Would it be better to switch back to cartridges?

[TheSteeleStrap]

Other than that problem with the 360 of breaking the disc when the console moves (really guys? Is this that hard to fix?) I don't mind discs; I don't have to blow on them.

Err, you might want to sit down for this...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-25-blowing-on-nes-cartridges-was-actually-bad-for-them

Oh God... Oh Jeebus this changes everything...

 

[Bad Jim]

First, cartridges encourage data compression, and data UN-compression is a lengthy process. SNES titles like Batman [loading] Forever and Mickey [looks at his watch] Mania show how awful this can get.

Correction - decompression took a long time in the early nineties. Data requirements have gone up by 3-4 orders of magnitude, but processing power has gone up by 5-6 orders of magnitude if you do it on the GPU.

In fact, the job can be done fast enough to do it every frame. Texture compression methods for instance are specifically designed so that the GPU can render directly from the compressed texture. It first appeared on S3 cards which were available in the late 90s.

 

[dark-mortality]

Yes, I would love to be able to go back to cartridges, but people also seem to forget one thing: It costs much, MUCH more money to produce cartridges than it does to produce CD's. What I would actually like, is more durable CD's that doesn't get destroyed if I look at it to hard.

 

[GTwander]

I actually prefer having physical copies of games, so if a cartridge could prove itself as being superior to a disk, I would have no real problem with that as long as the price is reasonable.

With the advent of solid state drives, I'm surprised it hasn't already.

Hell, isn't a DS cartridge basically flash memory?

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

I actually prefer having physical copies of games, so if a cartridge could prove itself as being superior to a disk, I would have no real problem with that as long as the price is reasonable.

With the advent of solid state drives, I'm surprised it hasn't already.

Hell, isn't a DS cartridge basically flash memory?

I honestly don't know. I've never owned a DS. The last thing I owned that used cartridges was the N64.

I know a lot of older cartridges like the ones for the SNES have a shelf-life though. Eventually they lose the ability to hold save files. I tend to get nostalgic and play older games from time to time, so this sort of thing would be a deal-breaker for me in a hypothetical switch to modern cartridges. Granted, obviously the technology has advanced a lot since the SNES. Big understatement, I know.

 

[spartan231490]

I hope so. I will never buy digital games firstly, and secondly cartridges are a lot harder to damage than discs. Even if you treat a disc well it will eventually accumulate small scratches, or like my first MW2 disc it will crack from being taken out of and put back into the case so many times. Cartridges don't do that.