Resurrect the cartdridges!

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I think it would just be nice if I could load a full game into RAM if I have enough RAM. Why is it that when you emulate a game, like from the PS1, you still have the same load times when the entire game could easily run out of RAM.

Not that I would ever emulate PS1 games, just saying.

If you really wanted, you could do something silly like make a disk image of it, then copy that onto a ramdisk. You would then have absurdly fast access time to your game data. The emulator still probably wouldn't load it faster than a certain speed though, because for accurate emulation you have to do things the way the original console does it or else you run into problems sometimes. Even running some PSX games on the PS2 with the faster loading speeds would makes things break because they do things during loading that get out of sync. It'd probably be fine to artificially speed up some others, but there's no easy way to be 100% sure.

 

[Epona]

No, before this gen no one thought they were leasing a PS2 game. Revisionist history?

Who the hell talks about leasing? Purchasing a license is not leasing. It is still a valid purchase, the thing that differs is the idea of "ownership". And yes, in the PS2 era people also just bought a license to play the game. You never actually owned the data on the disc.

But this is not a place to discuss this, lets keep on topic and the cardridge-lemma.

No, in the PS2 era people bought a GAME, not a license. This gen the industry has managed to brainwash people into BUYING games at $10 more while not actually buying games at all.

I have been BUYING games since the Atari 2600 and I can tell you that until this gen, people bought GAMES, not licenses.

For PC I always thought I was buying licenses to games rather than the physical disk with the information stored on it..

And people still don't mind this model; look at steam.

I never thought that until this gen. I bought Populous: The Beginning in 1998 and I installed it and uninstalled it at will. I played it online and offline at will and I could even install it on my friends PC and play a LAN game without asking for permission so as far as I was concerned, I owned the game. Same with console games. Now, I couldn't make copies and sell them for a profit but then I can't do that with anything I buy. I can't copy my Hoover vacuum cleaner and sell it either. The ability to do make copies of something and sell it on the open market is not a requirement of ownership. By those rules you wouldn't own anything except that which you crafted yourself. It's absurd to say that you don't own your TV because you can't make copies and sell them.

 

[Epona]

I think it would just be nice if I could load a full game into RAM if I have enough RAM. Why is it that when you emulate a game, like from the PS1, you still have the same load times when the entire game could easily run out of RAM.

Not that I would ever emulate PS1 games, just saying.

If you really wanted, you could do something silly like make a disk image of it, then copy that onto a ramdisk. You would then have absurdly fast access time to your game data. The emulator still probably wouldn't load it faster than a certain speed though, because for accurate emulation you have to do things the way the original console does it or else you run into problems sometimes. Even running some PSX games on the PS2 with the faster loading speeds would makes things break because they do things during loading that get out of sync. It'd probably be fine to artificially speed up some others, but there's no easy way to be 100% sure.

I can't wrap my head around games being written with hard-coded load times. What if your PS1 was dying and loading took longer than expected? What if your PS1 was brand new and the drive was just a little faster than expected?

I just can't wrap my head around programming a game in that way.

 

[Tanakh]

On topic: Is it that bad? Has been a while since I went console gaming alone; how long are the loading times this days? 10 seconds every 10 minutes?

Also, it's just not going to happen, as erlier said, there is no way publishers will cut their earning margins, and it makes no sense on the current market to make games more expensive.

 

[DeltaEdge]

Cartridges are just unnecessary. The only reason people would want them is if they are from the age where they thrived and want to see their nostalgic return. The only reason portable consoles use cartridges is because they are too small to use a big ol' CD/DVD-ROM. And why make a cartridge when you can make a USB flash drive that holds just as much and more. It's more compact, more versatile, and easily capable of more than the cartridge. Plus, the newer generations probably won't even like cartridges, so it would just be there to satisfy the older people who liked em' back in the day.
It would be like trying to get the old record player to make a comeback. Sure, it possibly could, but what the hell's the point? No one (minus the old fans) would want a big old clunky record, when they could have a nice compact disk that does just as much, and more. Sure, you could make it less clunky, but then what's the point? It's not even the same record anymore, but something that has adjusted and changed to meet the demands of a modern consumer.

