Nintendo Switch Cartridges Are Not Cartridges
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- Опубліковано 16 жов 2024
- Nintendo Switch cartridges... aren't cartridges. Listen to me explain why these small black plastic rectangles aren't the same as old-old-school cartridges from games systems in days gone by.
It's also an excuse for me to capture some footage from The Legenend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Which is quite good in case you hadn't heard.
There's a lot of wrestling games in this video, not for any good reason, I just fell into a rabbit hole. Some of them are good, many are not.
Also, support me on patreon:
/ sharopolis
That would be great.
Its a bitter tasting treat. Duh.
Shhhhhh
A nutritious part of a balanced diet.
Tastes better seasoned with silica spice
Good one lol
How did this even start? Why did people expect this piece of electronic plastic to taste different from any other electronic plastic? 😂
I may be wrong but I think the Game Boy Advance released in 2001 was probably the last directly memory-mapped cartridge system released. The video producer makes a good point though that the entire benefit of directly mapping the address space of the ROM cartridge to the CPU was that it greatly simplified the cost of the system itself. You didn't need either an operating system, BIOS chip, or much RAM in the actual system because of the direct memory mapped nature of the ROM cartridge in old systems like the various consoles and early microcomputers. Nowadays that wouldn't be much benefit, (even your refrigerator seems to have an Operating System these days), but in the past it kept the systems low cost.
It also allowed more complex games as time went on without having to upgrade the system. Carts released at the end of lifecycle of a console were able to be bigger and could have additional chips to help with processing.
I was a little curious, if the games were read directly from the cartridge then why would some SNES games like Mickey Mania, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Another World and some Nintendo 64 games like Quake 2, Perfect Dark, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 and Jet Set Force Gemini had loadings?
edit: It was in 2001
@@MoonSarito Most likely because those games had to store some data in compressed format to save space, which at the time was scarce, and it required some cpu time to de-compress it and load into system's ram
@@anki.8434 Thanks, got it.
Uninteresting fact: Nintendo have never used the word “cartridge” to market their games. For NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance they used the term “game pak” for the west and “cassette” for Japan. Then for DS, 3DS and Switch they use the term “game card”.
Also, I’ve had many “conversations” (arguments) with people online about this subject. There seem to be a lot of people out there who would never call an SD card a cartridge, but absolutely insist that a Switch game is a cartridge.
A Nintendo Switch Game Card is by definition a ROM cartridge. The technology is literally called "XtraROM". The difference isn't that one is chip ROM and one is flash memory, they're both chip ROM, it's how they're unterfaced with. "Game Pak" cartridges are mapped to the system bus as system memory, while "Game Card" cartridges are mounted as storage. However, they're still cartridges in the literal sense. They're just not system bus attached.
While the portion is small, Nintendo Switch Game Cards actually do have a small amount of "old fashioned" ROM that pretty much maps to a memory location, though things have gotten more complicated. This small section of ROM is essentially what the console communicates with and contains all the key functional information and more or less, how to load the data.
It's not that Nintendo is cheaping out, just that games have gotten much, much bigger. Far too big to map to memory, and so like all storage devices, the CPU commands the controller rather than the storage itself.
From day 1 I knew the switch games where SD cards, so, you're right.
@@timotheatae the point is it’s significantly different technology to what is widely known as a game cartridge. HuCards and Master System game cards were never called cartridges despite being much closer in technology to traditional game cartridges than Switch games are.
Equating old style game carts to Switch style game cards is like equating floppy disks to blu-ray discs. They work the same way only by the very broadest definition.
Of course, it doesn’t matter in the slightest what people call them, but there’s a reason Nintendo adopted different terminology for DS, 3DS and Switch games.
@@gammaphonic Pretty much every console ever has used "different technology" from another in the cartridge. It's not a broad definition: Nintendo Switch Game Cards are LITERALLY data cartridges.
As for terminology, yeah, their form factor is entirely different, partially possible because of the change in technology.
While Master System Game Cards were more literally "cards", Nintendo Switch Game Cards are still PCBs in a plastic case, just like any other cartridge.
Even in Wikipedia explain that to the public
Actually the loading times of totk surprised me because they were so incredibly short, even if you teleport from one side to the complete opposite side of the map.
Very true, it's not really a problem, just an excuse to make a video.
If you check Digital Foundry's tech analysis of Tears of the Kingdom they actually note that a big difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom loading is that the CPU is clocked at the usual 1020mhz on Breath of the wild load screens, whilst in Tears of the Kingdom it's overclocked to around 1700mhz, which means the CPU can load quicker and the GPU is clocked down to just around 70mhz to make sure there are no stability issues due to too much power being used. This is certainly a big contributing reason to the swift loading times in TotK
@@zues121510 aaah, now that's smart!
Nintendo probably clocked the CPU that way because BotW also launched for the Wii U
@@zues121510 The CPU is not clocked higher in TotK. You are referring to their recent Switch overclocking video where someone with a modded Switch showed that if you overclocked the Switch CPU/GPU/RAM you can smooth out the performance issues in TotK.
But that is only doable with a modded Switch. The Switch runs at the same clock speeds in both BotW and TotK with a stock, out-of-the-box Switch.
Nintendo 64 games do very often load things directly from cartridge.
For example,
In Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Super Mario 64, every frame of the player's animation is streamed from the cartridge.
Also in Ocarina and Majora, the font is loaded from the cartridge in real time as the message is printing.
Not to mention that in most if not all Nintendo 64 games music and sfx samples and streamed from cartridge.
I liked that you used the word "stream". Because it's not always from Netflix servers to your TV.
Kind of a no-brainer when the system had 4MB of RAM on it.
That would explain why "tilting" the cartridge only seems to immediately affect character models and sound in Zelda.
