ITT: Formats that never or barely got video games put on them

[Anonymous No.9471716]

Pic very related.

[Anonymous No.9471753]

I got one of these in 1997 for the sole purpose of going to the local university's library to download pc demos because 56k fucking sucked
There were great as long as you didn't get like on of the 80% that just died

[Anonymous No.9471810]

>>9471716
>>9471753
*click*
*click*
*click*
*click*
*click*
heh nuthin personell

[Anonymous No.9471831]

>>9471810
OOOOOH NOOO! THE CLICK OF DEATH!

[Anonymous No.9471851]

Would a VHS videogame console have been the worst console of all time?

[Anonymous No.9471863]

>>9471851
Unless you want extremely slow data storage they wouldn't function as games because they're not interactive in that way at all.

[Anonymous No.9471874]

>>9471851
there is one. Check the nerd.

[Anonymous No.9471880]

>>9471716

[Anonymous No.9471937]

>>9471851
Night Trap was originally made for a cancelled VHS-based console.

[Anonymous No.9472215]

>>9471753
>>9471810
>>9471831
that's reassuring, i was a student back in 2000 and we had no choice but have a zip drive to bring abode premiere projects from home to school, my zip drive wasn't even a year old and died like that the day before i had to turn in my final project, i had to rush to a store where they only had an internal one and i had to idea how to hook them up, just unplugged the floppy disk drive (or maybe the cd player i'm not sure) and it miraculously worked. back then i thought i was extremely unlucky that it died. thanks for reading my blog

[Anonymous No.9472246]

>>9471851
>>9471863
If they could run games from tapes for old computers, couldn't they have done the same with VHS? Not sure if it's any different, but I figure they were still just magnetic tape format.

[Anonymous No.9472253]

>>9471851
would???
it *was*

[Anonymous No.9472291]

>>9471716
Not Zip exactly but DD used very similar tech. Still qualifies as rarely used but jus saying. Sure people transferred or ran games off zip disks too. Weirdos.

[Anonymous No.9472324]

>>9472215
My memory is a little hazy but I think there was a specific way a zip disk could get damaged that would wreck any drive you put it in. Then that drive would replicate that fatal damage to any disk put in it, which would in turn wreck any drive it was put in, etc., etc.

[Anonymous No.9472335]

Zip drives were so fucking slow. Just pure agony to use. I think I did backups on them like twice and then decided it wasn't worth it

[Anonymous No.9472346]

>>9471716
>>9471753
I still have a Zip 250 drive with 100 and 250 disks, but no way to connect to my PC. I think it might still work.

[Anonymous No.9472554]

>>9471851
actually there are multiple ones, most some obscure in japan for kids

[Anonymous No.9472678]

>>9472246
Well yes, but cassette tapes already had really long loading times. Storing digital data on VHS would take far too long to load for it to be worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.9472802]

>>9472335
It was much faster than CD. Zip drive was also cheaper than CD drive. Still nowhere as fast as HDD, but the load time wouldn't be an issue for games whatsoever. The poor reliability is what kept it from being a popular format.

>>9471863
>>9472678
VHS transfer rate is really fast actually, but the seek time is really slow. It wouldn't be a problem if the player is only required to load the game once though, so a 90s console with something like 16MB of RAM could benefit from it.

[Anonymous No.9472883]

>>9472678
Nope. Imagine being so addicted to the (You)s that you'd out yourself as a clueless tard just to get a few.

[Anonymous No.9473219]

>>9472246
Not sure why you would unless you are just that curious about how unwieldy tape formats are at data storage, if you were that set on using tape you would use a slightly more tailored form of cassette and not the one made for video purposes.

[Anonymous No.9473279]

The Smartmedia card

To my knowledge only Cybiko used it

[Anonymous No.9473351]

>>9472802
>a 90s console with something like 16MB of RAM could benefit from it.
That's the problem, RAM has always been expensive and mid 90's console with 16MB would cost as much as a PC - much more than $700 3DO.
But VHS media is intetesting indeed. It can store 2-4 Gb of data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

[Anonymous No.9473354]

>>9471716
Can Iomega make 100mb cartridges format for Ultra N64?

