With all the advancements in the technology, the amount of data they can hold and still retain their physical size OR become even smaller (physically);Will companies like Nintendo go back to this format for there future home-based consoles?

I doubt it.

A cart has to be built whilst a DVD or other disc is essentially printed, so in manufacturing terms they are still behind disc based media.
To get a Bluray rivalling amount of space would also be prohibitively expensive.

It's not a good format and it'll basically be limited to Portables. Any "cartridge" will likely just be a protected disk like a minidisk or UMD disk.

possibly, if you look at zsnes or any other emulator, instead of having a disk or a cartridge, its all saved in your computer, i think it would be more efficent to have such a system with a console. actually, you wouldnt have to limit it to just consoles, it could work on dvds, tv, or anything else. my example of that would be tivo, or any other recording device.

PedroSteckecilo:
It's not a good format and it'll basically be limited to Portables. Any "cartridge" will likely just be a protected disk like a minidisk or UMD disk.

How is it NOT a good format? The games load faster, play without lag and are cheaper... also they're a lot more durable than any disk-based game.

Look at DS games... look at how much they can put into one of those and that's for a handheld!

i can still remember the times of bulky cartriges for the nintendo 64 then they got smaller for gamebor and gameboy colour then got even smaller for sp and such now were at the era of tiny ds ones aswell i dont even want to think about future ideas proberly more expensive a lot harder to produce and made a lot harder then it would have to be XP what a story for the guys of the future with tiny microchips as games looking at our discs and such

Cartridges have their advantages, but they are really only viable for portables anymore because of battery life and the small amount of memory that portable games need. Loading times for discs are stabilizing. But cards (like SD and the like), or just flash memory, are increasing in size [for cheaper] so cartridges are also losing their appeal in that area.

Cartridges are most likely dead. Just like the tape.

misterprickly:
Look at DS games... look at how much they can put into one of those and that's for a handheld!

DS carts are 256MB.

As data storage devices go, they're pathetically small. Using and SDhc type card would get you up to 16GB, possibly more. But that's still way way behind something like a Blu-Ray, which is cheaper and faster to manufacture.

It's not a good format for games because it has a much longer lead time than discs, something which practically killed the N64 as extra copies of a title took so long to be made.

i disagre the cartrages are a lot more annoying for saves if you look at nintendo cartrages if they get dusty or something they screw up and lose the data compared to say ps2 where it saves on a memory card which you can backup by copying it onto another you cant do that with game boy games or ds if they go they`re gone

I really don't think they will make a comeback,and they are also a bit too much trouble

Lets not forget the main advantage of cartridges: anti-piracy measures.

You can't just download and burn a cartridge game. True, people can rip the ROM and play it on emulators, but it'll be awhile until emulators can run current-day games.

gaara9999:
i disagre the cartrages are a lot more annoying for saves if you look at nintendo cartrages if they get dusty or something they screw up and lose the data compared to say ps2 where it saves on a memory card which you can backup by copying it onto another you cant do that with game boy games or ds if they go they`re gone

They had something for the Game Boy called the MemPlus, I think. It was third party and you back up all your saves on it. Really useful for Pokemon back in the day. And GameShark way back when on the N64 had a backup feature as well.

Cartrigdes? manufacturing costs and the fact that everything is already set up up for discs simply mean that it wont happen.

i disagree to i always had a problem with my n64 i mean when i accidentally pushed the cartridge or pulled the controller in like the middle of a level or dungeon the game froze and you had to start all over again

I think not.

Going back to cartridges would be impractical to say the least.

Cartridges not such a good idea, massive hard drives on next gen consoles is what i want to see. Preferably some solid state drives.

As much as i enjoy cartridges i think the way that things are going is that games will be sold on SD cards or something simlilar, maybe usb key ?

They need to make something a bit more durable than the CD/DVD and something with more size, i rmeber the days of having full games only taking up less than 50mb now you'd be lucky to find a game not taking up at least 1GB, but i guess thats the price we have to pay for better graphics,gameplay, levels etc.

The only reason to bring back cartridges would be combating piracy.

geldonyetich:
Lets not forget the main advantage of cartridges: anti-piracy measures.

You can't just download and burn a cartridge game. True, people can rip the ROM and play it on emulators, but it'll be awhile until emulators can run current-day games.

Don't tell the PC devs, before we all have to buy new special cartridges for our PC :P

misterprickly:

PedroSteckecilo:
It's not a good format and it'll basically be limited to Portables. Any "cartridge" will likely just be a protected disk like a minidisk or UMD disk.

How is it NOT a good format? The games load faster, play without lag and are cheaper... also they're a lot more durable than any disk-based game.

Look at DS games... look at how much they can put into one of those and that's for a handheld!

Way to little space from what I understand, I don't think the technology for cartridges has increased enough to surpass the N64 yet has it?

no

Eventually we'll be getting games on micro-SDs if my dreams come true...

You could build cartridges based on SSD technology [ Solid State Drive people ]. So space is not an issue anymore. But how will it increase to cost! uhuhu...

geldonyetich:
Lets not forget the main advantage of cartridges: anti-piracy measures.

