Nintendo Files Patent For a Console Without the Optical Disk (But has a Card Slot)

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

spemanig said:

Captain_Yuri said:

It does have an external hard drive solution in the patent so it makes me wonder why do we even need an sd card anymore at all

The Wii U has an external hard drive solution. Likely just for the Wii/3DS games that'll be playable on the NX.

To answer your last question, though, we don't know. But you have to take a really hard look at what you're suggesting by thinking that Nintendo would put 3rd party developers through the same N64 garbage that made Square leave. You know, the Square that is planning on releasing DQX on the NX.

I don't think the patent shows anything other than a typical SD card slot. I don't think that Nintendo is going to suddenly think its a good idea to go back to cartridges, which are more expensive than disks, after over 15 years of using CDs on consoles. And I don't think that's an absurd thing to think. I think that it's far more likely that they're doing the obvious move of going all digital, like literally every other form of media has done. Books did it. Movies did it. Music did it. Gaming has already done it on PC. Nintendo is doing it now on consoles. I wasn't sure if Nintendo was ballsy enough to do it for consoles yet. I'm 100% sure they are now.

Yea but technology has progressed a lot since then... Flash memory has become heck of a lot cheaper and its faster than optical media... The 3ds cartridges can hold up to 8gb and the got released back in 2011 so now, they should be able to increase the space but a lot while keeping the costs down. And while 64gb microsd cards do still cost a bit to buy, they are also full re-writable where as cartridges mostly aren't apart from the save data which will also bring the costs down. So I doubt the storage size or the cost the make will be an issue.

And while I get where you are coming from, the patent suggests that it will have games in the memory card

"First Basic Program" and "Second Basic Program" which are in the "Memory Card" and Not in the "External HDD" also goes into the console. So "First Basic Program" goes into Memory/Ram and "Second Basic Program" goes into the "Internal Hard Drive" which really suggests its a cartridge since the "First Basic Program" is most likely game files that gets loaded up into Ram and "Second Basic Program" is most likely any installation files or save data that gets written into the internal hard drive. Why would "First Basic Program" go into memory if it wasn't?

Oh and I am aware it mentions "SD card" but its not like SD cards can't have games inside or can't be "read only" since they are flash memory which cartridges are...