Cartridges are old news, just like tapes and cassettes. Technology isn't going to go backwards. We aren't going to see a return of anything that's already passed. No laser-disks, no VHS, no cartridges. Some time in the future, CDs and DVDs will probably be replaced by something even more advanced, and people will remember fondly the time of the compact discs and think,
"Man, these nano-usb portable drives (N-USBs) sure aren't much to look at, and they're kind of overly complicated too. Whatever happened to just popping a CD in the slot and turning the power on? They even had cool looking disc-art on each one, while these things have barely anything. I think CD's need to make a comeback."
Don't mean to be harsh, but I highly doubt that they will make a comeback. Even if some kind of nostalgic driven movent comes about and they produce a bunch of cartridges that facilitate modern storage needs, I doubt everyone would just flock back to the cartridge. Some people who are old enough to remember might say "cool" or "oh hey, I remember these", but really, for all the peolpe who complain about missing them, I doubt that most of these same people would go out of their way to buy the cartridges, when they can go pick up a USB for cheaper.
I liked cartridges too, but I think that they will never comeback. Unless it's in a totally new, and more efficient format. Laser discs -> Compact discs. Cartridges -> (?). Who knows, maybe advanced technology of the future will be in cartridge format. We'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I think it would just be nice if I could load a full game into RAM if I have enough RAM. Why is it that when you emulate a game, like from the PS1, you still have the same load times when the entire game could easily run out of RAM.

Not that I would ever emulate PS1 games, just saying.

If you really wanted, you could do something silly like make a disk image of it, then copy that onto a ramdisk. You would then have absurdly fast access time to your game data. The emulator still probably wouldn't load it faster than a certain speed though, because for accurate emulation you have to do things the way the original console does it or else you run into problems sometimes. Even running some PSX games on the PS2 with the faster loading speeds would makes things break because they do things during loading that get out of sync. It'd probably be fine to artificially speed up some others, but there's no easy way to be 100% sure.

I can't wrap my head around games being written with hard-coded load times. What if your PS1 was dying and loading took longer than expected? What if your PS1 was brand new and the drive was just a little faster than expected?

I just can't wrap my head around programming a game in that way.

They seem to have a little bit of tolerance for variation between drives, but yeah, with the ones that are dying, sometimes you get random disc read errors and other times you don't, when it's not doing quite what it expects. Most of what I've ever done has been on the PC, with not a whole lot of embedded stuff, and I'm used to "expect/trust nothing" too, so it's kind of weird to me too. They leave out all sorts of sanity checks because they can get away with it when the hardware's always the same. Heh.

 

[Rad Party God]

And you came up with that while watching someone play virtual console games?
Were you like "you know what would be better than having all games on 1 harddrive so you can play all of them within seconds? Splitting each game up into an expensive to manufacture cartridge which you'll have to fumble out and put into the console each time you want to play something else and that'll wear off and break some day."?

I'm a huge advocate of digital distribution, I'm a PC gamer and I simply love Steam and GOG, but I'm talking about consoles here, where changes are a bit slower for the end user, or the "greedy publishers" as some would say.

The day the consoles move on to just having a big (and I mean huge) harddrive disk and lower their prices for their games sold via digital distribution, that's the day I will buy a new console and the day where I'd say "pfff, how the fuck did I ever lived with all these crappy and clunky pieces of plastic!?".

 

[Chicago Ted]

Except the costs would probably get bumped by an additional $10-$20 at least and the amount that could be stored on a single game would also suffer. Disc based means that mass production is easy and standardized. You move back to cartridges, and then a bunch of new factories have to go up specifically for making the product.

Also, I never really saw much of the appeal in cartridges. They're big and clunky, take up more space and are harder to organize then discs in boxes. It screws up my shelves in the same way a VHS messes with my DVDs spacing if I put them beside one another.

"cartridges" in this case would almost certainly be similar to SD cards. Much like the PS Vita's cartridge.

I agree in terms of cost, but carts are no longer big and clunky. They're small and fairly convenient.

For a PSP or a DS maybe, but consider what you'd need for a full game here. They'd be smaller than an N64 cartridge, that's for certain, but I still am going to be annoyed with attempting to store it somewhere as I'd have to make a specific drawer or something for them. I can't see them really fitting in well beside my shevles of DVDs. I'd be certain that they'd be bigger than a USB thumbdrive.

