Would You Like a Return to a Type of Cartridge?

[Tanooki]

I welcome the days that happens, something must be done because otherwise it's entirely up to the mercy of the developers. They can choose to bury, re-release at full price, always maintain full price with competition squashed, keep it in a lock box and so on. If all these files can be pulled, and the systems busted open so even a child could figure it out, so things can be preserved, archived, and serviceable as easy as classic games are -- that's perfect.

[Keatah]

That's what I would expect to happen. Though we shall see!

[christo930]

I would not be so sure of these games being cracked and set free and made available. Though I don't know much about encryption, from what I understand, there is already encryption available which is likely to be effective for a very long time to come.

 

I don't think processors, unless they change in some fundamental way, of the future will be anywhere near as more fast compared to today's processors as today's processors are compared to processors of yesteryear.

 

Though I am well aware clock speed is not the end all be all of processor speed, in the 18 years between 1982 and 2000, clock speeds of PC processors increased over 250 TIMES, in addition to the productivity increases from processor to processor. In the 18 years since 2000, processor clock speeds have increased at less than 5 times!

The speed increase is much more incremental. In most cases for most things, increasing the number of cores very quickly hits a point of diminishing returns and all other things equal, it is better to have 1 fast processor than 4 slow processors whose cumulative power is close to or equal to the 1 fast processor.

 

Though Moore's Law continues increasing the number of transistors per square mm, the ability to make them faster has largely hit a wall. I don't know how much longer Moore's law can go, but there is obviously a point where even Moore's Law breaks down and things simply cannot get smaller.

 

With this in mind, it is not clear that we will possess regular computer equipment that is hundreds of times faster than existing equipment.

[negative1]

I would not be so sure of these games being cracked and set free and made available. Though I don't know much about encryption, from what I understand, there is already encryption available which is likely to be effective for a very long time to come.

 

I don't think processors, unless they change in some fundamental way, of the future will be anywhere near as more fast compared to today's processors as today's processors are compared to processors of yesteryear.

 

Though I am well aware clock speed is not the end all be all of processor speed, in the 18 years between 1982 and 2000, clock speeds of PC processors increased over 250 TIMES, in addition to the productivity increases from processor to processor. In the 18 years since 2000, processor clock speeds have increased at less than 5 times!

The speed increase is much more incremental. In most cases for most things, increasing the number of cores very quickly hits a point of diminishing returns and all other things equal, it is better to have 1 fast processor than 4 slow processors whose cumulative power is close to or equal to the 1 fast processor.

 

Though Moore's Law continues increasing the number of transistors per square mm, the ability to make them faster has largely hit a wall. I don't know how much longer Moore's law can go, but there is obviously a point where even Moore's Law breaks down and things simply cannot get smaller.

 

With this in mind, it is not clear that we will possess regular computer equipment that is hundreds of times faster than existing equipment.

 

 

again, where there's a will there's a way. almost all the nintendo stuff has been cracked even up to the wii era, and some switch stuff.

all the xbox stuff is being emulated up to the 360 on the xbox one, so that stuff is taken care of (since you don't need to be online for a lot of the single player game)

all the playstation stuff up to the ps2, and some of the ps3 stuff is emulated.

 

pretty much every single console, home computer and pc games, have been emulated and cracked up to the 90's.

 

also tens of thousands of arcade games have been emulated, and many more are being worked on.

 

so yeah, maybe this generation of games won't be emulated now. but as long as games are being developed on pc's, there is always the chance they

will also be able to be made to be emulated or run directly.

 

in another decade or so, probably all of this generations game will be emulated and so on.

 

i don't see a problem.