[Anonymous No.9473362]

I was surprised no one ever came up with a cartridge format for the amiga, it was probably possible and would have help with porting sega games.
I think future game systems should just use a cartridge that used sd card type of storage, they hold as much as blu ray and don't cost much anyway. The ngage sort of used sd cards or at least they work in the same reader.

[Anonymous No.9473376]

>>9473279
Game Park GP32 also used it.

[Anonymous No.9473380]

>>9473279
The gp32 used it as well.

[Anonymous No.9473381]

>>9473362
Ngage uses MMCs.

[Anonymous No.9473407]

>>9471716
>Pic very related.
zip was unreliable to store backup data. you seriously think people were going to use this for permanent storage of games? nobody thought about this for a moment. zip fucked up so badly when they launched that they lost most of their money due to the amount of warranties they were having to fulfil due to their broken drives. to save money, they pulled parts out of defective drives to make new drives and then sold these "new" drives to same people and defects would return. it took several years for zip to release a drive (and manufacture a disk) that wasn't a disaster and by the time they did that, cd burners became very cheap.

>>9471851
would have been ok. sony were able to develop PCM recorders using consumer VHS/beta/umatic. you can store over an hour of 44.1khz 16-bit digital audio on -ONE- VHS tape (played back in realtime btw).

[Anonymous No.9473408]

>>9473362
>I was surprised no one ever came up with a cartridge format for the amiga
but they did. it was the cost of making circuit boards, rom chips etc. that greatly exceeded the costs involved to write the same software onto a disk. it was never going to be popular despite amiga having support for it. very few things were ever released as a cart for amiga, and one of them was action replay.

[Anonymous No.9473416]

>>9473380
Upgrade Hucard before Nintendo Switch

[Anonymous No.9473420]

>>9473279
a whole bunch of various samplers by roland used it. it's a shocking format that nobody should ever have to use. it was unreliable then and now it's extremely expensive to find cards for your old music gear that needs them.

[Anonymous No.9473436]

>>9472324
>My memory is a little hazy but I think there was a specific way a zip disk could get damaged that would wreck any drive you put it in. Then that drive would replicate that fatal damage to any disk put in it, which would in turn wreck any drive it was put in, etc., etc.
there was no specific way. iomega's drives were all defective until they stopped manufacturing them. if you wrote a disk out on one drive, the chances of it working on another drive that didn't write it is a coin toss. people got very tired of playing this game of russian roulette with their data.

[Anonymous No.9473608]

>>9473279
>To my knowledge
That's because you've only seen it in one youtube. If you'd been quite the retro gamer around the turn of the century you'd know better.

[Anonymous No.9473649]

>>9473351
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
I ordered one for my collection just today in fact. That was rather interesting technology, and they were making these boards in my city!. They are quite rare these days, so I plan to reverse-engineer it and maybe make some more. It looks simple enough.

[Anonymous No.9473778]

>>9471753
I'm at work now and we litterally have boxes of hundreds of these never used. No fucking clue why since they are older than the building

[Anonymous No.9473786]

>>9472335
>>zip drives slow

My nigga...

[Anonymous No.9473912]

>>9473649
>i plan to clone useless obsolete poorly designed garbage
For what porpoise?

[Anonymous No.9473937]

>>9473912
It's fun.

[Anonymous No.9474026]

>>9471753
They had one drive at my university back in 1999 but as I never invested in one, I used good old 1.44MB discs for small games and console roms.

>>9471716
These discs were pretty expensive anyway. Why bother with these when CDs were larger and cheaper to manufacture?

[Anonymous No.9474032]

>>9471851

[Anonymous No.9474061]

>>9472346
>it might still work.
Bold claim.

[Anonymous No.9474073]

>>9474032
It's honestly amazing how many times consoles with controllers held like fishing poles had to fail before companies stopped trying.

[Anonymous No.9474134]

>>9473912
>>9473937
Yep, it's fun.

