/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7988565
>kids react: the thread

Piracy. Retard.

>They still used the cartridge format well into the early 2000s
Lol no, every new console from the early 2000s all used some sort of optical media (DVDs, Nintendo's retarded minidisc) and with the exception of portable consoles, every console had long abandoned cartridges for optical media since as far back as the original PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

>>7988565
>Why were gaming console companies scared of tapes and floppy disks?
rampant piracy and capacity, but for some reason companies like sega and nintendo just assumed piracy wouldn't be a thing with cartridges due to the costs involved. they were sadly mistaken.

>They still used the cartridge format well into the early 2000s
>they
>format
what format? it's merely ROM mirrored directly into the system's RAM.

>>7988573
This, and at the time cartridges were cheaper and easier to make. If it isn’t broken don’t fix it.

>>7988584
>and at the time cartridges were cheaper and easier to make
>making a plastic shell, making and designing a pcb, and populating it with expensive ROM chips and other circuitry is cheaper than making disks and tape
imagine being this intellectually disabled? sad.

>>7988579
>>7988582
OP means that there were still new games being made on cartridges for Nintendo 64 in 2001.

>>7988565
Inferior durability and load times.

If cart era games all came on floppies and tapes and shit, you'd be hard pressed to ever find working original copies after more than ten years.

>>7988573
>>7988582
That's really easy to solve. A console should've had both tape deck/disk drive and a small cartridge slot. A small and cheap to manufacture credit card sized PCB containing 4-8KB of essential game data such as graphics or game logic should've been included with the tape/disk containing the much larger portion of the game data. It would've been easy for major game publishers to distribute their games like this.

>>7988579
>every new console from the early 2000s all used some sort of optical media
N64 was still getting new games in 2001-2002.

>>7988584
>cartridges were cheaper and easier to make
They never were.

>>7988596
>you'd be hard pressed to ever find working original copies after more than ten years.
zoom zoom

>>7988565
Proprietary storage medium generates more revenue for the console manufacturer. It had nothing to do with piracy as these braindead retards above me would have you believe.

>>7988596
>Inferior durability
They could lasted long enough until the next generation of console and storage medium comes.
>and load times
True for tapes, but floppy disks were quite fast to load. Especially if you eliminated the seek operation like what FDS did. Not only it's a cost saving measure, games would load in a few seconds too (around 12KB/s).
>you'd be hard pressed to ever find working original copies after more than ten years
Depends on where you're keeping them. Early floppies could last over 50 years.

>>7988594
>>7988601
That's why I said "new consoles" that came out in the early 2000s. I know the Nintendo 64 still published games well into this period, but I mean consoles like the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube.

Speaking of which, I find it funny how the Switch had to just regress back to cartridges after all of the other Nintendo systems from over a decade used a form of optical media.

>>7988618
Why would they put an optical drive in a handheld system? Having SD cards like the DS/3DS is the only thing that isn't retarded about the switch.

>>7988613
Wouldn't cheap and rewriteable non-proprietary medium be more profitable because there would be vastly more games being made and bought?

>>7988594
>OP means that there were still new games being made on cartridges for Nintendo 64 in 2001.
there aren't many options for the n64 outside of backup systems like the doktorv64 to load software into them.

>>7988631
No. The software companies had to give a bigger cut of revenue to the console maker because they controlled the manufacturing if the consoles. This is why EA struck that deal with SEGA to make their own cartridges instead of having SEGA manufacture them.
It's a racket

>>7988618
Moving from optical disks to flash memory isn't a regression. Having to buy the physical game carts instead of being able to download them directly from the online store is, however.

>>7988638
*controlled manufacturing of the cartridges
Sorry been on an all nighter. I'm going to bed now, goodnight.

>>7988639
Digital copies suck on switch. They are locked to a single profile. Only dumbfucks use the eShop.

>>7988638
And I thought gaben was bad.

>>7988642
>They are locked to a single profile
I've never owned a switch. Isn't that what steam does to?

>>7988589
Imagine typing all of that for nothing, kek.

>>7988630
>Why would they put an optical drive in a handheld system?

>>7988601
That’s why Nintendo released the discs and then switched to cartridges a year later, they like losing $$.

>>7988652
The mini drive ate through the battery quickly.

