Cartridges or optical discs?

[Pemalite]

VGPolyglot said:

d21lewis said:
I've never had an issue with cartridges not working (well, not since the NES days...). I've had disc drive issues with PS1, PS2, and Xbox 360.

My Master System has had trouble reading cartridges for some reason, I still don't know why.

Get some rubbing alcohol, clean your carts and the cartridge slot on your console.

AlfredoTurkey said:
Carts and by carts, I mean Atari 2600 through N64 carts. What we're using now are tiny little memory cards. I'd rather have discs than those.

As to why? They're more durable and they almost instantly load. There's also just something infinitely more enjoyable about collecting them.

Well. After the Nintendo 64, carts were restricted to only handhelds.
And that means size needed to be reduced for portability reasons.

Aeolus451 said:
I rather them just go to normal sized USB sticks. Between cartridges and discs, I'll go with discs because they can be repaired and it's cheaper.

Carts can also be repaired.

Good luck repairing an optical disk that is suffering from oxidization of the data layer, which was extremely common in the PS1 days.
The optical disk laser also degrades over time, many of the early disk-based systems are suffering from that very issue... Yet a SNES will still run like the day it was made.

SvennoJ said:
Loading times are irrelevant as HDDs are faster than (affordable) cartridges anyway.

Mechanical disks do have terrible random reads/writes though.

dharh said:

If SONY wanted to they could upgrade the firmware to make it so.  Although SONY and Philips are joint creators of the CD-DA format I believe SONY would have to pay Philips a certain amount per PS4 out there to do this (its probably pennies per though), though I am no expert.  However, I suspect the real reason for not wasting time paying for licensing and put time into making the software is that Audio CD's are at this point antiquated to the point that _new_ hardware is not necessary.  Music Streaming has almost completely taken over.

Do you have a link for this claim?

curl-6 said:

To be fair, can you pop a PS1/PS2/PS3 disc in a PS4 and play it?

Nope. Xbox One can read all optical disks though.... From CD to UHD BluRay.