@@JetWolfEX Shiiiit, it's all coming together now! I remember pulling the cart out a bit in the Temple of Time in OOT and getting some weird text to appear.. damn, those were the days. I just wanted to touch a triforce.. any triforce.. even a glitched one :P
@@zaandam0172 "stream" has been used as a term by programmers for decades before Netflix or UA-cam started using the term
A thing to add is that most modern games store data in compressed formats, especially on discs/catrisges, so the data would have to be copied to RAM anyway to decompress it. At that point the sequential acces on quad SPI channels of modern flash memories stop being the problem and cache misses during the copy/decompress steps get to be the most expensive step
Damn, Cache Miss isn't a term I've heard for a while.. clearly I need to skill myself up.
I actually came to the comments to mention the same thing, and I actually started to wonder...in a hypothetical world where it wasn't more expensive to increase the storage density of "game cards", would it even make it faster?
I have a feeling it's actually a faster overall process to load compressed data into RAM and decompress it than it would be to try and load raw, uncompressed data through the serial lines of the game card slot. Switch game cards are notoriously slow compared even to an average-quality microSD in the Switch's SD card slot. The time penalty of having to decompress data is still probably less severe than the time penalty of having to read substantially more data from the slow game cards!
I have made exactly the same observation before; though not in video form, so it's good to have it documented like this. The difference between cartridge being memory on the system bus, and other storage media which are fundamentally block devices which require copy to memory, and modern cards being block devices of course for several generations.
I think NES is a bit of an exception though that two system buses are broken out to the cartridge, both the CPU bus as usual on all cartridge based systems, and the PPU bus too. It was quite typical of 8-bit systems to only have the CPU bus on the cartridge. The amount of data copying expected wasn't high, and many NES games contained SRAM for the PPU and also populated it by copying. Thinking of newer more powerful systems handling more data like Megadrive, those contained DMA hardware to accelerate the copying; today you have loads and loads of DMA hardware of exceptional complexity to help with the copying.
Back in the day, mask ROM was a standard solution offered by numerous factories, which behaves indistinguishable from SRAM except not accepting writes and directly compatible with standard processor bus. They would reuse most of the semiconductor layer stack setup and print one mask layer quickly and cheaply, since it didn't need to be as high resolution as the other masks, for each ROM to be produced, resulting in a custom chip at low setup cost, and this was the main method to manufacture cartridge games up until and including the GBA, and of course it was shared with so many other industries, every device which needed a bit of firmware needed one or a few of those, so economies of scale were excellent. This was economical even for a few thousand copies. Today this cannot be done, it has plain died out as a manufacturing technology, you won't find a company which offers it. A related technology was PLA or ULA, where instead of data you could program custom logic, this is how custom chips in most home computers were made, which was eventually replaced by Antifuse FPGA, and then Antifuse i think died out as well. Interesting cases of dead technologies that we no longer have access to.
Stop womansplaining.
@@Lifewhilelearning its not womansplaining its called ovary-acting
@@BanditTheCatRIP what the hell y'all
I was a little curious, if the games were read directly from the cartridge then why would some SNES games like Mickey Mania, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Another World and some Nintendo 64 games like Quake 2, Perfect Dark, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 and Jet Set Force Gemini had loadings?
@@MoonSarito On the Nintendo 64 you fully expect it, that's a system which was designed as a block storage based system, and took advantage of RDRAM, a memory type which was very fast for the time but cannot share the bus with any other electronics, there exists no electrically compatible ROM type, and if there was, it would have likely been horribly unreliable in cartridge form. The cartridge is not part of the CPU bus. It's a weird system in all possible regards, completely baffling. So in spite of appearance, it's not a classic cartridge based system.
Some games on SNES for sure have stage intro screens which are NOT loading screens, nothing happens there, they just hang in there for a couple seconds to hype you up.
Some things on the SNES actually need to be loaded. For one you need to populate the sound memory on the soundchip, and it happens through a somewhat narrow and ill designed port, it can take a little bit of time. This is the problem with Street Fighter Alpha 2, the audio loader is where the obvious pauses come from, and yes it could have been done better. You also need to copy the tile and graphics data to the graphics chip's memory, but it doesn't take much time, especially if pure black screen is OK in the interim.
A lot of games on both the SNES and Megadrive make extensive use of compression for tilemaps in particular because they're super sparse and repetitive, and tile graphics often as well. Particularly tile graphics decompression can take a fair bit of time. The reason is cartridge cost, where bumping up to the next higher capacity ROM IC would be too expensive. This is the probably case for Mickey Mania, ask Jon Burton. As to Another World, that's hidden drawing. The whole game is stored as vector graphics, and needs to be rasterised, due to floppy space limitation on the Amiga, so a form of compression as well - all ports of the game are direct and use the same data.
Did you know that in Yoshi's Island, SuperFX2 is used i think the majority of the execution time not for the graphics effects, but for graphics decompression? This way load-in wouldn't lead to slowdown. Some game logic is on SuperFX though, also acceleration of several math functions, calculation of HDMA buffers for offsets, the actual graphical effects really come from stock hardware, but SuperFX code helps set them up by calculating parameters. It might well be that including a co-processor is cheaper than extra ROM, and comes with extra advantages as well. Street Fighter Alpha 2 also has a decompression co-processor, works wonderfully.
Yep, definitely referred to as cards and not cartridges. Through Nintendo working with SanDisk and Macronix, the DS, 3DS, and Switch Cards are the modern descendants of the early Hudson Beecards, and Hucards in a much more convenient and smaller form factor. Being a fan of gaming most of my 40+ years, I have always been fascinated by how the cartridges went from being pretty big with the NES (later I learned that they actually were much smaller in Japan, but they required more shell for the NES), blown away with the size of GameBoy Cartridges, awed by SNES and N64, really impressed with GBA. Then during that, I have seen the cards, cartridges, and discs of other systems and appreciated the pros and cons of them. Ultimately, really glad that Nintendo chose Cards as the physical format for Switch as noting that many PSP users had issues with the UMDs or the drives for them.