[Anonymous No.9474143]

[Anonymous No.9474295]

>>9474143

True but not retro.

[Anonymous No.9474316]

>>9474143
I'll never get this meme. It was relevant for maybe a couple months.

[Anonymous No.9474358]

>>9474026
>These discs were pretty expensive anyway. Why bother with these when CDs were larger and cheaper to manufacture?
The drive was much cheaper than CD drive. The price of the disks depended on the capacity.

[Anonymous No.9474482]

>>9471716

[Anonymous No.9474484]

>>9474482
Its essentially a psp umd.

[Anonymous No.9474489]

>>9474026
>>disc != disk

Also stop being poor

[Anonymous No.9474505]

>>9474482
Mini disc players were so god damn aesthetic it hurts. Two bad like only 2 kids at my school had them

[Anonymous No.9474508]

>>9474505

[Anonymous No.9474509]

>>9474508

[Anonymous No.9474518]

>>9474505
they caught on everywhere but america for whatever reason

[Anonymous No.9474541]

>>9474505
MiniDisk could have done so much fucking more. Sony could have used it as a Floppy replacement in the early 1990s. Like 100 MB per disc in 1993? Get fucked zip disk

[Anonymous No.9474565]

>>9474541
Yea that was amazing for the time but they were much more expensive than cd players which were still expensive in the early 90s

[Anonymous No.9474627]

>>9474489
Making cost efficient products =/= being poor

[Anonymous No.9474639]

>>9474541
Zip disks' selling point was that they're cheap. Magnetic data transfer was cheaper than laser. Zip disks were more like plastic hard drives rather CDs. MiniDiscs were encased CDs, and yes they were expensive.

[Anonymous No.9475236]

>>9473937
k. Personally I find it more fun to clone useful well designed garbage, but whatever floats your boat.

[Anonymous No.9475382]

>>9473362
Blurays are like 120GB now, an SD card of the same size is $30.

[Anonymous No.9475394]

>>9473219
The VHS format would store much more data simply by having much more tape, at the expense of a much longer waiting time. Of course I realize how stupid this would be for a commercial console. For what it's worth I do know of at least one commercial tape drive for computers which allowed backing up hard-drives to a VHS. So you could theoretically load Duke Nukem off a VHS if you wanted to.

[Anonymous No.9475428]

>>9473362
Why use the cartridge slot when the Amiga has a built in 880KB floppy drive? That's bigger than most SNES and Mega Drive carts already, and floppy disks cost like nothing. Most games took only like 8 to 12 seconds to load on startup. If you wanted bigger games or reduce the load time, you'd simply expand the RAM. It was expandable to 4MB or something. There's absolutely no point in distributing amiga games in cartridges.

[Anonymous No.9475446]

>>9471716
yup nothing like original hardware. zoomies and their zip emulators just dont know

[Anonymous No.9475714]

>>9474061
I wish there was an easy-to-find adapter to connect it to USB. I wonder what are in those disks.

[Anonymous No.9477556]

>>9471716

[Anonymous No.9477574]

>>9473279
>raw fucking nand on a card
>easily corrupted with no way to recover
lmao who invented this thing

[Anonymous No.9477597]

>>9472346
>>9474061
The 100 MB drives were decently reliable, the real quality control issues were with the 250 and 750 drives.

[Anonymous No.9477613]

>>9473416
Gp32 only accepts 128mb smc cards, which are hard to find. I ended up getting an smc to micro SD converter (yes it exists) and medical grade 128mb micro SD cards. So I can have a few cards loaded with games and homebrew shit. Best homebrew scene ever, it is sorely missed

[Anonymous No.9477621]

>>9474316
I still use my PS3 quite often with a cfw. There's a shit ton of games playable on it. PS1/2/3 psn games, emulation, ports. It may not be as versatile as the Wii for emulation, but what it does, it does well.

[Anonymous No.9477625]

[Anonymous No.9477648]

>>9477613
It only works with the biggest card?
Also it's weird such an adapter exists lol

[Anonymous No.9477801]

>>9477574
It didn't say in the wikipedia you just read?