You can't just download and burn a cartridge game. True, people can rip the ROM and play it on emulators, but it'll be awhile until emulators can run current-day games.

Cartridge games are not exactly the best anti-piracy option either, those same ROMs that people can use on their computers in an emulator can also be used with emulator programs on the systems themselves. Take the GBA for example, you could buy a cartridge and the stuff to hook it up to your pc, then load it with roms and play the current GBA games on your GBA, they are even using it to pirate DS games. Also the cost of the items needed for this isn't all that expensive.

gaara9999:
i can still remember the times of bulky cartriges for the nintendo 64 then they got smaller for gamebor and gameboy colour then got even smaller for sp and such now were at the era of tiny ds ones aswell i dont even want to think about future ideas proberly more expensive a lot harder to produce and made a lot harder then it would have to be XP what a story for the guys of the future with tiny microchips as games looking at our discs and such

The smaller gameboy cartridges have been out quite a bit longer than the N64...

joystickjunki3:

gaara9999:
i disagre the cartrages are a lot more annoying for saves if you look at nintendo cartrages if they get dusty or something they screw up and lose the data compared to say ps2 where it saves on a memory card which you can backup by copying it onto another you cant do that with game boy games or ds if they go they`re gone

They had something for the Game Boy called the MemPlus, I think. It was third party and you back up all your saves on it. Really useful for Pokemon back in the day. And GameShark way back when on the N64 had a backup feature as well.

I wish I had that for my gameboy, I'd still be able to play me some po-ke-MAN silver. That or I can attempt to open it up and replace the battery without damaging the game itself.

Dechef:
Don't tell the PC devs, before we all have to buy new special cartridges for our PC :P

If that was their plan, what they aught to do is just release them on USB ROMs. Only trouble is, there's no real emulation needed to run a PC game on a PC, so the pirates would just dump the ROM and it'd be good to go.

Perhaps if they had some kind of proprietary unduplicatable hardware key... ah, but the pirates would just hack the software to ignore the key.

What they'd probably need to do is make the USB device perform some kind of vital, uncircumventable function, like have the core logic of the game on an unreadable portion that is treated as a black box by the very game that uses it in some sort of direct memory reference input/output only method or something. The pirates would actually have to rewrite an emulated version of the game to pirate it.

jbonkerz:
Cartridge games are not exactly the best anti-piracy option either, those same ROMs that people can use on their computers in an emulator can also be used with emulator programs on the systems themselves. Take the GBA for example, you could buy a cartridge and the stuff to hook it up to your pc, then load it with roms and play the current GBA games on your GBA, they are even using it to pirate DS games. Also the cost of the items needed for this isn't all that expensive.

Sure you could. However, the thing is, not many people are going to have that hardware laying around already, nor really have the expertise to deal with that kind of stuff. Pirating DVD-distributed games, on the other hand, is easy stuff - you've already got a DVD burner, your DVD burner software likely can already handle ISOs, so you're pretty much good to go.

The proof is in that console game piracy is as low as it is. Sure, console games are pirated, but the massive difference between the rate of PC piracy versus console piracy is in how many console owners already have the hardware they need to do it.

Very good point :)
However even DVD/CD Pirating of games is not exactly idiot-proof, go on a torrent site and look at all the people who cant even figure out how to get the torrents to work, let alone the people that can't figure out how to get the games to work after downloading them, even when the instructions are very straight forward and dont leave anything out. :)

Because most people get tired of blowing on them and swabbing them with ear-swabs.

No they won't make a comeback, if anything handhelds will transition over to flash cards.

I could see the next generation of games come out on Flash-drives; that you play off the drive with NOTHING to be installed... just like the old Cartridge days.

I mean... that's a tech, that improves So rapidly that no disc-based system could possibly catch up; even blu-ray are falling behind.

A friend of mine has already done this sort of thing with Fable#1 and F.E.A.R#1.
Mind you he's a programming nut!

Personally I don't think so. Cartridges are as easily copied nowadayas as other media (response to an earlier post), hell I know people selling cartridges with 45 copied games on for the DS. so its not unavoidable anymore. I personally think the delivery of games is going to become more and more digital, a'la Steam.

Teachingaddict:
Personally I don't think so. Cartridges are as easily copied nowadayas as other media (response to an earlier post), hell I know people selling cartridges with 45 copied games on for the DS. so its not unavoidable anymore. I personally think the delivery of games is going to become more and more digital, a'la Steam.

Good point!

Games of tomorrow could become DL only; where you buy a console and the DL the games you want.

like SEGA online.

After north america, japan, autralia and north western europe are 99% on broadband, DL-only should work. As of now I don't see it happening just yet.

Games distributed on some kind of solid state memory does have advantages that appeal to me:

1. no optical drive noise
2. small size, so easy to take your games with you
3. no chance of scratching the medium
4. fast loading. no more flat shading and popping textures on consoles
5. for PCs: no need to install the games. play right out of the box

I wish.