Nintendo’s next console will stay with the cartridges
1tb sd cards which you don't need, are nice to see. Though it's funny to learn switch only has 4gb of ram. It's weaker than a potato PC 😂 and the OLED didnt even bother improving it, being a color of the month with a shiny undockrd screen. At least the cards hold some data if you didn't buy a 400gb SD card.
Vid had fun wrestling clips and zelda isn't bad with load times compared to warborn/airhart taking over a minute to boot, or captain Tsubasa at least 30 seconds a match.
Don't forget that early variants of the Sega Master System could use game cards.
@Zachary Rollick definitely aware of them, just believe that they were a separate yet similar technology than the Hucards that Nintendo went with from Hudson.
Cards and cartridges are the same thing, by definition. Any delineation is something people just made up, but there is no difference as those are extremely general terms.
I’ve always hated discs, I’ll never forget how my sibling scratched up my Mario Galaxy game when I was a kid. I never got that game back either. Not only are discs easily destroyed, but they are way too big & take up a lot of space inside of a console.
Almost feels like we’re still clinging on to old technology that should’ve been phased out long ago. But I do like physical Switch games/cartridges way better, they’re almost like an SD card or something. I wish all physical games were more like that
in the early days of optical discs manufacturers were kinda debating whether to put the discs into a standardized caddy (i.e. floppy drive) to make handling easier. Ideas went wild, and some manufacturers went with separately sold proprietary caddies instead, which had an inverse effect of making handling much harder. Thus caddies became obsolete outside of maybe Sony's UMD.
@@gluttonousmaximus9048 I wasn’t suggesting a caddy type of solution. Just get rid of discs all together for something better. I like Nintendo’s solution a lot. Though there is room for improvement for their solution as well. But I know physical games won’t change to a better technology. What’s more likely is that PlayStation & Xbox will eventually abandon physical games completely.
well if ur disc got scratched up and damaged its ur fault. lol. u should take better care of ur discs. n keep it outta
reach from wreckless siblings. who u know would mess it up. being the delicate piece of software it is.
cd roms were a blessing from floopy and cartridge formats. imagine the 90s era consoles using the nintendo way
until gamecube. ff7 wouldnt even be a thing. tons of great games wouldnt have been made or the same...
besides the mini disc was also a neat evolution of the cdrom which gamecube tried but sadly it bombed. i wouldnt mind
that type of cd console. but ya glad nintendo went back to its roots with its cartridge format fetish they had since nes.
sad this tech wasnt there when square begged them for more memory to make their epic game tho.
but ya the future of gaming looks bleak if everything will go digital and is online purchase thing. i like to have physical
copies of my games for my console. i dont think nintendo will go that route anyday soon tho. as they are always the
black sheep type of company who against the standard.
@ᔕᑭꏂΛՐ Well, it's up to the indie game developers and AA game studios to save physical media of video games once and for all because indie/AA games cares about you and listen to you.
I am in the same boat, I absolutely despise discs ! Fragile, always scratches after normal use even if you are highly cautious, and loading times can be tough...
I didn't buy discs (games, movies) since decades... I go full digital for games except for cartridge format that I like ❤
For those who grew up on PCs, like me, here's an analogy to help explain the difference between old and new cartridges:
Old-school cartridges are basically an ISA card with some ROM chips, glue logic, and some optional extra hardware. Newer cartridges are basically just an SD card.
Thanks for explaining this
9:40 SD flash chip for evercade, indeed--they can be written/rewritten with an sd reader and a pin adapter. Official systems even write the savestates/patches back onto them.
It's still a cartridge. You can load a gun with a cartridge, doesn't make a lick of difference what's INSIDE the cartridge, except the promise of certain functionality what with comes as some of the components are delivered IN A CARTRIDGE. Such as, they're treated legally as material property, and not a service license, which is the entire basis of physical games. And the entire basis of delineating what IS and what IS NOT piracy.
Too bad many find it convenient to lie that "owning" a software license is a free pass to twist the democratically set LEGISLATION about what is and isn't piracy. And break the very same copyright law, that suddenly becomes hypocritically a problem when YOUR cartoon OC is stolen on Twitter, or UA-cam lets somebody strike your "Fair" Use content. Giving themselves the privileged excuse to make "backups" but not allow businesses and 3rd parties to rely on the SAME legal exemptions. And taking piracy money from ads, but scream bloody murder when 3rd party retailers want to sell "Fair" Use content in CAPITALISM, not in ad-funded corporate socialism.
@@sboinkthelegday3892 Boohoo, Miyamoto won't be able to pay for his yacht because fans translated Mother 3.
@@sboinkthelegday3892 how did /pol/ get here
@@sboinkthelegday3892imagine simping so hard for starving people to death because they dont have enough imaginary points
TL;DR “That’s not a cartridge, this is a cartridge”
(Yes that was a crocodile Dundee reference
Moreover, the paradigm shift from mapping programs written to ROM directly to the cpu to loading chunks of the needed resources into memory, this fundamental change has implications in terms of how games themselves are programmed. This represents a shift of programming responsibility from knowing how to write to the game to accommodate specific components of the hardware architecture set to focusing on building potentially one codebase for multiple platforms and optimizing the game resources where necessary, and takes the responsibility of the game developer away from having to address specific hardware and instead relies on software-based API calls, which tend to be much significantly less daunting than, say, writing assembler for the switch’s hardware (if Nintendo, or any other console hardware manufacturer for that matter, allows for that nowadays).