[Anonymous No.9477804]

>>9473279
Fuck you

>>pays 60 bucks to hold 3 and a half songs

[Anonymous No.9477805]

>>9474627
Just buy more money

>>That's not a meme

[Anonymous No.9477806]

>>9477801
Well whoever it is I'm glad we've left such ideas behind.
It's like a fucking flash version of tapes lmao

[Anonymous No.9477829]

>>9474032
That console and controller look like a parody game system from a TV sitcom, I don't even believe this thing can be real.

[Anonymous No.9477831]

>>9474316
There was no real reason to buy a PS3 until demon's souls. That's where the meme came from. Anyway go talk about this somewhere else.

[Anonymous No.9477840]

>>9474518
Americans had bought vinyl and then cassettes and CD came around as a new compromise to replace both formats. Minidisc was just one too many formats to sell to the consumers, especially since having to record your CDs to a minidisc was like going backward to the days of copying records to tape.

The other big factor was that most Americans commute by car, not on foot, and so a music format which could be easily pocketed by pedestrian commuters in Europe and Japan had little appeal to American drivers whose cars had ample space for CDs or tapes.

[Anonymous No.9477847]

>>9475382
The issue, as I understand it, is that multilayer BluRays have questionable quality control. Data archivers don't seem to trust the 50GB and up offerings.

[Anonymous No.9477850]

>>9477556
Those are PC Cards, right? The cardbus thing?

[Anonymous No.9477857]

>>9477847
The question is about games though and consoles are using 120GB BDs now.

>>9477850
No that's microdrive, it's kinda like a CF card but there's a mechanical HDD inside.

[Anonymous No.9477862]

HD-DVD lol. Also most home video formats, obviously not including laser

[Anonymous No.9477879]

>>9473279
There was an N64 "game" that came on a cart with two SmartMedia card slots for reading and writing images.

[Anonymous No.9478169]

>>9471716
It kinda did.

>>9472335
>Zip drives were so fucking slow
Only for winfags who had to use it via the parallel port.

[Anonymous No.9478232]

>>9475428
You're thinking of the NES. SNES had very few 4mbit games, the majority where 8/16/32 which are 1MB, 2MB and 4MB respectively. And speaking as an Amiga owner, you usually had to wait for most of that 880KB to load before you got to play anything which was easily 1-2 minutes. And it only got worse with the RAM expanded machines and A1200s where you'd need to load all of disc 1 and some combination of the other discs. A 32mbit cartridge with near instant loading would have been amazing but then it would have cost what a SNES game did and Amiga users were used to a third of that cost at most and hell, they usually just X-Copy'd their friend's already pirate copy as it was...

[Anonymous No.9478583]

>>9474518
Minidisc hardware stylings were absolute kino

[Anonymous No.9478669]

>>9477831
>There was no real reason to buy a PS3 until demon's souls.
For the price they made good PC's yellow dog linux and erc distros were cool as fuck. It was so gay soyn got rid of other OS on the PS3 fucking yellow kikes blaming hackers. When in reality it was because the import fraud claiming the PS3 was a computer and a console. Got vito'd so they could no longer bypass tariffs and etc shit. I think even Iran was clustering them together for ghetto super computers. That was another neat thing about other OS even the unite states military was fucking around clustering like 100 together. Because it was far cheaper then buying other hardware somehow.
Tl;dr Soyn should have doubled down on other OS since the ps2-5 all run custom BSD. Having the console run its own official linux/bsd/wtv distro alongside the console environment would have been really cool. But no Japanese boomers are luddites and retarded, marketing the playstation as a console and PC, would have worked so well.

[Anonymous No.9478681]

>>9471753
>>9472215
I never knew of any games released in this format, it seemed very short-lived and poorly timed. The only time I remember having to have a Zip disk was in middle school art class circa 1999, for some reason. The teacher collected them from us, and I don’t remember us ever using them for any kind of project. We got them back at the end of the year, so for all I know she was using them the whole time for something else.

[Anonymous No.9478735]

I wonder how many wax cylinders it would take to store a video game.

