower price than both HDD and SSD.

>>6444894
Discs are plagued with the same problem. I bought a Command & Conquer compilation disc for PC a few years ago and the CD itself literally was a download code for the games on Origin.

It actually takes more work, but publishers do it because they can make more money in secondhand sales.

>>6446516
>Not him
totally not
>but I think it's possible
totally is
>cope
totally deflecting
Regardless of the relation between you and the larper, any attempts to copesplain the shitpost will never change the cringe level of your/his larppost. It was fedora tipping fart sniffing shitposting on the most ignorant level. There's just no coming back from that.

>>6446706
>back in the nintendo days before EEPROM they used battery powered SRAM saving
I wonder what was the first game to use EEPROMs?

I know that Wonder Boy in Monster World for MD/Gen used them, and that was released in 1991. I don’t think any SNES game did saves without batteries.

>>6447026
Sonic 3 uses Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM), which I've never seen in anything else

>>6444846
Cartridges seem to be coming back with the Switch, and to be honest, this isn't 2000 anymore. We have USB and CD/DVD/whatever feel old and busted.
But back then and from a logistical point of view, picking cartridges over CDs was retarded.

>>6446789
>Games in the near future will be distributed on optical media because it is cheap to reproduce, but they are just an intermediate format to get the data to your SSD. We will see a return of cartridges once high-capacity SSDs become dirt cheap again.
LMAO you wish. Physical media is going to die and games on consoles will be "download only".

>>6447161
Seems like history is repeating itself. Back in the early days of the Famicom Nintendo developed the FDS because catridges were too expensive and couldn't hold much data. Once cartridges became affordable again and mapper chips were developed they went back to them.

But what's the point of sticking to physical media in 2020?

>>6444846
You can't tell me what do to with my money.

>>6446242
based

>>6446706
>-back in the nintendo days before EEPROM they used battery powered SRAM saving, hence your data will be gone once the battery runs out, and nintendo was so retarded so they have backup power, and your battery is soldered to the board so good luck replacing it without losing your data