 

later

-1

[Video]

On the one hand, this stall of processors increasing is kind of bad, in the other hand, it's really good. Finally programmers are beginning to get back to what made early computers great (relatively speaking) want more power? More ram can help. Now some computers can take 64 gigs of ram, where just a few years ago, your cap was 4. And even though the processors are similarly sized, having more, sometimes a lot more ram is immediately noticeable. Also, efficient programming, less brute force forces better programming. Voice recognition is an example here. Ten years ago, it sucked (anybody remember setting up voice in the 90's to early aughties? Reading a book so it could learn your voice, and ONLY your voice?) Now every generic computing device can do this, with most people. It's because programming got more efficient as the programmers could no longer assume everybody's computer will be twice as powerful in a year or two.

 

I doubt people will ever crack (or care to) the security of big players download stuff. Has it been done with Xbox yet? 360 may still have a few years of active support left, but I imagine once it's gone, it won't be bothered with either. It'll also get swept under the carpet as an example of why I (and many other people) don't support downloads.

[80s_Atari_Guy]

Xbox 360 on Xbox One, is in the hands of Microsoft, it's not in the hands of the public. Microsoft, at any point, could just pull the whole thing and never release their code - and there would be nothing we can do about it. It's impressive what Microsoft have done with backward compatibility, but it's still Microsoft's, it's not open source.

 

The original Xbox, has only just begun to be emulated to a point where a few games can be played - 17 years on from it's release.

The PS4 has only been hacked to firmware 4.05, and who is still running that ?

The Vita has only been hacked to 3.60, and the second your Vita gets a sniff at net access it will force update.

The Xbox One remains un-hackable.

Is there a "Will" to hack and preserve current gen ? What about games where a portion of the code sits on a corporate server ?

 

You can't compare the past with the present. Copyright laws from the past are much more relaxed than they are for current gen. No-one is going to get shut down running Pac Man in MAME. Yet, imagine running Horizon Zero Dawn on a PC, today. While the emulator would always be locked in a legal grey area, the system files required to run the emulator will always be copyrighted by Sony.

 

Then there are patches. Many might make or break the game. Some might be zero-day patches that are simply game-breaking if not downloaded. If we can't get access to those patches then preservation is useless.

And what about the size of these games, especially once they're free of optical drive limits. I can currently take a handful of Blu-Ray burnable media and store the last 40 years of system roms/games/bioses etc... How do we store these current gen, multiple gigabyte games ?

 

I would love to be able to play current and future gen games in say, 20 years time. But Corporations today have far more control, and far more power at their disposal than they did in the past. They have the power to shut down servers, stop issuing updates and patches, etc..

[Keatah]

Storage space is not an issue.. We have consumer-grade 8TB drives and up. SSD 2TB and more shortly.

[christo930]

Storage space is not an issue.. We have consumer-grade 8TB drives and up. SSD 2TB and more shortly.

 

This may or may not come to pass. One of the problems with this move to digital is it's not limited to just games. Software in general is moving in this direction and it would not surprise me at all if the companies move more and more towards a client server model with thinner clients. There was a huge push for this with Chrome Books. For now, that has largely been a failure, but don't expect them to stop trying. I have always been against "cloud computing" and see it as a glorified terminal system with all of the problems of old terminals.

 

Obviously stuff that is already in the pipeline is likely to make it to market. But developing these things cost enormous amounts of money that has to be made back with wide spread sales.

[Keatah]

Corporations do not want you to play today's games in 10 or 20 years from now. Because then they wouldn't be able to sell you new stuff. You'd be busy with the old material.

[Tanooki]

I would almost think there's less of a will now to preserve this generation and perhaps a bit of the last.

 

Why? By the design of the makers, the shift to the HDD. We're not accustomed to broken games basically, and how do we deal with the fixes on broken games? Sure you can get warez drops of all those digital and physical releases, but so often the consumer is now used as a free tester guinea pig instead of wasting more time, paychecks, hours in house on testing as it was in the past as it was a closed environment. Can warez types intercept and archive all these hot fixes and major updates to get a broken game up to snuff that just digitally distribute in the background on PS3/4 and X360/one? If not, there's a huge hit to motivation archiving partial games and broken games when the fix can't be obtained. Maybe I'm off and they are grabbed as it is, but I don't monitor that.

