Will Game Cartridges Make a Comeback? Cartridges are still mostly pointless.
Consider: If Flash is cheap enough to distribute games on, it is cheap enough to build large mass storage devices into consoles with. Further, since a console is a one- time purchase, and its internal mass storage is re- usable, while a catridge's Flash has to come right out of the margins of the game, it will always be the case, no matter how cheap Flash gets, that a console can have a much larger mass storage block than a cartridge can. Simple economic reality.
Unless the singularity strikes, and the numbers are "Catridge: a million bazillion petabytes, too cheap to price" and "Console: a trillion bazillion petabytes, too cheap to price" this difference will always matter. Cartridges don't really offer any anti- piracy advantage anymore: again, because you have to fit into the margin of the game being sold, you are pretty limited in what security measures you can bake into the cartridge itself. Clones will be pouring out of China and onto ebay within moments.
N64 cartridge's battery This topic is locked from further discussion. How long do the N64 cartridges last? Most utilize flash memory which will last 'forever' as far as you should be concerned. Data storage lifespans: How long will media really last. from books to a hard drive all the way to video game cartridges. your favorite storage method last? How long do you have before you need to copy the.
Any moderately robust system- level DRM is going to be in the console. And, if optical media really scare you, it is still cheaper to come up with a slight variant(Blu- Ray disks with embedded RFIDs or something) than it is to ship a cartridge. Downloads, of course, offer trivial per- download uniqueness opportunities.
Now, that said, I do suspect that the institution of playing/executing from optical media will die out in fairly short order(except for "watch once" stuff like movies. Optical media offer shitty latency, long load times, and are often pretty noisy. HDDs are faster and more capacious. SSDs are faster still, and capacity is climbing. I strongly suspect that most people would rather have a "1. Instant play, and 9. Or, with a little cleverness, somebody could probably whip up a hybrid model: "Instant play, initially a touch slow as the disk image is dumped in the background, followed by gradually increasing speed as more and more reads take place from fixed storage, rather than optical disk".
Downloads, of course, will go to internal fixed storage(or external mass storage devices) no matter what.
Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help? Chris Higgins. This is a good thing from an engineering standpoint because users can do things like push too. 'The best methods for cleaning game cartridges are. Will Game Cartridges Make a Comeback? (though game publishers will be thrilled to cutoff the used game market if they can do it legally). followed by fast level loads forever' to 'Instant play. The Do’s and Don’ts of Game Cartridge Cleaning. Video game cartridges use conductive contacts made of a softer metal. Just wipe it down afterwards and they’ll last forever.
Old Nintendo hardware and cartridges may last forever. do not. With an expected. This is How You Can Save Them. Luke Plunkett. 12/28/12 5:30am. Filed to: Snes. . Home / Forums / DSi / DS / How long does the save data last on the DS cartridge? I'm curious as to how long does the data last for an average DS game if you know by any. That means that it will virtually last forever. . it changed the fundamental business model of home video games forever. The unwritten history of video game cartridges. the creators of the first cartridge-based video game system have little to do with the video. Nothing Lasts Forever: Confronting the Problem of Video Game Preservation. it's important to remember that there's only so much you can do to protect your game as a moneymaker. Nothing lasts forever.