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Comment by rpm4321 | Hacker News Reader

God, what a great system that was. I was 11 when that thing came out, and after seeing just how great the quality jump was from the NES to SNES (and my half-remembered, dust-covered Atari before that), it suddenly became clear to me just how good video games were going to get in the future.

It was a lesson in Moore's Law that even an 11 year old could understand.

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What's really interesting -- and what most people don't understand about pre-5th gen consoles (Playstation, N64, etc) -- is that cartridges weren't just physical containers for code, but contained their own logic. When you have a disc, it's just a storage mechanism, but a cartridge back in the NES and SNES days had a fair amount of power over the functioning of the system. Several cartridges contained ARM chips, in fact, and boosted the computing power of the console tremendously; this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th gen consoles were able to last for so long.

NES games were produced for 11 years after the console was originally released (and the console itself was produced for 20 years!) because of this flexibility; SNES games were produced 8 years after the console was released as well. Cartridges were just incredibly powerful, and I'll always miss them.

My favorite part was the way you put the cartridge in, turned on the power, and the game was playing.

No OS bootup, no OS navigation menu, no game booting delays, no game level loading delays. All games, instantly.

Nowadays, even my television (Westinghouse 40") needs ten seconds from power-on to showing me a picture :(

In fairness, TVs have always been dogs. My old CRT TV back then would take about five seconds to show a picture and like 15 to get as clear and bright as it was supposed to be.

But yeah, when I fire up my old NES or Genesis, I'm struck by how much time modern systems waste with loading. I can already be through level 2 of Super Mario Bros. by the time Assassin's Creed III actually lets me start playing.

this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th gen consoles were able to last for so long.

Not that I disagree that cartridge logic can extend the lifetime of a console, but the Playstation 2 is 12 years old, and Playstation 2 games are still being produced too (e.g. FIFA Soccer 2013). The last batch of Playstation 1 games were released in 2005 (with minor exceptions in other regions), the PS1 was released in 1994.

The problem with cartridges is that they hugely increase the cost of the primary case - non-extended games - for the advantage of the few cases where it's actually used to its full extent. I think accessories, like the N64 Expansion Pack, make much more sense for that purpose.

That said, I prefer cartridges too; CDs and DVDs are just too finicky.

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