[Anonymous No.9478742]

>>9471753
Same. It served it's purpose for the brief window where you needed way more space than 1.44" floppies but CD Burners were still prohibitively expensive.

[Anonymous No.9478743]

>>9471716
This is permanently etched in the zeitgeist in Face/Off.

[Anonymous No.9479424]

USB

[Anonymous No.9479567]

>>9478232
The majority of MMC NES games used 128KB or 256KB carts. Most mega drive games are under 1MB. SMW and A Link to the Past are about 512KB and 720KB respectively. The most popular SNES and MD games weren't anywhere close to the maximum capacity of 4MB. Those carts were expensive as shit. The only games where they're a necessity are fighting games and squeenix cinematic jarpigs.
>And speaking as an Amiga owner, you usually had to wait for most of that 880KB to load before you got to play anything which was easily 1-2 minutes.
I don't remember the loading screens taking that long. You didn't wait for the whole floppy to load, most game were split into opening screen, game data, and level data chunks. The intro music alone could take up to 300KB while level themes were normally 96KB or less. But even if I had to wait 2 minutes for a game to load, I'd rather do that than waste 50 quids or 60 american 90s dollars on a video game. Most console owners rented their games like poorfags and had to pay for a game genie cart and the game mags that had the codes. Amiga bros could grab a game for free and get some cracktro trainer cheats as a bonus. I pity console peasants.

[Anonymous No.9479691]

>>9473279
>>9473279
>The Smartmedia card
From what I understand, SM was literally a couple of bare NAND flash chips. And by bare, I mean I'm sure that it didn't have a chip inside to do wear-leveling like SD does. I gave up on the format after a 128 meg (two-chip) card I had died after it got bent a little bit when I pulled it out of the camera.
XD flash was the same but in a less flimsy carrier. Fucking Olympus still insisted on using SM and XD flash in their cameras for years.

According to wikipedo, the GP32 used it, and even used its primitive DRM system.

[Anonymous No.9479883]

>>9479691
Not even embedded devices use raw nand anymore save for routers.
Kinda surprised that format even remotely worked and didn't end up with incompatible controllers killing cards used on other devices.

[Anonymous No.9479912]

>>9479883
Well this was 2002... my card broke the same weekend that the shuttle burned up on reentry. Wiki seems to imply that cards DID get killed when used with other devices. And they had both 5V and 3.3V cards, the only difference was corner notches cut differently.

[Anonymous No.9480451]

>>9474541
RIght, but didn't they deliberately gimp the data transfers because they were scared about piracy?

[Anonymous No.9480481]

>>9480451
Only for music

[Anonymous No.9481115]

>>9471716

[Anonymous No.9481129]

>>9473354
Kino timeline

[Anonymous No.9481228]

>>9471753
>>9478742
Werent those things faulty as shit?

[Anonymous No.9481248]

>>9479567
But most YuroGames sucked ass aside maybe from Turrican.

[Anonymous No.9481250]

>>9473608

Nah I still own my original Cybiko, you silly goose.

[Anonymous No.9481326]

>>9471716
God I wish mine had worked long enough to transfer all those documents onto a rewritable CD.

[Anonymous No.9481348]

How many of these alternative disk formats even got commercially pressed software of any sort released for them that you could buy at the store/mail-order and not just blank media?

[Anonymous No.9482370]

>>9481248
Most games from any country suck. There are also tons of great gems to be found. You can't find a game like Moonstone anywhere else.

[Anonymous No.9482520]

>>9481115
I know of atleast one example of some music album having a microcomputer game on it that you could get to load up depending on whatever set up you needed to do so, im assuming through same means as a cassette loader.

[Anonymous No.9482998]

>>9481115
>>9482520
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/jul/07/video-games-on-vinyl-flexi-discs-zx-spectrum

[Anonymous No.9484928]

>>9471716
Forgot these existed

[Anonymous No.9484950]

I always thought it weird that no consoles used floppy discs as their primary games format during the 8 / 16 bit gen.

Surely those cheap 1.44MB discs would have been a good way to release games in that era.

