Do you think game cartridges will make a comeback in video game consoles?

[shams]

Griffin said:

BengaBenga said:

Could well be. Flash cards already have a higher capacity than BluRay, read speeds are much higher and the additional benefit is that it's much harder to pirate, if done well.

From a quick google search i found flash cards at 100Gb and read speeds of 35MB/s.  Blu-rays go up to 400gb and at 8x they go at 32MB/s, but from my understanding they can already read at 12x.  So can you provide a link where they hold more data and are faster without costing an insane amount.

 

Firstly, the PS3 doesn't have 12x drives does it - in fact BluRays read slower than DVD drives (part of the reason for this insane manditory pre-install process).

Secondly - we are not talking USB/Flash cards. R/O media is much, much faster - has special dedicated interfaces, etc.

A lot depends on how the read transfer is done - but cart media have vastly superior random access times, not to mention seek times. So disk drives are better for reading large amounts of memory at once - but carts are better for "general" memory access.

Just look at DS development - DS carts are basically treated "as memory" - just slower memory. You can easily stream sound & music from the carts. And again - its 6-7 year old tech.

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The point with carts, is that you don't have to preload all the data into normal RAM - you just use it as required. Capacity is much more an issue than speed is.