Did CDs stumped the price of carts from decreasing fast enough?

here is a list I made of the "highest popular cart size" on home game cartridges from 85-94:

1985 .25 megs
1986 .5 megs
1987 1 meg
1988 2 megs
1989-1990 4 megs
1991 8 megs
1992-1993 16 megs
1994 32 megs

you would think, that 64 meg carts should've became popular in 1995, but from 1994-1997 carts stopped at 32-megs? Was this the fault of cd based systems becoming popular around 94 and 95 that did this?

 

i think it was mostly the production price of bigger cartridges

 

yeah, I know bigger cart prices are more expensive, but like every other technology they become less expensive over time and so your able to have bigger and bigger cartridges the same price as time goes on.

I'm asking is, if the price of ROM was decreasing by close to half it's price every year for about 9 years, why did it all of a sudden stop in 94/95?

 

Not sure on this but think this had a big effect of cart prices

 

They said RAM, not ROM, but it might've effected production of both. I don't know what chemicals they use to make chips, but it seems to make sense.

Even if the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were limited to 32-meg carts, they could always use mappers in the carts, like NES games did. Mappers were also used in a lot of arcade games in the 1993-1998 era.

 

The answer is right infront of you. It's called the CD-ROM. Also the Hard Disk Drive. Eventually CD-ROM was matured enough that having games on ROM chips was no longer needed. Why would they continue trying to make larger and larger Mask ROMs when you could now make CD-ROMs containing 650 to 700 megabytes of data?

So after everyone went to optical discs there wasn't much demand to improve ROM chip technology. Also remember the bigger the ROM the more pins you need on your chip, so the bigger your chip will likely be.

That's what my guess would be.

 

What's "highest popular cart size" mean? You mean you're excluding non popular carts? Wasn't SF2T, or whatever, for the Genesis 40megs and considered popular? I know there was a 40meg SFC game - I think it was Star Ocean.

 

"highest popular size" meaning highest meg size to have a large quantity of games to have. There weren't very many 40 or 48 meg games.

 

Honestly, i think that by 1993 Rom chips for carts and arcade board should have been cheaper and have more memory.

 

I know, for Super Nintendo, they were able to pushed more and more colors onscreen, but people were forgeting how important animation was for bringing the true arcade experience home.

 

cart rom sizes did get bigger - just on consoles that had more power to exploit the extra storage space, N64, Neo Geo etc.

 

Yeah, IIRC, Resident Evil 2 on N64 had 512megs. Maybe he shouldnt have left off at 1994 :icon_bigg

EDIT: And also, IIRC, Zelda:OOT had 256megs.

 

It wasn't cheap. Plus Nintendo charging developers for each game sold didn't help it either.

But CD / DVD would earn it's place, even if it happened later.

 

I think it's cool that DS games are finally going to hit the 512 Megabyte size, starting with DQ9 (i'm pretty sure). It's pretty much the only cart based system left isn't it? If you clasify those cards as cartridges.

Some of the later 4 Megabyte+ Super Famicom games were damn impressive, I must say. Especially Street Fighter Zero 2 and Star Ocean which used that on-board compression chip. It would have been awesome to see some N64 sized carts during the 16-bit era though.

 

yep, and its sad

i like cartridges

 

making a big cart for say MD is not too easy because the flash chips that are big (8Mbytes+) are 5V intolerant and require lot of hassle when you try to get them working on 5V system... the game i'm making is 64Mbit, or possibly 96Mbit if 64Mbit is too little.

 

The N64 only got up to 64Mbytes (512mbit) and there were only 3 or 4 games that size. The NeoGeo you can't count that way. While a NeoGeo game totals in memory extremely high, the largest chips are only 8Mbytes, a mere 64mbits and they just use many of them, plus the cost of these games was extremely high and never would have worked mainstream.

Large amounts of ROM chips just weren't practical once you had a very cheap optical disc and designed your system and games to run from limited amounts of RAM. The only issue really is the speed of loading from disc and the amount of RAM and the PS1 desperately needed more VRAM in my opinion. I can't forgive the horribly shitty ports of superb arcade games like Marvel Vs Capcom and Metal Slug.

 

The Zelda: OOT used a 32mbyte (or was it mbite?) cart. Majora's mask used something bigger I think, not sure.

But yeh, RE2 for the n64 was a compression algorithm jewel. It wasn't that they got the FMV on the cart, but the conversion & compression of the images from the PSX to the N64 was pretty cool from a programming standpoint. But it did use a large cartridge.

On another note, anyone with a Majora's mask cart... have you ever heard 'noise' coming from the cartridge when it's loading a level or anything from the cart? I remember that mine did, if you were close to it. It was weird. I never had the tools to open it up, plus I sold it.

 

Majora's Mask was also 32 Mbytes just like OoT. Resident Evil 2 and Paper Mario and one or two other games were 64 Mbytes which is 512mbits.

 

all 512mbit n64 games:

biohazard 2 (resident evil 2)
conkers bad fur day
paper mario (just the euro version, us is 320mbit)
pokemon stadium 2
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zelda the ocarina of time - master quest