Games of yesteryear were better programmed just simply due to the fact that the programmers were generally better at their craft; and while the titles were small, the hardware was simple enough to program in assembly, and game devs absolutely had to have a grasp on the ISAs of the different processors if they wanted to have at least something functional in the first place.
The Switch runs on a standard ARM64 chip. There's literally no need to write assembly when you can compile C code to it.
@@charliekahn4205 You missed the point I was making, entirely. Never once did I mention that one should (or could even) attempt to code in assembly for the switch. I argued that games were programmed better on hardware that utilized Cartridge-mapped ROM space just simply due to the consideration that developers *had* to know the hardware in order to program for it.
@@michaelwarner228 And I'm saying that because the Switch is entirely off-the-shelf, all the optimization work has basically already been done and is built into the compiler.
@@charliekahn4205 to clarify: I’m not stating that modern consoles should be programmed in assembly, that’s just not how things are done any more - not just because of the “parts being off the shelf”, but because NVIDIA hasn’t released the ISA for the graphics processor in the tegra X1, which is instrumental for producing GPU-accelerated code, instead they have devs rely on calls to graphics libraries or Driver API. That and, again, the ISAs of modern SoCs are far too complex (this coming from someone who regularly works in X86 assembly)
However, the CPU inside the NES was also an off-the-shelf component that was also possible to generate optimized machine code from C, but Assembly was opted for in software written for the 6502 specifically for performance and memory optimization. Hand optimization of assembly generally produces results that are either on parity, or even superior to that which can be performed by a compilation toolchain.
@@charliekahn4205 You would be surprised of the low quality assembly that compilers can emit sometimes. It's not uncommon for gamedev to trace put hot loops and play with the code to make the compiler behave
This was a fantastic video about Pro-Wrestling, and Zelda; with an interesting narration about differences between classic game carts, and modern game cards.
One major reason for loading times you forgot to mention: Data compression. When the data is loaded "from elsewhere", it doesn't matter what format it starts in, as long as it ends up in correct format. By using data compression, developers can trade more data / smaller capacity cartridge (cheaper to manufacture) for slower loading. Some late SNES games even had a dedicated extra chip for data decompression.
Also, one benefit of having to load gfx audio data to the dedicated chips is, you can have any amount of data, you can modify some of it, you can replace all of it, as long as you have space in ROM. It's just more flexible.
And random trivia at the end: (afaik) the first ROM cartridge based system, that didn't have cartridge memory directly mapped to the CPU is... Atari Lynx!
I don't think it's that clear-cut. There are some situations where employing compression actually increases throughput and results in faster loads, in situations where the CPU can decompress faster than data can load from storage, you essentially multiply your throughput by the compression ratio for free. Though I think in the PC world, SSDs have diminished the benefit of this, and I don't know how Switch carts compare to a modern SSD in terms of speed.
It's the classic trade-off of RAM versus CPU. Need a lot of RAM to decompress a ROM, but you don't need a fast CPU. It's just adding loading time. In the 90's nobody had a lot of RAM as it was expensive. So had to stream raw data directly from the ROM and use it as is and that was up to the speed of the CPU, and for the consoles that used a CD it heavily depended on the speed of the drive.
Basically what we call in the business a "block" device. Read (and write) a block at a time in and out of main memory.
ROM in N64 cartidges was still way faster than console's RAM. To the point that many later games accessed textures directly from ROM without copying them into memory. Games that didn't do that were limited to use 4KB texture buffer heavily limiting texture resolution.
However N64 cartridges had very limited size. Other consoles and PCs adopted CD-ROM which gave 500+ MB of space on single disc. Games on N64 had to use compression to store as much content within just 16-32 MB. This is why N64 games have loading screens. They decompress data from ROM to RAM.
This is why only some games use ROM as memory on N64. Uncompressed textures take up to 10x more space than compressed data.
It wasn't faster on cartridge but it had lower latency. The rdram in the n64 was very high speed, much faster than comparable ram available for other consumer tech and pc's, but it had terrible latency. These are different things with different implications for how a particular game runs.
The data lines on RAM don’t need to be the exact same length. Nor are they as you could even see in your image.
There’s however a maximum trace length for a given frequency that shouldn’t be exceeded, and only when you have differential signals and hey almost need to be the same length but there’s a certain leeway. In case of RAM the module will wait a clock cycle within that cycle (that frequency) the data should be at the cpu bus. Hence the length of the traces don’t need to be the same but have a maximum length to guarantee that all the bits are on the bus before the next clock pulse. So I’d with bit arrived a fraction later as the other is just fine as long as they’re all there when the next pulse hits.
This also is why APPLE now used SoC because traces in a die can be so much shorter and the Ram will perform so much faster. The CPU is these days waiting on RAM.
Sorry, but that is incorrect. N64 cartridges are relatively fast, but nowhere near as fast as system RAM. Also, there is no way to bypass the 4 KB texture limit (not even with clever programming tricks).
@@first__last indeed ROM has always been a bit slower that DRAM.
RAM bus of the N64 was 562MB/s but ROM speed 5-50MB/sec. So the RAM bus with its RDRAM was at least 10 times as fast.
The N64 GPU only had 4KB texture memory (TMEM), by the way this is let polygon m. Pushing it into RAM didn’t make the GPU’s TMEM all of sudden larger. What you could do though was texture swapping and that would require the textures to be in the fast RDRAM.
And ROMs generally are slower than DRAM. And the N64 used RDRAM that’s where the RAM used the speed of the RAMBUS preventing memory waits. Do it had to be faster than a ROM 😉
You're right. SD cards (which Switch "cartridges" are similar to) are a storage media. More like a solid state hard drive than a cartridge. Also, the dupe glitch was fixed yesterday (yesterday by the time this video went live, it was probably recorded before the glitch was fixed).
