Cartridges or optical discs?

[Pemalite]

VGPolyglot said:

Pemalite said:

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.

I never had PS1 games with that problem, so I'm not sure if it can be called extremely common.

It's also known as "Disk Rot".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

It most certainly is a real issue.

I do have a few games with disk rot such as Unreal 2 and Morrowind on the original Xbox, the games still work, but it's only a matter of time.

SvennoJ said:

You will never be able to pop a disc in the Switch, nor a 3ds cartridge btw.

Well. Nintendo could release an updated dock with optical disk and cart support for backwards compatability purposes, the transfer of such data is more than okay over USB.

Is it likely to happen? I doubt it, but they took that approach with the Gamecube... So...

curl-6 said:

By the same token though you can put a DS cart in a 3DS, a GBA cart in a DS, a GB cart in a GBA.

You could also put Gameboy in the SNES, Gameboy Advance in the Gamecube.
And there were 3rd party adapters (Albeit uncommon) for similar for the Nintendo 64.