 

As keatah said, companies now want to re-sell you games over and over, so by pitching out somewhat broken or unfinished games with zero day to a week out patches can ensure it because if all you can warez is a beta, it's just not good enough.

 

 

christo the new model is what the Switch is seeing in Japan from Capcom on Resident Evil 7. The entire game is cloud based, you download only what you need at the area you need because it buffers all of it at a level if your connection can handle a netflix stream, the game will work. This way the game is always active, always patched, and always OUT OF YOUR HANDS. They can decide they are done with RE7 on switch and so are you, or leave it up for 10 years. That's the future I've seen approaching, a way to even do away with stored digital downloads. Why let someone download a 20GB game and have it encrypted to a drive for someone to pirate, when you can stream it off a chain of super computers from the main office of the game maker.

[negative1]

patches and updates are not a big deal.

 

hacked programs have updates and patches that work also.

if you've ever pirated games, you would know that. it's not an issue.

 

games will always be hacked and patched as long as you have access to the files and hard drives.

sure encryption gets in the way. but if someone really wants to figure it out they will.

there's a lot of sega arcade games (pc based and other) that are being emulated now, that people that couldn't be emulated.

 

later

-1

Edited June 28, 2018 by negative1

[Tanooki]

Oh I was quite piratey back in the 90s, but I haven't really kept up other than downloading old game roms that never were encrypted anyway as a backup of things I have for a lazy moment on the computer.

 

I just was thinking of the distribution method and encryption layers involved in those patches as it's not like the old download and click the file patching method from the early days of Windows (or type it out in DOS.)

[80s_Atari_Guy]

On PS3, Gran Turismo 6 had about 22 patches which are on Corporate servers, they're not on public servers for anyone to freely download. So, how would you go about getting those patches, in say 20 years time ?

 

GTA V Retail DVDs on PC, despite coming on 6 DVDs, only contain about 70% of the entire game. The rest is downloaded as you install the game. These aren't patches, this is part of the actual game. Again, in 20 years time, how would you go about getting those files ?

 

Denuvo, on PC, hasn't been fully cracked yet, with a few games going back to 2015 that are still waiting for cracks. Sure, they could be cracked. But the motivation has to be there, as well as the talent.

 

But not everyone wants cracked games for preserving, in the future I would think most people attempting to preserve today's games would want them preserved with copy-protection intact Good luck with that.

 

 

 

Corporations do not want you to play today's games in 10 or 20 years from now.

 

No, but they might want you playing a remaster. Look at Steam and Skyrim. Bethesda and Valve, made it harder to find and buy the original Skyrim, rather than the Special Edition. It took users on Steam to post direct links to the original. Corporations could use Copyright to stop anyone playing today's version, forcing you to use the remaster 10 years later.

Also, what right would you have to play today's games in 10 or 20 years time ? Copyright today, is much stronger than it was in our time. Sure, you own that nice shiny DVD or Blu-Ray disc, but the code on the disk would still be in Copyright with it's original owner.

[christo930]

Was the 7800 encryption ever cracked? From what I recall, someone found a copy of the encryption software on an Atari ST and that is how new 7800 games are able to be made (in that we have the code to produce the key). This happened quite a while ago and it might have been cracked in the interim, but I don't know.

 

As I said, I don't really know much of anything about encryption other than that I've heard that some strong encryption is really good and remains unbreakable for now, though that (being unbreakable) might be limited to brute force attacks.

 

I think we are going to end up with a lot of lost games, at least on our end. I don't think the industry will make that mistake again. I know a lot of the old roms had been completely lost by the companies. and that they had to download them off the internet.

 

The internet is another weak link. They are really cracking down on all types of things now. While the internet is still wild west in many respects, that is changing. The SCOTUS has just ruled for internet sales tax collection and the EU is trying to shut down linking and fair use (I want to say it's bill 13 or something. It just passed the first hurdle). They are also doing away with free speech. If police are knocking people's doors for insensitive tweets (YES, this is actually happening), how long before all these ROM sites are shut down because they are enforcing copyright criminally?

