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Forums - Gaming - Could "Cartridges" (Or Something Similar) Make a Comeback?

 

Could Carts Make a Comeback?

Already making room on my shelf 29 24.79%
 
It's certainly possible 36 30.77%
 
Highly Unlikely 31 26.50%
 
Vinyl has a better chance at a comeback 21 17.95%
 
Total:117
Thunderbird77 on 14 March 2016

They never left for handhelds.



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SvennoJ on 14 March 2016
Pemalite said:
SvennoJ said:
I highly doubt it.

Even if it's going to happen they will be cheap and slow read only cards, which have to install to the hdd before you can play. Making convenient 300 MB/s uhs sdhc cards on which you can also write save games, way too expensive.

I wonder if Sony is going to use 4K discs next gen. Games keep getting bigger, and one 100 GB disc is probably cheaper in the long run than 2 standard blu-rays. Adding an extra layer is all a 4K disc is anyway. Most games won't need 3 layers, a lot only need 1 actually.

TLC NAND can hit roughly 20cents per gigabyte right now, I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done cheaper via stacked, it's still not going to be cheaper than mass produced optical discs though.
But... Load times of 300MB/s with 1-2ns access times is VASTLY superior to the PS4's 27MB/s and 180ms access times of it's blu-ray drive. (That's 180,000,000 ns)
It would allow for streaming to be very feasible.
300MB/s transfer rates is also 2-3x faster than a mechanical Hard Drive, which is something you won't get out of cheap TLC NAND+controller set-up.
Though... On the bright side you probably wouldn't need a hard drive if you were using 300Mb/s Flash as the storage medium, provided each "cart" had a few gigabytes of extra storage for extra content or something.

Also Discs aren't tied to a resolution.
You could do 4k movies on a regular 700 Megabyte (Aka. PS1) compact disk, unfortuntately... You would likely have to compromise on bitrate and run time substantually... And no commercial hardware players would be able to read it natively, you would need a "Smart" device to do so that can already output at that resolution.
In short you don't need a 100Gb disc to do 4k, it's just marketing buzzwords that you have grasped onto. A 25/50Gb Blu-ray disk using h.265 for 4k video would be sufficient for most people.

Yes I know, I meant the 4K UHD player formats which can read 50, 66 and 100GB discs. The 50GB are simply the current blu-ray discs. 66GB dual layer with slightly smaller dot pitch and 100GB triple layer discs. They could as well use BDXL discs that can do 128GB, yet it's more likely Sony wants to promote 4K ultra HD with the ps5 at the same time. Easier to use the same formats for pressing discs.

Next gen will probably use SSD drives internally with SATA 3 or even better. Games will still be installed as it's the easiest method to keep digital and physical version behaving identically. They could make physical perform better now by also utilizing the blu-ray drive to read chunks of continuous data simultaneously with the HDD reading the small random access files. However that's extra work. Patches will also still need to be applied and I doubt they'll provide writeable flash memory to actually patch the game on the flash card. Full installs are here to stay.

In the end, discs will always be cheaper to mass produce. 20 cents per GB sounds good, yet how much is it per unit. What's the base cost per card. I doubt a 16GB card is 'only' $3.20

But maybe upgrading the hdd next gen will be as simple as sticking a higher capacity card in a slot.



Hiro94 on 14 March 2016

I don't see why not. Vinyl made a huge comeback yet 10 years ago no one wanted the things in their collection. I think Indie developers may find a way to take advantage of the cartridge if given an avenue for them or just using them for current existing cartridge based consoles.



kooltrex on 14 March 2016

I would but I have no room on my shelf :^l It would be awesome but they would be like Vita or 3DS carts if they did come back.



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Low78wagon on 15 March 2016

Huge neo geo style carts ftw!



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Ucouldntbemorewrong on 15 March 2016

This just in:

Miami Vice TV show coming to Big Screen.