[Anonymous No.9485135]

>>9484950
>mom magnets entire game collection for bad grades

[Anonymous No.9485201]

>>9472253
I had one of these with a flying game, even being 8 I knew it was absolute jank

[Anonymous No.9485219]

>>9474518
Because we had those iPod Shuffles.

[Anonymous No.9485240]

>>9484950
Sega wanted to make a cheap console and Nintendo made a profit from monopolizing cartridge production.

[Anonymous No.9485528]

>>9484950
It's not quite floppy disks but there was the Famicom Disk System and the Nintendo 64DD.
You probably never heard of them since they only came out in Japan, though.
Also, some bootleg NES/SNES/N64 were released via. floppy disks, such as the infamous Hong Kong '97, which is why there is the "...please send us your floppy" in the opening text.

[Anonymous No.9485642]

>>9485528
>primary

[Anonymous No.9485927]

>>9471716
Speaking of physical media, checked my switch games today and they all have a scratch here.

It’s also on some of my other cart based games, but I was wondering if anyone could check theirs and see if it’s normal. I’ve got a lot of physical retro collections on the switch and I dunno if the console is tearing up my carts.

[Anonymous No.9486008]

>>9485927
Pull the camera away, it can't focus that close.

[Anonymous No.9486034]

>>9486008
It was actually pretty far, but it was hell to get it to focus and that little mark on the switch cart to show up. Had to mess with the zoom quite a bit.

[Anonymous No.9486131]

>>9486034
Maybe mine has it too

[Anonymous No.9486158]

>>9486131
I appreciate you checking, yours looks a lot less pronounced than mine, but if yours is similar then that puts my mind at ease. Considering they are also on my DS and 3DS games, I’m guessing this is about as normal as the scratches on the golden contacts. Still, it’s weird, checked my friends and his doesn’t have said scratches, and when I took a new game out and put it in his, no scratch, then I tried it in mine, and there it was. Guess not all switch’s are created equal.
I really wish I wasn’t so autistic about preserving my physical media.

[Anonymous No.9486362]

>>9486131
>>9486158
Think I got it figured out. After seeing yours and the placement of the scratch being different, I checked my friends carts again, and lo and behold, there are very light marks but in a different spot from mine (much, much lower).

Looks like there’s a little metal piece in the switch that holds the games down, and depending on its placement is where and how deeply it’s going to leave a light scratch into your carts. Wild nobody noticed this before, but then, I guess it really isn’t a big deal.

[Anonymous No.9486476]

>>9474505

Sony cucking themselves with proprietary formats, why did they always do that?

Having said that though the real reason for MD's death was that hard drive MP3 players came out in the early 00's and were just obviously superior in a lot of ways.

[Anonymous No.9486514]

>>9484950

A big part of their business model in those days was to make money on selling publishers the cartridge media; and it was also the primary anti-piracy measure. Early computer systems like the Commodore, Specturm etc had absurdly easy piracy because you could just copy the cassettes on your hi-fi. Console bootleg cartirdges existed but it was nothing like the explosion of piracy once chipped PS1s became commonplace and you could just copy a game you rented from Blockbuster onto a blank CD-R. That's when the business model changed, with Sony selling hardware at a loss and making it's money on the game licensing- It can bee argued N64 was less successful because they missed the boat on that.

To this day they still typically sell hardware on a loss- with the difference that since the advent of online distribution they can much more easily recoup the losses because they monopolise the actual marketplace.

This is a lot of the reason the games industry is such a shitshow, by the way. It's like the music industry on crack. It's all built on skimming off the fat and squeezing profits out of the people who actually MAKE the product, then fucking them over and throwing them in the trash.

[Anonymous No.9487712]

>>9486476
MD was created to solve a problem. And solve that it did.
They made players until the mid 2000s when flash players (which they also made) can replace them.

[Anonymous No.9488232]

>>9486476
Flash drive mp3 players were expensive as shit until after 2005 and the early ipods with mechanical drives all eventually died within 4 years. I had a friend in college that was making money replacing the hard drives