 

While I knew the servers were a problem even with games that come on a physical medium, I honestly wasn't thinking of how much they use the customers as beta testers these days and how many patches they release.

 

Still, even with these problems, I still like holding stuff in my hands. I like to feel like a bought something that is now mine and could be lent, traded or sold at a later point.

[Newsdee]

in cases like after burner climax, you have to wait until someone emulates it, like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T83qd8LvD6o

 

later

-1

This and Outrun were great games Id be happy to have paid to have in physical form. It's a damn shame online is killing some games and forcing people to find alternatives.

[negative1]

This and Outrun were great games Id be happy to have paid to have in physical form. It's a damn shame online is killing some games and forcing people to find alternatives.

 

 

which outrun?

 

there have been tons of versions released on cartridges, disc, etc.

 

later

-1

[negative1]

unless you're trying to preserve each version of game with each patch, there's still a way to capture each one of these updates.

 

as long as you have the files on your end, it doesn't matter if they originated from a server.

 

later

-1

Edited June 29, 2018 by negative1

[Games Retrospect]

I'd love a return to cartridges, but it won't happen because a lot of people actually like digital downloads, and as more people "age out" of buying the latest and greatest games all the time and get replaced in that market with younger people who have grown up without physical media, that trend will only accelerate.

 

Personally, I won't buy something if I don't think I can use it if I want to in 20 years. But I recognize that that's me being old. I've lived long enough to know that I do still use a lot of the stuff I owned 20 or more years ago. But 20 years ago that wasn't true because I hadn't lived long enough for it to be true, so I was fine just buying stuff and then throwing it away when done (only to want to buy it again later). And that's the age of people that the game makers are counting on rushing on to PSN or the Nintendo eShop to buy the latest releases.

 

So there are two factors, I think. One is that increasingly, kids are growing up not experiencing physical media, or experiencing it just enough that they consider it inconvenient. Two is that kids and young adults are generally pretty wasteful in general and think of games as disposable - that's *always* been the case. You don't really gain an appreciation for keeping stuff around long-term until you're old enough to have lived long enough to do so.

 

There are obviously exceptions and I don't know how old you are. But I think that mostly, it's middle aged and older gamers that want to hold on to physical media, and return to cartridge. (I definitely would prefer cartridge to optical disc for reliability reasons... though I'd keep around my Xbox One S for 4k Blu-Ray!)

 

Obviously you do have the Switch as a current option, but I often feel like Nintendo's trying to kill off the cartridge as the main format even on that, in favor of downloads. And a lot of games on cartridge still seem to require downloading practically the whole game before you can actually play it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Switch games come in cartridges. I know the format's called Game Cards which most people associate with SD Cards, but I think their still cartridges. So if you have a Nintendo Switch, you're technically using cartridges.

[Tanooki]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Switch games come in cartridges. I know the format's called Game Cards which most people associate with SD Cards, but I think their still cartridges. So if you have a Nintendo Switch, you're technically using cartridges.

No real correction needed, they are cartridges, well more like little memory cards as they're sub-SD card sized, kind of like on the Vita. But basically yeah they're cartridges in total design all around really. I think I said it days ago earlier in the thread, carts never left, they just got smaller. Nintendo never once dropped the cartridge on the portable end of things even if they were forced to bail (too late) with the N64 into Gamecube. GB through GBA, DS through DSi, 3DS through 2DS/3DS normal/XL sized and Switch -- all cartridges (cards.)

 

Also of fair note up until the Switch Nintendo has never issued large scale patches at all for games, stuff has been never or extremely minor because they forced tiny storage limits on handheld and console. Switch has allowed for larger sized DLC, updates, additions, and some third parties now are abusing it to do their patch a game bullshit Sony/MS have done on their hard drives. Switch is the first console of theirs to allow that annoyance, yet they tend to release their games not broken and later patches are for minor fixes but mostly DLC and added modes. it kind of bulletproofs against dead servers decades later.