Also, I like using my system as a DVD player as well. Makes it so I don't need to hook one up to my TV. We go back to cartridges, we'll either lose that ability, or have the cost of consoles rise even more because they'd have to install a DVD Drive as well as the one for the cartridges.

 

[Byere]

Hmm, possible. It'd probably also make piracy a little more difficult, since you can't just stick a cartridge in your PC...Feel free to edit that consideration into your original post.

I know there have already been people bringing up this point but there's still problems with piracy on that level. I mean, look at the Nintendo DS. You can just as easily emulate any of the games on that as you can CD-based games or old cartridge games from back in the day. Though it is a little more trouble, it's effectively the same thing.

 

[Signa]

That drive is $9 so we'd be looking at something like that as an increase to game prices. Plus it's looking like games are going to be moving onto Blu Ray soon so a comparable storage solution is going to be that much more expensive.

Most importantly loading delays are less than a tenth of a percent of how long it takes to boot up a game. You have the console logos, then the publisher logo, health warnings, copyright warnings, middleware adverts, ads for hardware manufacturers, legal warnings, pointless start screens, loading selection screens, log on to servers, upload player details. Cartridges would take you from a minute and a half boot to game to one minute 29 seconds and 9 tenths of a second. If developers gave a shit they could easily reduce times far more by doing all the loading and logging on and selection during the random ads and copyright. Bottom line is that games take so long to load because of capitalism, not technology.

That's not entirely true. In the case of the 360, MS REQUIRES that a game is loaded within a certain amount of time. In the case of mandatory logos and such, a developer is granted extra bonus time to load their game while those logos are displaying. Basically, while the logo will take a faction of a second to load, the 360 is given about 3-5 seconds to load as much as it can for the Main Menu. It's why those logos are unskippable, because the system NEEDS that time. The real problem comes in when the game is ported to the PC, and the logos are still unskippable.

 

[viranimus]

-snip-

We are mostly in agreement here, save for a few points.

The problem is not that they specifically would use the power. The problem is giving them the power in the first place. Sort of like how people got pissed over the indefinite detention act signed last year in the US. Then to have the Whitehouse reassure the public "I will not use this power" Its really more of the insane argument I have only recently started seeing "Well that doesnt effect me, so why should I care?". Which we all know our actions effect not only us, but those around us. Same principle behind the butterfly effect, only on a much grander, and infinitely more nuanced scale

Personally I have no need for skype. itunes, you could not pay me to use because it is riddled with malignant bloatware, and specifcally because apple also utilizes bogus practices such as what were discussing here. Microsoft is a ness. evil. But that section is not what we are discussing when were talking ownership rights. Its much like I said in the other post. You dont own the proprietary software. You cannot modify it and claim it as your own product. You CAN however own the physical disc, which using the microsoft example would allow you to infinitely reinstall Windows on a thousand different computers, provided that it is removed from one physical build to the next as a part of transfer. That too is fundamentally the same as moving a game from one console to another, just dramatically more complex. (IE formatting/reformatting/install/uninstall)

The difference in this licensing intellectual property on disc. You own the disc. You can do with that disc how you see fit. You do not own the software on the disc, so you cannot modify the software on the disc. Same is true of the book reference. You own the physical book. you can sell it, burn it, wipe your ass with the pages. You cannot however rewrite chapters of the book and try to redistribute it as your own work.

The real point to this section. The only way steam is special is it is consistently laying the groundwork of precedents that other less customer friendly corporations are also adopting to more sinister ends. However In the field of digital game distribution, they are the rule rather than the positive exception that gog provides and shows how it SHOULD be handled.

However, it still comes at a great expense because if you could translate the number of sales from digital distribution for indie developers into an equivalent physical distribution, those developers see dramatically less from digital.

That is simply false. Unless you sell them for more than the double in a physical media, DD seems to give you bigger margins. Also, that is one of the reasons for my support to Steam, it has hepled a renascence of the computer indie scene and gives anywhere between 1/2 to 1/5 of it's add slots to indie releases.

The problem here is, that the article looks at the figures wrong, which was what I was trying to point out. Yes, the profits generated for digital distribution ARE better than physical, because you remove most of middlemen. However, those agreements are NOT favorable to the publishers. XBL is notorious for this to the point that many indie developers do not want to work with them at all. The profits might be 70% of cost... but that 70% is cut between the developer, and steam the publisher, whereas with physical copies the cut favors the developer. As you said.. it seems to give bigger margins, but that margin is more illusion than reality.