>>7988652
So your solution is having them make another proprietary optical disc format instead of the solid state medium they have been using for 15 years? Or are you wanting them to put a fuckin portable blu ray drive on the switch? Lmao

>>7988667
Hey, it wouldn't be impossible, if not quite impractical

>>7988613
This is the answer. Let's take Nintendo for example. They could also dictate how many cartridges got produced as well. Hey 3rd party dev, you have a decent sleeper game that could BTFO Zelda? Sorry we are only gonna have a 200k production run. Now fuck off and give us our licensing fee

>>7988652
https://m.banggood.com/Coolbaby-X9-S-8GB-3000+-Games-5_1-inch-HD-Screen-Retro-Handheld-Game-Console-Game-Player-with-Double-Joystick-for-PSP-PS1-Game-Emulator-p-1696953.html?rmmds=search&act_poa=POA7020455&cur_warehouse=CN

>>7988601
>A console should've had...
11/troll

Not vidya.

>>7988565
Requires much more RAM compared to cartridges so consoles would have cost a bit more upfront.

>>7988672
>They could also dictate how many cartridges got produced as well. Hey 3rd party dev, you have a decent sleeper game that could BTFO Zelda? Sorry we are only gonna have a 200k production run.

Not exactly. Developers could order a specific number of cartridges though IIRC it had to be a multiple of 20k. You could order another run although most devs never bothered unless the game was exceptionally popular. Nintendo also decided based on a pretty arbitrary rating system how good a game was and whether it was worth promoting or not. If the game was forgettable shovelware it got little promotion.

>>7988652
That's why I got a DS. I didn't want my games wearing out. How are UMDs holding up now?

>>7988642
Also, the cartridges taste good.

>>7988645
Yes, only physical copies come with right of first sale. Many gamers are entirely unaware their public library system has current console games they'd want to play.

>>7989080
I just ripped them to ISOs and put them away. I *think* I remember where I put them...

>>7988573
>>7988584
>>7988594
>>7988596
>>7988642
>>7989078
Cartridge bros... we won

>>7988565

Cartridges are an extensible system that let you include bits of extra hardware for some games, thus giving you a bit more lifespan out of your console.

>>7989139
Outside Japan, was that capability ever used for anything but mappers and Super FX?

>>7988652
The price of flash memory crashed during the PSP's life. UMDs proved to be one of the most poorly timed decisions of the console.

>>7989163
Certain game boy games would add additional RAM that way IIRC.

>>7989163
Atari had a special chip for certain 2600 carts.

>>7989301
They could also get special versions of ROM chips made with the bank switch circuit built in. But the 2600 was nothing compared to NES carts.

>>7989163
Megadrive had some carts with extra chips.

>>7989115
There was no other option for them, they couldn't have a portable system with discs.

64DD used magnetic discs

>>7989416
>64DD
>making your own disc drive from scratch
>three years late
>less space than a Zip disc
>initially sold by mail-order
>by mail order IN JAPAN
>TEN count 'em TEN titles, including a utility disc
>IGN rated it 6.0/10
>discontinued 14 months later
yep, that was a real success there

>>7989139
Why not just build unified hardware upgrade units, like extra RAM module or graphics acceleration module that could be attached to your console? That would be a lot cheaper and more effective than buying one for each game.

>>7988601
>That's really easy to solve. A console should've had both tape deck/disk drive and a small cartridge slot. A small and cheap to manufacture credit card sized PCB containing 4-8KB of essential game data such as graphics or game logic should've been included with the tape/disk containing the much larger portion of the game data. It would've been easy for major game publishers to distribute their games like this.
This would be a field day for cracking groups. Lots of cat and mouse. You know how quickly mice reproduce... Any solutions like this only prevented casual pirates from renting a game and copying it. Scene groups would find ways.

>>7988565
>>7988582
>>7988589
Access times you retards. Access times were the number 1 issue by far. Ever notice how it took upwards of an hour to load a game from tapes? Probably not most of you are zoomers who never even saw one and yet feel qualified to speak about it. Tapes are still used today for cheap archival storage but we don't use them on computers. Why? Because of access time.

>>7988615
>True for tape but floppy disks were quite fast to load. Especially if you eliminated the seek operation like what FDS did. Not only it's a cost saving measure, games would load in a few seconds too (around 12KB/s).
"quite fast" isn't the same as direct access is it? These consoles didn't want to require enough RAM to load everything it needed into memory. Floppy discs could potentially have been an option for some games, that's why you had the Famicom Disk System and pirate add-ons that used floppy discs for 16-bit machines. However the access was still slow compared to carts. Remember waiting a bit for a floppy disc to be accessed? Remember that noise you'd hear? It took a bit for it to work. So no it wasn't the best option, no you don't know more than multi-million/billion dollar corporations and research projects.

