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Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges

engadget.com

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Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges

#31

Post by IkmoIkmo »

jetti wrote: post #17
Htsthbjig wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple. Hair and dust get to cover the electrical contacts of the cartridges. Blowing removes it.

Actually it had to do with the moisture of your breath bridging the connection between the carteidge and the system, however the moisture from your breath also caused problems for the copper in the cartdridge.

Nah I think it just did damage over the long-run, and the act of reinserting it a couple times helped to get it connected properly with or without moisture from your breath. The blowing was just a ritual.

Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges

#32

Post by scrollaway »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #6
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I think like most people, when I think of cartridges I think of Nintendo. I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. One advantage of cartridges over discs is that you can put specialized chips on the carts that each game can take advantage of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_c... At the bottom of the above link you'll see a list of super Nintendo games that us…

"I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did." As far as I remember, people did not like optical media. When Sega added a new optical attachment for their Sega Genesis, nobody bought it. Optical media required loading. Interactivity was lost. You had "Dragon's Lair" kind of games that had tremendous quality but felt prefabricated. It was only much later with he first PSP that people starte…

> Interactivity was lost. You had "Dragon's Lair" kind of games that had tremendous quality but felt prefabricated.

That's a product problem though, not an engineering one. Games suddenly had all this space but nothing to do with it because graphic engines were, for the only time in the history of video games, running behind hardware capabilities. So we got those awkward "uncanny valley" type FMV games/interactive movies and what not because those were the only ones that justified the need for optical discs.

Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges

#33

Post by bluedino »

kalleboo wrote: post #19
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I think like most people, when I think of cartridges I think of Nintendo. I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. One advantage of cartridges over discs is that you can put specialized chips on the carts that each game can take advantage of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_c... At the bottom of the above link you'll see a list of super Nintendo games that us…

> 2) these chips were cheap I don't think it's was so much that the chips were that cheap (chips are definitely way cheaper now - $5 for a wifi chipset?!), but rather the games were very expensive - when the game costs $100 or more in today's money (and you hadn't already blown your budget on a development team of hundreds of artists), you can justify a $2-$5 budget for an advanced chipset that'll double your sales.

ROM chips were not cheap at all. The bigger your game, the more chips you needed and therefore the more your game would cost. The 'big' games on SNES were 16 and 32 megabits which ended up with $69-89 pricetags.
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