would you still buy a cartridge based console made in 2008+?

well a golden line would be to have some sort of optional RAM cartridge where a percentage of the disk would be dumped into memory, much like GD-ROM arcade-based systems. needless to say though that this sort of performance does come at a price.

 

I would definitely.
Carts are my favorite form of gaming media.

 

If there was some game exclusive to the system that I just had to have,....then yes I would buy a cartridge based system.

 

the thing that bugs me about UMDs is that they have no dust shutter, just an open hole. and of course compared to flash media they are slooow.

 

Absolutely. Especially if it's reasonably priced so I can get one for my nephews.

I'm looking to buy maybe a NEX or a Tectoy SMS/MD, does that count? :shrug:

 

what about HD based with dowloads from the net?

i would be interested if the loading is realy fast.

 

Definitively NO. I love cartridges, but optical technology is always more advanced than carts. When carts we're 128 Mb and CD's 600 MB, now carts could be 16 GB and Blu Rays 50 GB. Not worth it.

And I alredy had enough paying 14999 pesetas for each fucking N64 game (140$).

 

Well, in theory, cartridges can be made up to 1 TB, seeing as it's pretty much a HDD.

 

Thats what I said, but then cartridges would be more like hot-swap HDDs, and with tons of games inside.

Kinda like those cheap HK Nes knockoffs.

 

I don't think Digital distribution is the wave of the future. For the simple fact retailers won't let that happen.

Now cart based console......does the DS count as a console?

 

yeah, the ds counts as a portable console i think. i was more referring to stationary consoles though.
and the ds is more like 2004 technology and not 2008+

 

The reliability of carts isn't really what we used to think back in the day. This is evident today - it's not uncommon to find carts that don't work anymore, or are corrupted in some way. They wear out, batteries die, connectors become less reliable. Of course I love them in an rose-tinted-specs way, but they are outdated technology. Do remember that modern-day Flash technology is very different, and not really a valid comparison... I would probably prefer games came on Flash cards over optical media for durability reasons!

Retailers will resist digital distribution because it threatens their business model. We all know the advantages and disadvantages of it so I won't get into that, but if a console was to be released purely to appeal to the niche retro gamer or whatever, digitial distribution would be the only viable, cost effective distribution format, especially since any such format would find it hard to keep a large presence at retail.

 

Cartridges today (DS game paks etc) are nothing like cartridges of yore, in fact they're infinitely closer to optical media and often have around the same throughput despite the extravagant cost of solid state memory and built-in interface controllers; because of this it'd be stupid for home consoles to go "cartridge" again.

 

Tough question. Lets just say, I wouldnt mind a cartridge based system existing right now, and I would almost definately purchase it, but it is in no means something I have been dying to have...

Sad to admit it, but its definately outdated technology. Bring on the Discs!:crying:

 

Why do people keep saying this bullshit? If the cartridge doesn't work it's probably because it's NEVER BEEN CLEANED. You have to clean these things you know? Just like you wipe or blow dust off a disc. Battery is dead? Gee maybe you should replace it then? Cartridges don't wear out, people are just stupid. Cartridges stop working when someone decides to damage them through shock or crushing. You can start worrying about cartridges actually wearing out when you need to desolder the maskrom chip and get a new PCB board printed for it.

Forinstance I went to play Sonic on my Genesis a couple days ago, the game didn't start. I opened the game up, cleaned it, put it back together and back in the system, no problem. I have a Chrono Trigger SNES cartridge, the battery is dead. I could fix that if I went to the store and bought a new battery for it.

If you made a new system using cartridges, containing durable HDDs might be a good idea if you could make it cheap enough. But that is doubtful. I think you'd have to make the cartridge contain some kind of optical memory. Maybe you could have some kind of block containing a large amount of data that would be read by a laser within the system or something. But people don't like change, that's why I think discs are here to stay for a long time yet.

 

I guess people's problem with the reliability of cartridges comes from the fact that you NEED to clean them! I have never had to clean a disk, apart from when I have got it off someone who treated it badly. When 2 carts start playing up in one week, I cannot help but think fondly of CD based games.

As an aside do CDs ever stop working through any other reason than dirt or marks on the disk? I heard a complicated story about layers seperating on DVDs on this forum a while ago...

 

CDs are vulnerable to scratches. If a scratch is deep enough, you're screwwed. Or if the scratch is in a bad direction or shape that could do it. And it is possible for your Disc to split apart as they are basically layers glued together. But Disc problems for pressed discs are usually scratches from wear and tear as well as poor user care. This isn't a big deal if you buy everything new, but if you buy used Disc games it can be a serious problem. You can have your disc polished or something to try to make it readable again but only so many times.

If you take proper caer of your Discs they should last a long long time. But the same is true of if you clean your cartridges. They don't get that dirty that fast. If you clean them only when they stop working, you're still talking like once every 3 years or something. And that's just a random guess.

 

I had some disks which we're eaten by fungus. Anyway, carts we're so fucking expensive and even if I like them, I wouldn't buy more than one game per year.

And I doubt that digital distribution will success any soon, tell me how can I download a 50 GB PS3 game with my "awesome" theorical 6 Mb connection.

 

And did you hear about Comcast putting a download cap on their service to "combat piracy"? Claiming no non-pirate needs more than X amount of GB download per month. It's retarded.

 

Point taken, though I hardly think it called for such a rude tone.

Download caps are certainly going to hold back digital distribution however. Virgin Media, for example, have a 4GB cap, which could be a problem if you use Steam or similar to download games.