>>7988601
>>7989831
Thought about this potential problem a bit more. Obvious solution would be a cartridge that allows dumping this data to a disk and loading it into the system's memory from it. You could store the contents of multiple cartridges on one disk then swap for the disk with copied game data. A system designed like this negates the need for more complicated console copiers like pic related which were very expensive at the time. Copy protection schemes could be devised after the fact but they would still have cracks being distributed.

>>7989884
>Ever notice how it took upwards of an hour to load a game from tapes?
>standard 30-45 minute tapes takes an hour to load a game
zoom zoom
Also that's why C64 tape deck has a counter on it. Depends on the game or how many games the tape contains, but you're not always supposed to always start playing from the beginning. The main advantage of cassette is it's cheap and gives small third party devs a chance to distribute their games with little cost.
>"quite fast" isn't the same as direct access is it?
He said load time, not direct access.
>However the access was still slow compared to carts.
RAM data access is fast.
>Remember waiting a bit for a floppy disc to be accessed? Remember that noise you'd hear? It took a bit for it to work.
RAM can be bankswitched too, so you could have an option load the entire game data into the RAM without flipping the disk during gameplay if you had enough RAM. Some computer games did that, and it wouldn't be impossible for consoles either.
>no you don't know more than multi-million/billion dollar corporations and research projects
I do know well that companies are greedy profit oriented organizations and not consumer oriented.

>>7988565
>why weren't consoles more like my janky-ass 1980s home computer
Uh, because those computers sucked ass?

>>7988565
Master System got popular in the UK just because it was a cartridge system, which was unusual for the audience at the time.

>>7989412
>being to young to remember the psp

>>7988573
It's why Nintendo made the Gaycube's disc such an odd size and spin backwards...

>>7988661
If you had a 3000 it would use the extra 32MB of RAM as a disc cache which greatly helped.

>>7991791
That's a myth.

>>7988672
Sounds like what happened to Body Harvest.
>I want a remake of BH

>>7990038
>Uh, because those computers sucked ass?

You must be 18 to use this website.

>>7991791
As if we couldn't just buy these

>>7992201
Thats an example of a game ruined by Nintendo. Nintendo thought the graphics weren't good enough so they forced the devs to sacrifice the framerate for higher poly count.

>>7992363
ever try to whittle one down and then write it backwards?

>>7990113
What? Everyone had played atari 2600. Also the c64 used cartridges too.

>>7988579
even prior to that,1993 onward it was CD such as mega cd,turbografix CD,3do,CDI,amiga cd32 and neo geo CD THEN came the ps1 and saturn

OP is a zoomer who doesnt know anything and spouts his dumb zoomer opinions

>>7989412
ok zoomer,the psp exists

>>7989139
there is literally a mega cd cart that was made for retail a few years ago,literally a sega cd in a cart with a built in sd card reader for roms,plug it in and boom mega cd in a cart.

>>7988606
No underage poster uses the phrase "you'd be hard-pressed".

>>7992376
Just embarassing

>>7992376

>>7989163
gyromite nes was just the famicom version with an adapter inside the (absolutely cavernous) nes cart

>>7992209
>I must be underage if I don't appreciate your shitty Zniggy shovelware computers

>>7992803
What in the unholy fuck

>>7992803
absolutely based

Because its magnetic, retard.

>>7992462
Don't reply to the austrailian tranny

>>7990038
#filtered

>>7992447
You don't know how to read.

>>7992914
shut your mouth cocksucker

>>7992871
>non-Japanese retro machine
Into the trash can it goes.

>>7989163
Extra RAM (not to mention N64 had extra ram pack), gyroscopes (multiple different games), light sensor (Boktai), rumble motor (pokemon pinball, some gba titles), persistent saves, real time clock, coprocessors for maths and shit, super game boy, master system converter etc from the top of my head. IIRC Atari 7800 had also the TIA chip to generate the 2600 noises, and system was supposed to have the audio chips on the cartridges themselves if devs wanted anything more.

>>7989793
Because it's actually more profitable for the company in the long run, despite appearing to be reverse.
Consider this:
What are you more likely to buy as an user - a console extension for 30 bucks that might or might not "pay back" in the long run for you OR pay 5 buck more for that specific game you want to play? Meanwhile the company faces a choice: design a special, unified extension system, that will cost about half the development price of the whole console, THEN hope for the best for people to buy it for potential games using it OR pay 20 cents more per cartridge during production of the game and then recoup it with sales of said game?

>>7993996
>What are you more likely to buy as an user - a console extension for 30 bucks that might or might not "pay back" in the long run for you OR pay 5 buck more for that specific game you want to play?
The former because I'm not a consoomer.

>>7992803
Sometimes I ask myself why I still come to this stupid fuckin chink website after 13 years. And then I see shit like this and I remember why.

