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Dio9sys@haunted.computer

Dio9sys

Hear me out: games should return to being on cartridges
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but seriously, think about it. Optical drives were added to consoles for two main reasons:

1. more storage space for the game
2. CD audio

With that, disc-based consoles left behind two interesting things you could do with cartridges:

1. storing game saves on the game itself
2. added chips for better audio, special video modes or more memory

Now, solid state storage has gotten ahead of optical media. You can get SSDs that are so so much larger in size than a standard CD or even a high density blu ray! Most consoles are going mostly- or totally- digital now, because their internal hard drives are (usually) big enough for most games you would want to play.

So, here's my thought:

1. Put game files, assets and any required game libraries into an SSD, with an autorun script that runs when the media is mounted.
2. Make a console that's basically just a PC, but have an external m.2 slot, or USB 3.0 port, or firewire port. Some kind of port that can do high data transfer rates
3. put the SSD into some kind of cartridge format, possibly extra giblets in the cartridge if desired?

You could put the cartridge into the machine and it would autorun, or at least mount the media to show in your games library. You could make the SSD in the cartridge larger than the actual size of the game, as then you could install updates directly to the cartridge itself. Saves could be saved to the cartridge again, the cartridge could optionally have extra bits like a midi soundfont or extra RAM or something, everyone would be happy.

Data rot would be a concern, though. Disc rot exists but not as badly as the failure rate on some SSDs.

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charlotte

Charlotte 🦝 therian

Reply to @Dio9sys@haunted.computer
re: Hear me out: games should return to being on cartridges
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@Dio9sys the ds, 3ds, and switch already do this essentially, and it doesn’t fit the larger games at all

they also don’t store game updates on them (potentially due to limited read/write cycle count)

music in pc and console games nowadays is either streamed, or done in software. the little audio hardware still exists can mainly just decode some audio codecs

extra ram over PCIe gen4x4 would be significantly slower than system memory. from what i can tell there doesn’t seem to be any existing pcie memory extenders? they barely existed for pci, and the closest there is to it are CXL memory extenders which are based on pcie gen5

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Dio9sys@haunted.computer

Dio9sys

Reply to @charlotte
re: Hear me out: games should return to being on cartridges
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@charlotte Yeah, as soon as I pressed send I thought about how the switch does this more or less already with their sd card-style carts.

It would be expensive and impractical, but making something that uses one of those datacenter hard drives with an absurdly high write cycle count would be neat, I think. As for the RAM thing...yeah, you're right that's probably not very practical/possible. I wonder what else could be put into the cartridge though... it would be neat to have a game that has, like, a pack-in sensor bar and the cartridge has a port to plug it in so you could play it with a wiimote

Cursed idea: data tape-based cartridge for ultimate cold storage and 20 hour load times

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