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Comment by wvbdmp | Hacker News Reader

The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.

In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger.

That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.

Or the launch day patch is >80% the size of the game, but I don't want to go back to game design limited by optical media access speeds.

Nintendo is pretty good for putting a solid 1.0 version of their games on the cartridges on release. But on the other hand, the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long as they keep the servers online so you could download a digital purchase.

I've kinda given up on physical games at this point. I held on for a long time, but the experience is just so bad now. They use the cheapest, flimsiest, most fragile plastic in the cases. You don't get a nice instruction manual anymore. And honestly, keeping a micro SD card in your system that can hold a handful of games is more convenient than having to haul around a bunch of cartridges that can be lost.

I take solace in knowing that if I do still have a working Switch in 20 years and lose access to games I bought a long time ago, hopefully the hackers/pirates will have a method for me to play them again.

> the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long

You've been paying attention to the wrong sources for information about NAND flash. A new Switch cartridge will have many years of reliable data retention, even just sitting on a shelf. Data retention only starts to become a concern for SSDs that have used up most of their write endurance; a Switch cartridge is mostly treated as ROM and only written to once.

What's "many years"?

I've read about people's 3DS cartridges already failing just sitting on a shelf.

Speak of the devil, I just got this tweet in my feed today

https://x.com/marcdwyz/status/1999226723322261520

Are you sure those flashes are capable of refreshing?

The read speed off of an 8xDVD is ~10MB/s. The cheapest 500GB SSD on Amazon has a read speed of of 500MB/s. An NVMe drive has is 2500MB/s. We can read an entire DVD's capacity (4.7GB) from an SSD in under 10 seconds, compared to 8 minutes.

> That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!

Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.

Maybe, but I'd argue the on-board storage chips literally an inch away from the CPU / GPU of the PS5 are faster these days. But in between cartridge consoles and fast hard drive consoles there was a disk-based gap where seek times were an issue.

Hard drives and optical discs are the reason they duplicated the data. The duplicated the data to reduce load times.

do they even sell disc of these game?...

They do, but it's irrelevant to performance nowadays since you're required to install all of the disc data to the SSD before you can play. The PS3/360 generation was the last time you could play games directly from a disc (and even then some games had an install process).

I believe even then it was already "most", at least for the PS3; that was the era where always-online devices became the norm, where game developers were more eager to release patches after release, etc.

The (de)-optimization exists, essentially, because of physical media.

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