Some videogame systems still had shielding over the motherboards a decade or more later. I know the Atari 5200 did. That might have been the last one I took apart..
Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
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Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#22I 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.
Well, they tried to start getting CD tech in the mid 1980s but fucked up badly.
Sony and Nintendo were going to produce an add-on for the SNES so it could load data from CDs. The licensing agreement would not have worked out well for Nintendo. That led to drama at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show when Sony announced the product one day, and Nintendo announced that they were partnering with Philips instead the next day...[0]
After more false starts and some lawsuits, Sony basically then went on to produce the PlayStation without Nintendo. [1]
As for Nintendo's partnership with Philips -- that didn't work out either, though I don't know the details. I do know that Philips developed a system called the CD-i (which flopped), and got the rights to use some of Nintendo's characters. Philips later contracted other companies to produce games for the CD-i, which is why Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure exist.[2]
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-philips-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_%28console%29#Deve...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_...
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#23I still to this day don't understand why blowing on the cartridges would make them work. It boggles my mind every time I think back to my childhood.
In a NTSC-US style NES, there's a big 72 pin connector in the back of the NES that the cartridge plugs into. The pins in that connector are basically little springy metal tabs that grab the contacts on the cartridge when you plug the cartridge in. But through use, some of those pins get loose enough so that they just barely make contact, and even start to fail to make contact. When you blow on a cartridge, you're introducing enough saliva to create a conductive path and maybe get good contact at that 72 pin connector.
The connector is easily removed and the pins can be cleaned and bent back into place with a small flathead screwdriver. Replacement 72 pin connectors are also easily obtained on eBay and other sites. Top-loading NES models are less susceptible to this and thus they have been sought out by collectors who want a long term way to play the games in their collections.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#24I still to this day don't understand why blowing on the cartridges would make them work. It boggles my mind every time I think back to my childhood.
That's because it wasn't actually the blowing on the cartridge that helped, it was the reinserting it: http://mentalfloss.com/article/12589/did-blowing-nintendo-ca...
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#25I 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 think the biggest advantage is a cartridge provides basically true random access with no seek time (maybe a few hundred nanoseconds of extra delay when switching banks, but that's still nothing compared to hundreds of milliseconds seeking a disc.) They're also much cheaper to interface since they can be mapped directly into the address space of the CPU; contrast that with the extra hardware and firmware required for an optical drive - plus the additional RAM that would be needed for the CPU to execute from.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we talking about engineering or "software engineering"?. I'm a "software engineer", and what I actually do is web development, completely self taught. There are about a million ways you could teach yourself the skillset that I have. I don't see how that compares to something like nuclear engineering or chemical engineering. No one teaches themselves to build nuclear reactors, and no one is going to get a job in t…
i'm not sure i get your point. are you trying to suggest that chemical engineering cannot be self-taught? or that self-taught chemical engineers cannot get work? either point seems suspect. "No one teaches themselves to build nuclear reactors, and no one is going to get a job in that field as an autodidact unless they have already worked in a closely related field." can you substantiate either of these claims?
Some engineering jobs may require a PE (http://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe) certificate, which--although it appears to vary from state to state--requires a four-year engineering degree. Also, most companies in the position to hire a chemical engineer to, say, design and implement a process to distill liquid oxygen, are conservative enough not to entertain the idea of putting an uncredentialed worker on the team. When you're building a plant with the unfortunate capability to explode, poison, or asphyxiate a town, well, isn't it fair to expect that the number of autodidact engineers doing significant work on these projects is close to zero?
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#27Black or white, could you get a job as a self-taught engineer today?
Yes, in the field of electronics it's possible to learn (a lot) by yourself. Well, the math is complicated, and kind of hard to navigate by yourself, but I'd say it's doable and you don't need to go too deep
Less in mechanical engineering and even less in Civil Engineering (especially because you need a diploma to be able to sign on projects)
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#28The Magnavox Odyssey (1972) was the first console with cartridges to select different games. The Channel F console (1976) was the first with ROM cartridges.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm not sure i get your point. are you trying to suggest that chemical engineering cannot be self-taught? or that self-taught chemical engineers cannot get work? either point seems suspect. "No one teaches themselves to build nuclear reactors, and no one is going to get a job in that field as an autodidact unless they have already worked in a closely related field." can you substantiate either of these claims?
Some engineering jobs may require a PE ( http://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe ) certificate, which--although it appears to vary from state to state--requires a four-year engineering degree. Also, most companies in the position to hire a chemical engineer to, say, design and implement a process to distill liquid oxygen, are conservative enough not to entertain the idea of putting an uncredentialed worker on…
Every state allows for substitution of experience for education. Unfortunately, the substitution rate is generally on the order of 10 years of experience or more counting similar to a 4 year degree from an accredited program.
There are also very strict laws for anything that touches the public from the engineering standpoint and also many insurance companies won't touch you without licensure. This will catch up to software engineers some time in the future I imagine and a licensed engineer will be required to oversee and sign off on products just like in other engineering disciplines.
As a tangent, it is actually illegal to call yourself or portray yourself as an engineer without being licensed by the state as such.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#30I 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 think of the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64 and the Sega Master System, all of which also had cartridges in the early 80s.
One of Nintendo's stated reasons for choosing cartridges for the Nintendo 64 versus optical media was to discourage piracy.