Gadgetory

hey guys this isn't Linus so what's one of your favorite childhood memories maybe eating sugary cereal while watching Saturday morning cartoons so I can capri-sun out of a pouch or getting weird love notes from that super awkward kid you know who you are well if you were like me it's blowing dust out of my old game cartridges which would magically make them work if they've been misbehaving and because all of our old consoles the NES Sega Genesis Gameboy etcetera all these cartridges this is a near universal rite of passage for young gamers back in the day but fast-forward to modern times and game cartridges have largely disappeared Nintendo is still using cartridge like game carts for their 3ds and switch consoles but the ps4 and Xbox one which are meant to stay in the living room still use optical discs and so did all of the predecessor consoles it's actually been a long time actually was the n64 was the last time that there was a proper game console that was based in your home that still used cartridges see these guys they're the future so why have they disappeared and why were they popular in the first place well although we usually think of game cartridges as older tech do you remember how quickly games used to load compared to modern titles on optical media I mean right now you take a game you put it in your xbox and now that you have to install 50 gigs to your hard drive but you have to download another 20 gigabyte patch whereas with Super Mario on the NES you just put it in and you play do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do please don't use that well not only where the cartridge is relatively durable other than the affer mentioned dust issues but the way they interface with the console made them very fast you see when you insert a cartridge into a console this system effectively treated its content as part of the system's memory imagine how fast modern PC games a load if they were just sitting on a stick of RAM that you insert in your motherboard instead of a hard drive or SSD with slower loading times of course it's not a perfect comparison game cartridges contained mostly read-only memory or ROM that stored the code for the game itself wherever you saved your progress thus a file will be stored on either a small amount of volatile memory that needed a coin battery to maintain the data or a special memory chip called an EEPROM that doesn't need a constant supply of power but could only hold a very small amount of information so if cartridges were faster and could hold save data unlike optical discs then why did they almost disappear unsurprisingly as with many great things in life a huge part of the equation is the cost gain cartridges and the ROM they contain is a lot more expensive to manufacture than optical discs which can be produced for only a couple bucks including their packaging and documentation although to be fair they don't really include much documentation these days you got to be eco aka cheap and that gave me a cool manual to remember how to beat the boss or something I don't know what she figured I don't really ever think I found any use at all in manuals even though data discs are much more susceptible to things like breakage and scratches it was a worthwhile trade-off for the console manufacturers especially considering there is a lot easier to create a high-capacity optical disk and then create a high-capacity cartridge when games became more complex the optical disc also allowed the likes of Sony and Microsoft to push more games to market prior to digital distribution because those optical discs were so much cheaper to produce if you released a game that turned out to be a giant dud in terms of sales it didn't automatically mean that you were going to be a completely bankrupt company of course physical media isn't exclusively in the form of optical discs these days anyone who owned a Sony discman in the 90s will know just how much of a pain taking an optical disc on the road can be so for portability reasons the after mention Nintendo 3ds and switch use game cards something that Nintendo has been able to get away with thanks to the following costs of solid-state storage and their high margins on the first party titles and I guess third party titles too if you think about it I don't how much Nintendo makes for every switch game they sell I bet it's a lot what seven dollars seven percent seven cents okay but it should be noted that modern game karts are quite different from the game cartridges of yesteryear they don't become part of the addressable memory for the console as instead they're much more akin to something like a modern SD card that means low x could still be slightly long but there is good news nothing stopping you from blowing the dust off of those Nintendo cartridges and we're living the days before your failed relationships and crippling student loan debts but if you want to get that self-confidence back after you've been dumped for the fourth time then you might want to check out the sponsor of today's video do you want to treat your brain well there check out brilliant a problem-solving website that teaches you to think like a computer scientist instead of passively listening to lectures brilliant allows you to master concepts by solving fun and challenging problems and it provides the framework and tools that you need to tackle the challenges brilliance thought-provoking content is based around breaking up complexities into bite-sized understandable chunks that will lead you from curiosity to mastery and you'll be in the company of over five and a half million members who share your curiosity and love for math and science so what are you waiting for you can support tech wiki and learn more about brilliant by clicking the link in the video description or going to brilliant org slash tech wiki and signing up for free the first 200 people to go to the link will get 20% off an annual premium subscription so be sure to check it out so thank you for watching this very non lioness edition of tech wiki if you enjoyed then you know you can hit the like button if you didn't enjoy you should hit the like button anyway because that's the way that works and of course she check out some of these other videos like this one and this one you can also go subscribe to our new channel this is over on YouTube or you could just sit here and stare at me as I awkwardly wait for you to click on one of these videos it's your choice but that was pretty good