>>7993996
hardware doesn't magically become a sixth of the price because you put it in a game cartridge instead

>>7993996
Also the costs of leading-edge hardware, especially RAM, go down over time. If Nintendo had put another 8K or 16K of RAM into the NES it would have probably added $50 to the console. A few years later and it's like 2 bucks for an 8K SRAM chip, and twice that for 32K.
A few extra address lines in the cartridge are cheap and powerful, but that was a lesson not properly learned until after 1984.
>>7994067
But it does get a lot cheaper if you put it in a game cartridge five years later instead of in the console at launch.

>>7994078
That's true, which is why things like RAM expansions became briefly popular in the 90s.

>>7988565
In the 80s people used to copy tapes. VHS is a big no no as not everyone had a VCR, let alone would lug it around or pull out and plug in wires to plug into their console and then back into the TV. Floppies are generally just too small and slow when some of the info isn't stored on a HDD or in RAM.

>>7994047
>I am not consoomer
>Which is why I would buy things
Pottery

>>7994737
Taek the floppy answer from an Amiga 500 owner. The OS took forever and then you had to swap disks all the time

>>7994741
kek

Because they had the worst load times in history.

/thread

>>7994743
>you had to swap disks all the time
Expand your RAM.

>>7993996
>5 buck more for that specific game you want to play
That's impossible, floppy and tapes were much cheaper than game carts. Even a little kid could collect over 100 games with his own money.

>>7994741
consoomers love products that rip them off

>>7988565
>tapes
It takes so fucking long to load and you have to have the entire game in RAM at once. The only reason cassette tapes were used for games at all is because they were cheap. The floppy drive for the C64 for example cost about as much as the computer itself because it had to contain it's own RAM and CPU since the C64 couldn't control it on it's own.

>>7999698
The electronics in the 1541 weren't the issue, it was the drive mechanism itself. A PCB can get cheaper with time but mechanical devices don't.

>>7999721
In either case tapes are awful for stuff like games. Besides for the sake of cheapness in 8-bit home computers they're only used for backup.

also nobody used tapes in the US after 1983, only Euros

>>7988565
Piracy and load times.

>>7989412

>>7988565
Beyond piracy mentioned elsewhere, cartridges were far more durable than magnetic media, which was a bigger deal when you consider that a large chunk of the target market for game consoles consists of kids. Plus they had faster read speeds than disks, which was nice because game consoles didn't install games. It would be neat to see what public reaction was to the Famicom Disk System and Nintendo's subsequent abandonment of the add-on, despite for a brief time looking like th future of the console.

>>7988565

>>7999772
>countless European kids played on home computer games with cassette tapes just fine
Was this an American problem?

>>7988565
The cartridges weren't just for reading data dumbass, they often had chips that improved performance and gave special features, just look at the SNES.

>>7988565
t. zoomer that has never used a tape in his life

>>7999913
As an Xer I can say that it's too bad nobody used 8-track to load programs, because they made much more awesome tape piles on the side of the road.

>>7999721
Ah, the clueless zoom zoom. Once a rare and endangered subspecies due to the tide pod outbreak of 2018 these fucknuts are back in force. Shitting up the internet for everyone.

>>7988652
I would have liked to see a handheld that used these.

>>7988565
Cartridges are fast. Load times on cartridge games are usually just copying a few pieces of important data into RAM, like enemy positions and the graphics into video memory, and usually happen so quickly that you don't realize the game is loading data.
Magnetic media is slow: disk drives were fairly expensive (and still not that fast), tape drives are obscenely slow.
RAM was getting cheap, but it was still cheaper to just offload ROM costs onto the consumer -- the base system could have vastly less RAM than the ROMs used (very basic NES games are like 48kB, but the machine can ship with only 2kB of RAM; later games could both provide RAM on the cartridge and larger ROMs).
The FDS stopped being relevant very quickly as ROM prices plummeted, which meant that the disadvantages of magnetic media outweighed the advantages. FDS disks were no longer bigger than the ROMs they were set to replace.
Cartridges could contain additional hardware, which was extensively used on the NES and SNES. Mapper chips with shit like automatic background animation, extra sound in Famicom games, extra processors in SNES games, etc.
And lastly, cartridges were harder for the average person to copy, compared to rampant piracy of games on systems that used magnetic media.

>>7990592
>>7992453
man, I don't fucking miss UMDs at all, they were slow as balls
being able to run games off of the memory card was a godsend when I hacked my PSP
even the games I owned legit, I'd copy to the card because it was so much faster

>>8000724
Now I'll have to buy the White Album again.