The disparity here is, that Next to no one owns a game... but you CAN own the disc/cartridge that content is on. Thats where the ownership of physical media comes into play in all this. By removing the physical media, your removing the last protection the consumer has to keep the product remaining as a product and not a subscription.

How does that protect you when your hardware is a black box that needs to be constantly updated to provide online functionality?

It does and it doesnt. The black box you refer to is a perfect example of how this all works out. Hint: Online functionallity is rarely if ever the game. Only a part of it. One that is not required.

Spoiler: Dark souls condensed for space

I will use the case of Dark Souls on PS3. Physical media means you can buy new, used, rented, etc. You put it in the drive, and play it. It will run regardless of how you came about acquiring it. That is the protection of ownership of the disc. There is no time limit for you to play it in, theres no restrictions of how when where you can play it, You can put it in a dozen different PS3s and it will still work. In this case, it DOES protect.

However, much as you mentioned. Once you add online capability (and thus immediately DRM) you are no longer using soley the product, you are using a service used in conjunction with the product. A service that has nothing to do with the files on the disc because the game runs completely fine without PSN. However, if you want to access the online content (IE servers) then you have to agree to the terms and conditions of the online distribution platform, PSN.

Also, Dark souls for PS3 is an interesting caveat example. The infamous patch, that required players to waive their rights to civil litigation against sony becomes relevant. In order to play dark souls. You are required to have your playstation updated to a certain PSN firmware level. (Lets say 1.0.3. Not sure but I think thats it.) If your Playstation is not updated to that level, you simply cannot play it online or off. If you wish to update via PSN, you have to update, but Sony does not allow you to pick and choose which patch you update to. So, If your firmware is 1.02, and the game requires 1.0.3, but the current version of firmware is 1.0.5, and you try to update via PSN it will auto update you to 1.0.5 Now, lets say the litigation waiver patch is 1.0.4. So you do not agree with that term and condition, You do not (automatically) have a means to bypass patch 1.0.4. It will not allow you to download 1.0.5 without 1.0,4 So in order to play the offline single player game you would have to find some way around it. Thankfully, In the case of Dark SOuls, patch 1.0.3 was included on the disc, so it was not required to update via PSN. Thus, with the foresight of including the specified patch on disc Namco allowed players to still be able to play the game without having to agree to a waiver of legal rights. Not every case ends that way, and many companies have no such consideration, and you are left with the choice of either waive your rights, or dont play the game you legally purchased.

Back on topic

I like the idea of cartridges, but I respect that cartridges much as others have said would be an increase in the cost to the publishers and in turn that is one instance where the publishers WILL pass it along to the customer. Its simply not practical in this day and age when you have Bluray discs that have ample capacity for storage, and have increased durability over their CD/DVD based counterparts. Honestly I see no real positive reason for cartridges over bluray. The ONLY justification I ever really saw as a consumer to favor more solid state style distribution is the capacity like old school NES/SNES game carts had that allowed you to save on the cartridge, not the system. Thus allowing you to take your save file anywhere you go. However THAT is something that IS better for flash/SSD transfer anyway as Memory cards (of all manner of format) have been more than sufficent to handle the one major drawback disc based media does in fact have. Its inability to write/rewrite new data once the disc has been finalized.


Now, Ive said all I needed to say and more. I like the cart idea, but its simply impractical, but its a better alternative than digital distribution. To say any more is just going to be repeating myself. With as many thesis type responses as I have written, all my musings on the subject are either there, or in this post. So I am done holding it up and unintentionally getting it off the track it was supposed to be on.

 

[Hyper-space]

And a lot of these buggy games were successful, too. The notion that people who made buggy games somehow went out of business is kinda...Well, contrary to what every one of use who grew up in the NES/SNES days had to put up with.

Hell, some companies sold you a new version of the game at retail price as a means of distributing "bug fixes."

Like you said, "hooray for the olden days."

Oh god, "Mission" packs they called them, basically bug fixes + reskins.

And they charged it as if you were buying a whole new game.

 

[Bad Jim]

I can't wrap my head around games being written with hard-coded load times. What if your PS1 was dying and loading took longer than expected? What if your PS1 was brand new and the drive was just a little faster than expected?