You can still delete the file on your switch if you have the cartridge, and the glitch can still work. With out loosing yous saved data.
@@thewise_1one856 Well, you can't! The Switch won't let you start the game up without being on the last patch it remembers having installed. You'd need to scrub every bit of data related to that game from the system to run the unpatched version again.
To be fair, you probably technically could use the CF serial connection as a normal bus, as long as there is a DMA protocol for it. But unless the connection speed rivaled that of the CPU without issue, I don't think it would be very pleasant.
medium
live;
yester
SSDs, while not commonly referred to as such, fall under the definition of a cartridge in electronics.
Traditional cartridges also required developers to be quite savvy in low-level machine code, a skill that's becoming rarer these days. Only having to worry about the data getting unpacked lets developers use conventional programming languages like C++, Java, etc.
C/C++ is still somewhat low-level though.
@@surplusking2425 It's a lot more accessible than Verilog or VHDL.
@@J-Pow or even older yet, FORTRAN.
@@surplusking2425+ is classed as a high level language. It might be on the lower end of high level but it's high level. Low level is machine code. The first level above binary. If you can set a variable with a word and have to worry about ram hardly or maybe not at all, it's not a low level language
Plastic case... Check
Chip.... Check
Motherboard.... Check
It's a cartridge
On my first home computer, the TI-99/4A, some cartridges were like that as well... those who had no CPU ROM, but only a GROM chip, which was 6K in size and mapped to only one reading address in CPU memory space. The CPU could't execute machine code from these directly, but those games were written in GPL, and the console had a built-in GPL interpreter which ran the games. Oh, and the video chip (like on many other consoles) didn't have access to the cartridge as well, but had its own VDP RAM, so all the graphics used had to be copied from the cartridge before they could be displayed. I guess it was the same with all of Sega's consoles, but then they started to have DMA which could copy directly from the cartridge to VDP RAM without involving the CPU.
I found the loading times 3x the speed of BotW WiiU, and just under twice as fast as BotW on switch. Really snappy. I only use cartridges too.
With the updates, botw on switch runs a bit faster than the Wii U
@@therealjaystone2344 Well you'd hope so.
When you were showing footage from the N64 i noticed that Bad Ass Billy gun was there. It blows me away that he’s still wrestling to this day, 4 whole consoles generations later
8:44 - Fascinating. I watch a lot of channels like this and man, first time I've learned about track length. Your videos are very informative! Thanks for taking the time to make these videos.
This is a good time to bring this up as the topic aides my point.
Modern game consoles aren't actually game consoles but software specific PCs.
The PSP's little mini disc format was kind of neat. It wouldn't be a stretch to see a format like that used today, but it would be rather expensive to implement I imagine due to the tiny disc reading drive that would need to be present. Having data on a MicroSD like card is just so much more practical, holds a lot of data these days & works just fine.
today flash memory just has more throughput and density than any mechanical drive.
@@fluffy_tail4365 And you don't need to worry about some moving parts failing or becoming weathered over time etc.. even an old-school NES that's been sitting in a moist garage for years usually comes good after a spray and wipe with electrical contact cleaner!
Technically the NES has to load some data into video memory. Often this data is compressed and has to be uncompressed, or at least it was when I was programming on the SNES.
It tastes wonderful though!
Excellent cartridge selection there at the start, brother 😎
Am I the only person who noticed every single game in the video that isn't Tears Of The Kingdom is a wrestling game.
Bad conclusion..
Cartridge (noun): a case or container that holds a substance, device, or material which is difficult, troublesome, or awkward to handle and that usually can be easily changed. (merriam-webster dictionary)
Whether something is a cartridge or not has nothing to do with its pinout or addressing. Its a simple generic word for containers of things that are easily interchangeable. Switch cartridges are easily interchangeable among all Switches, and are cartridges in that sense. Just like printer ink cartridges, shotgun cartridges, etc. Yes, Switch carts electronically function different than old school cartridges, but they are still cartridges nonetheless.
Fun fact, the ESP32 does direct memory mapping of SPI memories, both flash and RAM. They're still serial, so quite slow, but it doesn't need to preload.
Think of it more as a more compact optical disc and you are set. But hey, at least if the game is ever delisted you have version 1.0, so you dont lose the ability to play.
Or pirates/archivists backup the updates and conserves them. Which has already happened to old systems that has updates like the Wii or PS3.
With a physical copy I can also lend it to my sister, my friends, and still sell it for $30-40 when the year is done :P
Me discussing this with my son:
Those aren't cartridges, _these_ are _real_ cartridges!
Ok, Grandad, time for your medication.
Your son calls you grandad ?
@@mugu007 Maybe he said its time for medication because he thinks of his grandson as son.
if i remember correctly a cd could hold about 700mb of data and a n64 cartridge the biggest one i ever saw was resident evil 2 and it was 512mb. so when you say the n64 cartridge could hold "nowhere near" as much as a cd that is incorrect.
Dude, thank you so much for posting this! That was a FACINATING watch!
Great video. I love all the wrestling cartridges! I never really thought about it, but yeah, it's a medium that changed and is now dying out. I must mention too that a purely digital system will be WORTHLESS if the hardware/online services fail. We need physical media.
Even the digital codes on retailers selling them are worthless in the future
Of course it's not a cartridge, it's a magazine.
Despite being such a cornerstone system the NES is SO damn primitive. CHR Rom wired directly to the PPU which reads directly from that. It's easy to forget how a system that was still pretty viable in 1993 was designed in using 1982 hardware.
When your cartridge slot is actually the system bus, who cares about limitations?
I have always thought of them being more like SD cards then a cartridge.
