Nintendo What-If? #4

[bdbdbd]

h2ohno said:

bdbdbd said:

Umm... How was Gamecube's disc drive more proprietary than that of Dreamcast, PS2 and Xbox had? And how did it hurt Gamecube? What do you think was the problem with with Gamecube's console design and why do you think the bad design PS2 had did not hurt PS2, if GC design hurt GC?

I don't see power being a problem with Wii U.

The gamecube disks were designed to be read ina diffferent direction than the DVDs used for other systems.  That;s why they were 'more propietary.'  It was a way of preventing them from being burned and copied.  What really hurt them, though, was that the small disks could only hold 1.5 gigs of data, while the PS2 and Xbox disks could hold 3x that amount.  It meant that again, developers were discouraged from working harder to fit larger games like GTA onto the small disks.   Many third party games that skipped the gamecube would have come to the system if it had used 4.5 gig disks instead.

The drive was hardwarewise a standard DVD as far as I'm concerned, only the firmware was different to have the disc read from outside to inside - even the disc was spinning in a standard direction. Physically the discs were standard mini-DVD. If you'd had the codecs, it would've played standard mini-DVD's. All of the consoles had the same things being proprietary, which are the codecs and DRM used for the software (for obvious reasons).

Yes, the disc was smaller in capasity, but it doesn't make the drive any less standard.