Well, let's say you're a PS1 programmer. To speed up loading, you compress some of the data. You divide loading into three parts and code it like this:

-Part 1 must be decompressed, and loads first.
-Spawn a thread to decompress Part 1
-Part 2 is then loaded.
-Part 3 is then loaded into the RAM that was used by the compressed version of part 1. Remember that you don't have much RAM to play with.

Now the right way to do this would be to wait for part 1 to decompress before loading part 3. But as far as you are concerned, that's only theory. You 'know' that part 1 will be decompressed long before part 2 finishes loading. You have a fixed platform with a slow CD drive and a comparitively fast CPU. And unlike Windows, there are no background programs that might hog the CPU and slow down decompression.

Since the program will only fail on a system that is significantly different to a real PS1, you have no reason to write extra code to safeguard it. It's not a hard coded load time, it's just a race condition that will always be met on a real PS1.

For really bad programming, there were a lot of DOS games that ran as fast as the CPU let them, so that the next PC you bought would run them at a ridiculous, unplayable speed. This includes action based games like Wing Commander. It's quite easy to limit the speed of games, but they just didn't bother, even though it was obvious they would become unplayable.

 

[Terramax]

The only way that steam will lock you out of the games you have purchased is if they go bankrupt...

What if they get bought out by another company?

 

[Something Amyss]

For a PSP or a DS maybe, but consider what you'd need for a full game here.

There's absolutely no reason you would need to go larger than a thumb drive or SD cart.

Also, I like using my system as a DVD player as well. Makes it so I don't need to hook one up to my TV. We go back to cartridges, we'll either lose that ability, or have the cost of consoles rise even more because they'd have to install a DVD Drive as well as the one for the cartridges.

This, at least, is a fair point. Doesn't have anything to do with the industry, but it is a mild inconvenience.

 

[Something Amyss]

Oh god, "Mission" packs they called them, basically bug fixes + reskins.

And they charged it as if you were buying a whole new game.

And a lot of people bought 'em. Kinda makes the current Bethesda model look benevolent. XD

 

[Epona]

I never thought that until this gen. I bought Populous: The Beginning in 1998 and I installed it and uninstalled it at will. I played it online and offline at will and I could even install it on my friends PC and play a LAN game without asking for permission so as far as I was concerned, I owned the game. Same with console games. Now, I couldn't make copies and sell them for a profit but then I can't do that with anything I buy. I can't copy my Hoover vacuum cleaner and sell it either. The ability to do make copies of something and sell it on the open market is not a requirement of ownership. By those rules you wouldn't own anything except that which you crafted yourself. It's absurd to say that you don't own your TV because you can't make copies and sell them.

And you still just bought a license. A license that allowed you all that (simply because back then it was not really possible to enforce this) but it changes nothing.

Game = Software => License.

The problem is that since DD and the possibility to enforce stricter license terms (or actual the ability to enforce them at all) increased with the internet people are starting to realise this or, in your case, deny that it was always this way.

In loose terms speaking: Yes, you "owned" the game. In the terms of the ability to play it wherever you like to play it.

I owned it and I still do. Even with current technology I can still treat Populous as I always have.

I love how you (as in people) have to change the rules in order to explain a software license. It just shows how ridiculous it is because the new rules don't work with anything else. "Why yes, you never really owned your TV, you only thought you did. If you owned it you would be able to copy and distribute it."

So you go on believing that but the fact is that no one can take away the old console or PC games you OWN. What they can get away with tomorrow depends largely on how well they brainwashed you today. This generation has been full of anti-consumer stuff and this is a the top of the list. They started out simply charging you $10 more because of license fees to Microsoft and Sony and will end with activation codes. You, like many others, will eat it up without even questioning why none of this was necessary last gen.

 

[RatRace123]

I like it, and the DS and Vita have shown that they can still be a relevant form of hardware in this day and age. The 3DS can pump out Gamecube/Wii level graphics and the Vita boasts PS3 level, so looks wouldn't take a hit.
I don't think companies would do it though. But I'd like to see it done. And in some cases it would be more practical than discs. We're no longer at the point where you'd need to blow on them to get them to work properly and it's much easier to scratch a disc than it would be to seriously damage a cartridge. (I think, don't quote me on that.)

Movie Bob did a Game Overthinker episode on this very topic, and he was (unsurprisingly) also in favor of it.