Yeah same here , the Witcher 3 loading time was horrendous ,playing on pc or steam deck was a pleasure after playing through it on switch
Don't forget TG16. They used hue cards way back then.
@@powpuckmobile9226 Wow, way before my time.
That's a classic cartridge but in a very innovative space saving manufacturing form. Electrically there's nothing too unusual about it, it's a ROM (memory) device rather than a block storage device.
@@SianaGearz what’s the difference between the 2?
@@cosettapessa6417 A classic game cartridge is a memory device (ROM) and is incorporated into the system bus right alongside system's internal RAM, with system RAM and cartridge ROM being accessed in the same exact way. The software isn't "loaded" into the system RAM, it's executed from cartridge.
Modern Flash based storage (i.e. SD-Card, Switch Game Card, even Nintendo DS card) is not like that, it's an external device to the system that the information gets fetched from in blocks (512 bytes or larger) and copied to main RAM in order to be used, and is used in the same manner as a disk drive, it's "loaded".
This is actually the topic of the video.
@@SianaGearz so a modern comparison would be a ram stick that contains the game? Except for its cancellation when the power goes down lol
I remember out of this world (another world) had loading on SNES. It was so weird to me
This guy is a gaming version of DankPods
Thanks!
For years, I wondered why Switch "cartridges" had loading screens. Now I have a better idea as to why. Thanks.
New cartridges are still cartridges as they are encasing with the memory chips inside. But autor makes a good point overall about the difference in function of old and new tech.
(currently at 1:50)
Yep
This new kind is called cards instead of carts, even the nomenclature is similar but different to match the items. That's why there's no such phrase as "SD cartridges". 😂
@@autobotstarscream765 haha, yeah, would be super awkward to say "SD cartridge".
A bit of trivia, HuCard which has Card in it's name, is defined on Wikipedia as ROM cartridge in the form of a card. Just enough to make the world tiny bit more confusing :)
We're kinda making our way back to mapping storage with Direct Storage and how fast NVME SSD are we can get the instant load times of the NES as we can experience with the ps5.
I always think of it as like the difference between plugging something into a SATA connector vs a PCIe connector. The PCIe can be used for whatever you want whereas the SATA is only for storage. For example if I want to put a chip inside of a cartridge that gives me more RAM I'm fine to do that but you can't do that with a storage only medium which is what a modern game card does.
You wouldn't be able to put a super FX chip inside the switch cartridge or like how you had games that had tilting functionality or a sunlight sensor that couldn't work on a card based system like the switch.
I think an ISA card is a better fit than PCI Express. ISA is just an extension of the 8088's and 80286's memory bus plus a few extra control lines and power. Memory expansion ISA cards for XT and AT systems were a real thing. I recall having a 486 with an unusual extra connector that the manual said was for a memory expansion board, but I never saw anything similar on anything later than that.
Cartridge loading times were instant when game ram was 8 megabytes at most and that took a maximum of a couple seconds to transfer. Now we have carts (more like SD card) that have to hold games that are many gigabytes big which takes several seconds to transfer even on the fastest speeds.
He covers exactly this and goes into more detail in the video - you'd be surprised! 😅
@@phattjohnson I know he covered it, but I didn't think the way he explained it was super clear.
Literally just yesterday I was looking at a Switch cartridge and thought, "Is this _really_ the same thing as a NES cart?"
Nah, it's a switch cart bro ;)
I have always wondered this and I'm so glad I stumbled upon this video!
Did you know the loading times are faster in TotK than BotW? That's because in each loading time it will change the switch's CPU clock speed.
It's really 3d accelerator that made cartidges unresonable to implement. 3d accelerators can't just have a static grid it need to reprocess some of the data, really more than are stored.
Also when going over to GDDR memory become ported in stead of bussed, making a traditional cartrage implementation impossible. Any implementation would need to be on a parallel port... making it not a cartrage but a memory card.
Interestingly this is pretty much how the ps5 works
Have you seen the video of Digital Foundry using an overclock mod, getting a locked 60 out of TOTK? And thanks for the videos!
No I'm going to go and watch it now, thanks!
30fps you mean.
@@DrWillz1996 There was comment from the original creator of the overclock utility that says it will run on certain switches at 60fps.
As I mentioned, this was a SD Card that holds a lot of data and it might be possible to dump Switch games on PC that I couldn’t tell why.
Compare the Switch cards with CDs. The benefit is if in future Switch is no longer supported, the cards will still install.
I was a little curious, if the games were read directly from the cartridge then why would some SNES games like Mickey Mania, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Another World and some Nintendo 64 games like Quake 2, Perfect Dark, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 and Jet Set Force Gemini had loadings?
I think it is a wait for decompression
loading times in ToTk are limited to fast travel, death and going into shrines. considering you can fly from the sky islands to the chasm without any loading screen is chefs kiss.
I don't really know what's wrong with this video, but I can't get it to play at all. Goes for a couple minutes but then stops at 3:25 then stops at 4:36. It just spins on.
The directly mapped cartridge is actually very similar the way computers went.
The original IBM PC had the external bus directly connected to the CPU, so you could not only slot in graphics cards of sound cards but also RAM cards.
I could have seen designing a cartridge implementation that uses a parallel bus to speed up loading into ram while being able to use SD cards in the slot as well for expanded game storage. It would just need some way to indicate that it's a cartridge using the parallel bus and default to the serial bus for SD cards.
I never thought these were a cartridge... everyone knew they were SD cards... HU cards are ROMs
The speed of the memory bus on super nintendo is only a few MB/s - a rom chip could easily keep up. But on a modern system the memory bandwidth is many GB/s. There's no nonvolatile storage technology that can do it.
