nkarafo
Member
See this from the perspective of someone who was gaming in the mid/late 80's, on home computers instead of consoles.
Home computers always had very slow, unreliable, noisy and clunky storage mediums. Mainly cassette tapes and floppy disks. Computer magazines back then would always undermine consoles for their less advanced/complex and more expensive games but they all agreed to one thing. Cartridges were awesome. Instant access with no loading? No clunky, mechanical parts? No noise? More reliable? Check on all.
I remember when my friends did the jump from stuff like the Spectrum/C64/Amiga to the Nes/MS/Mega Drive. Cartridges were a huge change, a massive QOL improvement for them. For me it was a given thing though since i never gamed on home computers.
And then, CDs happened.
If you think about it, CDs (and DVDs/BRs) work in the same exact way as floppies and a bit like cassette tapes. They all have data stored on a surface where it can't get accessed all at once. It has to be read little by little by a reading device (head/laser). They all use mechanical parts to move that surface or reading device so it can access more data. They are all noisy. They are all unreliable (some more, some less).
CDs is an improvement ofc. It stores way more data than a floppy. It's more reliable since the data on the plastic disc can't be as easily corrupted. But otherwise, it works on the same principle. It's an evolution of the floppy.
Carts are different. The data can be read instantly from any part of the rom. There are no mechanical parts, which makes them inherently more reliable. Carts never really evolved to something else, they were always perfect. The only thing that evolved was the ROM size.
And now we are back at solid state being the present and future once again. SSDs replacing HDDs. And optical media is almost as obsolete as floppies were back then. Not sure if modern SSDs work the same way as Roms do though. I think the last console that used Roms was the N64. Later consoles that use solid state mediums aren't really instant-access Roms but more like very fast memory that still needs to load. Someone could educate me on this?
And one last thing. CDs were more beneficial to developers/publishers, and less to consumers. Because only the consumers had to deal with loading times, noise and their CD devices breaking. The games weren't even THAT much cheaper compared to first party N64 games. But Publishers could enjoy massive production cost cuts and enough space to not have to worry about compressing or figuring out clever tricks to use space more efficiently. That extra space was massive in the early days, sure, and players could enjoy better textures and audio for a while in some games. But roms was always the superior medium (if you didn't care about the cost) because it serves videogames better. Arcades that used bigger roms was the pinnacle IMO.
Home computers always had very slow, unreliable, noisy and clunky storage mediums. Mainly cassette tapes and floppy disks. Computer magazines back then would always undermine consoles for their less advanced/complex and more expensive games but they all agreed to one thing. Cartridges were awesome. Instant access with no loading? No clunky, mechanical parts? No noise? More reliable? Check on all.
I remember when my friends did the jump from stuff like the Spectrum/C64/Amiga to the Nes/MS/Mega Drive. Cartridges were a huge change, a massive QOL improvement for them. For me it was a given thing though since i never gamed on home computers.
And then, CDs happened.
If you think about it, CDs (and DVDs/BRs) work in the same exact way as floppies and a bit like cassette tapes. They all have data stored on a surface where it can't get accessed all at once. It has to be read little by little by a reading device (head/laser). They all use mechanical parts to move that surface or reading device so it can access more data. They are all noisy. They are all unreliable (some more, some less).
CDs is an improvement ofc. It stores way more data than a floppy. It's more reliable since the data on the plastic disc can't be as easily corrupted. But otherwise, it works on the same principle. It's an evolution of the floppy.
Carts are different. The data can be read instantly from any part of the rom. There are no mechanical parts, which makes them inherently more reliable. Carts never really evolved to something else, they were always perfect. The only thing that evolved was the ROM size.
And now we are back at solid state being the present and future once again. SSDs replacing HDDs. And optical media is almost as obsolete as floppies were back then. Not sure if modern SSDs work the same way as Roms do though. I think the last console that used Roms was the N64. Later consoles that use solid state mediums aren't really instant-access Roms but more like very fast memory that still needs to load. Someone could educate me on this?
And one last thing. CDs were more beneficial to developers/publishers, and less to consumers. Because only the consumers had to deal with loading times, noise and their CD devices breaking. The games weren't even THAT much cheaper compared to first party N64 games. But Publishers could enjoy massive production cost cuts and enough space to not have to worry about compressing or figuring out clever tricks to use space more efficiently. That extra space was massive in the early days, sure, and players could enjoy better textures and audio for a while in some games. But roms was always the superior medium (if you didn't care about the cost) because it serves videogames better. Arcades that used bigger roms was the pinnacle IMO.
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