[Video]

Flash ram, or mask rom, to me a cart, or card is basically the same thing. Granted, nobody really knows the lifespan of mask roms, I've got some at 40+ years old that still work to this day. Flash has an estimated life of 20 ish years, and get wear from being used. I've had no problems yet, but the oldest flash games I have aren't 20 years old yet.

 

Anyhow, a complete game in a self contained solid state box is a cart to me. I'm sure there's a technical definition somewhere. Switch counts, provisionally (providing the game doesn't need patches from the internet to be completed) but they're getting away from that, and that's part of the reason I do not yet have a switch.

 

An easy access list of games and how complete they are would be nice, but I tried a topic last gen and there were no takers.

Edited June 30, 2018 by Video

[Osgeld]

flash only wears from writing, time and storage conditions, same as mask roms, which are just eeproms without a window

[Tanooki]

I'd like that list for Switch. I mean we know a few, anyone who has pulled that crap of part of a game on a cart, part as a download, effectively being download DRM either way since it won't function. Doom is a fringe game, no net -- no multiplayer, but single will work once it sees it can't make the download be forced and Skyrim lacks that as it just works and it's a big one too. But Wolfenstein 2, LA Noire, the back half of Capcoms MML, MMXL and RE Rev1+2 packages are dead in the water but at least 1/2 the package is there so it's not a paperweight at least.

 

Other games like the first party stuff, sure you use some ARMS dudes, balloon play in Mario, the smoother frame rate and optional DLC packages on Zelda -- but the games are still all there at the core, functional, playable, work fine if not great (perfectly intended) without the claws of the internet at it. Third party is much the same for a great level of titles and if anything it's Nintendo to blame. 32GB of internal space diced up by the OS didn't allow these bastards to play the 500GB and up club shenanigans of release a guinea pig beta and fix it after or at launch (delaying pressing a week or two otherwise.) Some clearly are still doing it, or just not paying up for a larger storage card per pressing as now there is that microSD card gateway under the kickstand. Switch skates the line of both worlds of the console guinea pig environment and handheld. On the previous failure (WiiU) the storage had no supplement, stuff had to work or be very minuscule problems accidentally missed in test that get a wee sized patch, and same with Wii. 3DS and DS (since DSi) same thing, before or around that, silent 1.1 releases on carts just like back in the NES era.

[atarilovesyou]

This whole thread makes me feel a lot better about choosing retro gaming vs modern gaming. We get the best of all worlds, really.

 

Bottom line, people vote with their wallets. Obviously we who have issues with these measures that companies want to implement are in the minority. We dont matter to them.

 

Anybody who thinks that people will just keep buying and going along with the program forever just need look at the current info on vinyl record sales. People will create that which people want to buy, no matter how old or uncool it may seem. Money talks...trust me, you think I wanna pay 25 bux for new vinyl? Ouch. But at least its being made, you know?

 

And I would gladly pay 60 bucks for new NES games I could play on my original equipment. I wont hold my breath, but I would not be surprised in the least.

Edited July 1, 2018 by atarilovesyou

[Keatah]

flash only wears from writing, time and storage conditions, same as mask roms, which are just eeproms without a window

 

They are not the same.

 

Mask ROMs have their information encoded/stored at the design phase. Presence or absence of a diode/transistor indicate a bit or lack of a bit, respectively. It is hard-wired in during the photo etching process. Cannot be altered once the chip is made. In the early days the data was practically hand-drawn on the table-sized film that went to the fab.

 

EEPROMs do not have crystal windows. They are all black epoxy. They are Electrically Erasable Read Only Memory. Can be programmed many times after manufacture.

 

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/69234/what-is-the-difference-between-flash-memory-and-eeprom

[Osgeld]

that was true back in the day, but since the mid 80's early 90's they were just eproms without a way to erase, cause it doesnt make economic sense to custom fab a billion wafers of ET for instance

 

and yes you got me on the e vs ee

Edited July 1, 2018 by Osgeld