The fastest consumer SSD's now top out at 8,000mb/sec for reading. You could make a console with no internal storage (just have a small fast buffer) and just load all your game data into 8-16gb of console ram in 1-2 seconds from an SSD based cartridge. There absolutely is tech but including fast modern nand storage inside every game cartridge would make the cartridges expensive and of course no console storage means no digital downloads. Hell even write speeds exceed 4,000mb/sec. In the switches case with smaller games you could save on cost further by not including internal storage OR internal RAM. Just use a portion of the super fast nand game cartridge as working memory and have a small internal rom/buffer allocated for the operating system. Such a switch would cost about 3x less to make, but the games would double in price. As a bonus though an 18gb game like totk would have no loading times. They would be measurable in milliseconds.
RAM bus was 562MB/s but a ROM speed 5-50MB/sec. So the RAM bus with it RDRAM was at least 10 times as fast.
@@VarietyGamerChannel The memory bandwidth on a PS5 is 448GB/s. Yeah you can install a game onto the SSD for fast loading, it already does that. But you can't build a memory mapped cartridge and directly treat it like VRAM like the old days.
@@Badspot Radeon Solid State Graphics would suggest otherwise. It can be built, but few have the need.
also, want you need special types of memory for this? or could nand memory configured in this way work?
So then why are emulated roms not loading instantaneously? Maybe I'm not understanding.
A cartridge is not a term reserved for video games specific functionality, it's basicly a replaceable container with the medium for specific device (ink cartridges for e.g.). Back in the days the RAM was expensive, so games ended up in cheaper to manufacture mask ROMs as part of memory map, modern consoles have enough RAM to reduce cartridge function to simple data storage. Making a direct memory mapped cartridge would be really a troublesome device to make, there are no parallel eproms and transfer speeds are much much higher nowadays, high capacity cartridge would require a lot of connectors (like laptop RAM) and strict design for high speed signals, it's not hard to imagine how easy crashing a console would be if you wave it here and there, not mentioning connectors contamination. It's easier and more reliable to put a serial memory inside and treat it as hard drive.
NOR Flash is commonly available as parallel EEPROMs, mainly used to boot CPUs that don't support more complicated protocols.
@@0LoneTech Its speed is limited comparing to modern console's RAM and VRAM, it would also had a lot of connections for the buses, not very recommended, the concept of a cartridge that is only a storage media is better and safer in every way as long as you can afford the RAM.
@@sanjyuu2298 Scale down your absolutes. It was a specific counterexample to "there are no parallel eproms". Here's a specific counterexample to "better ... in every way": latency. In fact, DDR memories are pretty much stagnated in access times and have largely lost word addressing, because CPU manufacturers figured it wasn't worth optimizing a few cycles away when every cache miss takes hundreds anyhow.
This is why MiSTer added a small SDRAM even though the main board already had far more DDR3.
Unfortunately having a modern day Game Cartridge mapped directly to the CPU isn't possible [Well is maybe but..], because nowadays the CPU is largely faster than the connection speed of the cartridge interface which would probably cause the screen yo show scrambled crap while the CPU waited for the rest of the data to be sent from the game cart
Does the DS and onwards also have to load pieces of code from cartridge into RAM before running them? Is that not a cartridge either?
No, it's not. It's a read-only mass storage device.
Does the pc engine had cards instead of cartridges as well? Master System had too, right? How that worked when using cartridges and cards?
Master System had both cartridges and cards, both of which were directly mapped ROMs, which in this video are erroneously referred to as cartridges. Likewise for PC Engine. SD cards and Switch cards are block devices, similar to IDE hard drives (CompactFlash is actually directly compatible with those). Card means a flat thing and cartridge means a casing. A Hardcard or Microdrive, for instance, have a mechanical hard drive connected in a card format that also supports direct mapped memory.
On the Xbox Series X could their proprietary memory card serve as a cartridge?
The Stylin', profilin', limousine riding, jet flying, kiss-stealing, wheelin' n' dealin' son of a gun!
Breaking news: NES cartridges discovered NOT to be "tapes"!
The charts are more like sd cards in a way, which make the games load faster than being on a disk
Mapping a flash memory card into the CPU's address space wouldn't be an issue nowadays. PCIe 2.1 or up w/ resizable BAR is all that's needed. PCIe 4.0x1 is nearly 2GB/s and already plenty faster than the memory cards the Switch uses. With SD Express and NVMe, there's already two technologies ready to make use of this.
That's a really interesting point, I've heard a little bit about resizable BAR. Surely though there's going to be a bottleneck compared to CPU cache and all the features of modern CPUs?
while they would be memory mapped they would´t be on the main memory bus like (V)RAM. The speed/latency of the flash would still make it impossible to use it in the way memory chip were used in older systems anyway
For some reason, there are sections of your video that are completely unwatchable on my end. If I skip ahead 10-15s, that plays fine. Go back before the freeze and it'll stop in the same spot. Is it just me?
It makes sense that they stopped doing direct memory mapping because the number of pins needed would get ridiculous. The maximum capacity of a Blu-Ray is 50GB. Flash memory is up to TB. So it no longer makes sense to use disks. Unless you're Sony or MS and want people to download their games for licensing purposes.
of course they're not the same as older cartridges but they are in fact cartridges.
I thought the Switch had 8 gigs of RAM, not four.... what the hell, Nintendo? Get with the times......
It IS a last-gen handheld, natch.
@@KopperNeoman Bruh, you know Nintendo doesn't actively play the Console Wars. Gens don't matter anymore.
@@MiraiKishi So is it "get with the times" or "doesn't play Console Wars" :D But i think expecting an abundance of RAM comparable to last-gen home consoles in a 720p handheld would be a little silly.
Oh woah - so they can use 32 bit pointers instead of 64. It's more efficient, but they're at the limit of what can be done with 32 bits.
