Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges | Hacker News Reader

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

engadget.com

85 pointsjgrahamc31 comments

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 used extra chips. The list is astonishingly long.

Of course this was back when most

1) things were done is software

2) these chips were cheap

3) RAM and data bus connections were much faster relative to the CPU than they are now.

"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 started using them, after PC era of CD shareware like doom or dune. The advantages(immense amount of memory, distribution easiness, and PIRACY) overcame their drawbacks.

> 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.

> 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_...

Cartridges were also really durable. Back when people didn't have many electronics, cartridges helped defend the chips inside. Atari and Nintendo were essentially 'toys' back then. You could toss a cartridge around but not a disc.

Nowadays, any physical disc or cartridge is a pain. Digital games are the only way like Steam.

That and, until the CD-ROM came along, what were your options, floppy disks? (Yes, I know that the Famicom had a floppy drive and that there were piracy decks for other systems to load from disk. And they sucked.) Also, the first CD-ROM devices were 1x and were very slow to load games. It definitely felt like a step backward in many ways, and in fact this is the claimed reason that Nintendo went with cartridges for the N64.

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.

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.

> 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.

I 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...

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.

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.

Wouldn't the game stop working as soon as the moisture evaporated if that was true?

Yes, this is true, but the child in me wants to also believe it was "magic".

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE INVENTION OF THE GAME CARTRIDGE:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3040889/the-untold-story-of-the-i...

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..

The Magnavox Odyssey (1972) was the first console with cartridges to select different games. The Channel F console (1976) was the first with ROM cartridges.

Black or white, could you get a job as a self-taught engineer today?

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 that field as an autodidact unless they have already worked in a closely related field.

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?

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.

He did so much physical construction of electronics that I assumed they meant he was a "real" engineer.

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)

Yes, I have no degrees, no certs, and before becoming self-employed, I worked at two megacorps (an insurance company and a telecom equipment manufacturer) for a total of ten years, and had 'Engineer' on my business cards.

Yes, this is probably one of the better industries for that.

I continue to to this day don't recognize why spitting out on the replacements would make them work. http://www.speedyessay.co.uk/essay-writing-service.php

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