>>8001924
>Cartridges are fast.
RAM is fast too.
>tape drives are obscenely slow
Tape fastloaders on the C64 were quite fast.
>RAM was getting cheap, but it was still cheaper to just offload ROM costs onto the consumer
Cheaper for whom? The consumer or the corporation?
>which meant that the disadvantages of magnetic media outweighed the advantages
Said who? Floppies were still much cheaper than ROM carts, and RAM prices were plummeting as well.
>FDS disks were no longer bigger than the ROMs they were set to replace.
The FDS should've gotten RAM upgrades (it was embarrassing how the FDS only had 32K RAM + 8K VRAM while the avergaeg 8-bit gaming computer of its era had 128K , the Coco 3 could even be upgraded to over 1MB) and you could load a game into multiple disks.
>Mapper chips
You know that RAM can be banked too, right?
>extra sound in Famicom games
The FDS had that too.
>extra processors in SNES games
Nobody needed that.
>cartridges were harder for the average person to copy, compared to rampant piracy of games on systems that used magnetic media
Sticking a small integrated circuit on floppy disks could prevent day 1, week 1, or even year 1 piracy.

>>7992803
I made a jig with my cnc router to make them smaller and perfectly circle but that's cool too.

Carts allow you to offload a decent chunk of the cost onto the game and not the console. Mechanical drive assemblies are not cheap, RAM to store the loaded programs was REALLY not cheap. On the other hand supporting carts on those early consoles was literally just putting a socket on the main bus and charging the customer for the expense. Customers are dumb, they will always willingly save $10 on the base machine just to pay $10 more per game.

>>8003169
>Tape fastloaders on the C64 were quite fast.
Only compared to the stock routines. The C2N's baud rate was lower than other micros and so any trick you pulled on the C64 could also be pulled on another micro for better speed. Much of the reason C64 games loaded faster than other machines was because the later Amstrad, Spectrum and BBC Micros that existed at the time of the Fastloaders had 128K RAM. More RAM means more loading. The C64 originally sold based on its 64K, it also ironically wound up staying on 64K when everyone else upped the ante.

>>8003245
It actually depends on the game. C64 fastloaders could load data at around 0.4-0.6 KB/s. That would be 80 seconds to load SMB, because it's a 40K game. Also the C64 was relatively slow actually, but more reliable.
>it also ironically wound up staying on 64K when everyone else upped the ante.
That's due to the nature of it's 6502 CPU. Z80 CPU could read banked memory more easily while the 6502 the C64 used would need more pins. Commodore made C128 too, but it was incompatible with the games made for C64 unless its run on C64 mode.

>why did companies abandon magnetic media?
If you ever used either, you would know why. They are very slow to write to or read from, they are very easily damaged, and they are easily copied. It's why computer games had all the special decoders and codesheets before they started using software DRM. Could you imagine console gamers being forced to look up Word 14 on Page 18 of the manual every time they wanted to play? Or having to wait 8 minutes for the game to load?
>it was cheaper!
Paper punch cards would be even cheaper, can you guess why they weren't pushing for punch card consoles?

>>8001924
It sucks that your balls are slow and can't go out with your PSP

>>8003169
cringe

>>8003334
>They are very slow to write to or read from
That's what the RAM for. They're slow but able go store over 1MB of data no sweat.
>they are very easily damaged
Game stores should be mandated to provide a replacement free of cost.
>they are easily copied.
See >>7988601
>can you guess why they weren't pushing for punch card consoles?
Because it only stores 10 bit of data at most.

The FDS and its eventual redundancy demonstrate the lack of advantages of magnetic storage compared to ROMs in that time period.

>>7988594
Cartridges are superior in every way but cost

>>8003298
>Z80 CPU could read banked memory more easily while the 6502 the C64 used would need more pins
no it's not. both use 16-bit address bus so 64k memory without banking.

>>8004054
And distribution. Devs who had to make games for carts were given tight schedule because carts took longer to manufacture. Floppies and tapes could be copied in a day.

>>7988573
you can eliminate 99% of piracy by slightly altering the enclosure

>>7988615
>Depends on where you're keeping them. Early floppies could last over 50 years.
Game consoles are used by literal children you stupid nerd

>>7999913
What they SHOULD have done is used cassettes as primitive memory cards. It would have been better than using passwords, at least. If you only encoded like <= 64 bytes per save it would have been fast enough.

>>7999913
What they SHOULD have done is used cassettes as primitive memory cards. It would have been better than using passwords, at least. If you only encoded like <= 64 bytes per save it would have been fast enough.