Nintendo focuses on the games instead of the hardware and frankly that's how it should be
I think the video or at least the title is misleading. As far as I could remember, the basic difference between cartridges and memory cards is that cartridges have an outer shell that holds the interface to the main board, as per the meaning of cartridge. Sure it is different from old-school cartridges; in size, technology, etc. but to call it not a cartridge would be a step too far. As per the new use of gamecard as the name, it could be explained by the new technology used as a new interface, utilization, or a combination of other systems developed; nonetheless uses the essence of a catridge systems.
interstingly early switch cards had a pcb while current ones are Just the memory package in the plastic housing
Ic controller, which are now build in.
I also have later ones with PCB. i think everything below 8 GB game size is still like that
There's just a LOT more data to load now vs back in the day when games were mere Kilobytes. Any modern game is going to have load times whether it's on a cart or not. The load times are not fast enough for instant loading from such a device. Same exact reason why MicroSD cards take time to transfer data.
Whyyyyy, could they not make the physical game gold? Make an old Zelda fan happy Nintendo. Make Zelda games gold.
I'd love it if we could get something as sturdy as a cartridge again, and if it had more pins and could read more data in parallel, that would be great. Although, if those cards are modifiable, I don't have a Switch so I don't know, then they could enable game patches and save data.
I was literally explaining this to my kid recently. I'll still call it a cartridge, but yeah, totally agree
That aprt kind of irked me. It was an interesting video, but the main premise was 100% false. They still fall under the definition of a cartridge. Better yet, basically any storage device does.
Ah and the debate of that cartridges is much more expensive collared to cassettes / discs etc still lingers on.
I remember when I worked on a megadrive game and we mis project needed to shift down from 16mbit to 8mbit due to increasing prices for the cartridge production / manufacturing
My favorite feature of the retro console replicas like Powkiddy is that I can store games on SD Card Cartridge.
"A ROM cartridge, usually referred to in context simply as a cartridge, cart, or card, is a replaceable part designed to be connected to a consumer electronics device such as a home computer, video game console or, to a lesser extent, electronic musical instruments."
it is a cartridge afterall
I wonder if their next console after the switch will still use cards
Nintendo pissed me off when the Switch came out when it only gave parts of the games on the card, and one would then have to download the rest. I hoped they stopped that crap.
Well, they aren't cartridges in the way the NES games were. But they are in a way because they are a container holding something and are designed to go into a mechanism, yet they aren't, as cartridges used to contain a spool of film or magnetic tape, but then NES games were also not really cartridges to begin with ... you could go into Inception-like stuff here, I guess 😂 . Anyway, enjoyed the video, thanks!
By the broadest definition of the word, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays are also cartridges. But of course, no one would ever called them that.
I mean theres a whole rabbit hole one can go down with computer science terminology. Just as "AI" doesn't actually have anything to do with intelligence, a ROM "cartridge" isnt actually a "cartridge". Those were the sources of the names, but regardless of the etymology, they are just terms that have a meaning, ie a cartridge being an external chip which contains directly CPU addressable memory, which often is confusing, and leads to misunderstanding of the term decades later because computer scientists are really, really bad at naming things XD.
@@gammaphonic Not unless they are in some kind of casing, like a PSP UMD.
@@Ben-do1bf Naming things is well known as one of the 2 major hard problems in computing, right next to cache invalidation and off-by-1 errors.
@@angeldude101 Truer words have never never said
Skipped right past the GBA, which still had memory mapped directly into the address space of the CPU.
Interesting video about the technical differences between cartridges and removable storage, I just wish you didn't include footage from Tears of the Kingdom, I'm trying to avoid spoilers for that game. It doesn't seem necessary at all to make your point.
Why do a cartridge consol last so long I've still got my SNES nes
Having a tiny little rectangle sitting on the tip of my finger that I have to carefully slide into an SD-like slot doesn't have the same effect as holding a big chunky gold colored cartridge that says THE LEGEND OF ZELDA on it and pushing it into the console and watching it come to life. The joy of having physical copies of games isn't the same anymore.
I guess in the UK its cheaper to buy carts. Nintendo in the US never has no sales for their games and when stores have sales they usually exclude Nintendo games. So the way to get Nintendo games on the cheap is to wait for a gift card sale and buy the games from the eshop.
Like I went to Costco to buy a $100 card since it was 20% off. Then used the gift card to buy the Nintendo game voucher and bought TotK. Basically got it for $40.
I love the macho man randy savage reference at the beginning lol
That's interesting...
Excellent explanation, thank you!
well the SD standard supports SDIO devices, used to have a SDIO wifi card, but ya that worked independent of the cpu in my old pda.
This was a very confusing video for me. The term cartridge applies to me for both actually as it simply means that the have some sort of electronics encased in something else. Even a compact cassette is a cartridge as tape spools are put into a container. I may be just nitpicky here.
I also need to mention that there are modern microcontrollers that can execute code directly from an SD card in theory. They do this with XIP (eXecute In Place).
Though it seems that this is not done with SD cards but instead with QSPI flash chips. The application note AN3443 from microchip explains this.
Also it is true that modern flash media uses a serial stream instead of a parallel one. But to get even faster the industry has shifted to parallel serial interfaces with multiple serial lanes. One popular example for this is PCIe with 16 lanes for most GPUs.
I think the difference is in its size. Cartridges are more bulky, card-unlike. While game cards and sd cards are called cards and not cartrige because they have a card-shape.
@@Saroku1000 Cartridge actually refers to the casing. Expansion circuit boards are commonly known as cards, e.g. NIC or video cards. Hardcards even had hard drives mounted that way.
Why is there loading time with a physical cart?
…has anyone played Street Fighter Alpha 2 on SNES?
That bird spirit familiar looks like the bird creatures in the Mokuri universe (existed before TOTK)