Topic: Why is storage such a freaking problem!?

[kirby_killer_dedede]

...I dont see the problem.  Maybe UMD discs can store fourteen times more, but, I mean, when one console disc cant hold something, they make it a two disc-set (FF's, RE, BK - not Burger King).  Why cant they do something similar with the DS?  I'm just tired of DS getting bashed for this reason.

[Blackknight131]

You sure like to have "freaky" thread titles...

You know what? Dont get too caught up about it. The "problem", perse, really isnt that big. I beleive strongly in fact its not a problem at all. Several factors are at work here. The biggest one, is ignorance.

IG-NOR-ANCE.

Many people assume "cartridge" versus disc, and say "oh gawd, PS vs N64 all over again". They dont realize just how much has changed...for one, these are NOT you old school carts used in the SNES, N64, even the GBA. These are "flash-card" like high-tech solid state data cards...far cheaper AND faster to produce than our old skool carts ever were....and it may come that they involve rewritable sectors, just like Nintendo planned to have with the 64DD discs (gawd, that tech was inferior tho).
Already they are coming in flavors of 128 MB...there is no doubt 256 is right around that corner....and that is a lot of memory to make a beautiful game. How large did N64 games get (the closest approximation of the DS hardware)...the answer is 64 MB achieved by Resident Evil 2....our classic Ocarina of Time itself was on a 32-48 MB cart. Mario 64? 8-16 MB. How large was Aria of Sorrow for the GBA? Metroid Zero Mission? Mario and Luigi? Maybe 32 MB... Those figures are just for perspective.

What the DS cards will not be great for are high quality movies and streaming, pre-orchestrated audio. Resolution of texture art should not be a big problem...given the screen type of the DS.

Where else does ignorance come into play? Allowance for the portable market...a disc drive is fine technology (and Sony has plenty out there), but the best bet for a PORTABLE MOBILE gaming system? We'll see about that, but my early opinion is very skeptical. Solid state media on the other hand has proven suitably tiny AND hardy AND fast access. Load times on a portable machine? I shudder at that possibility...

At any rate, I personally dont want to ever bother with "multiple disc or card" games when Im playing a portable system. That notion just annoys the heck outta me...and really, it should never have to come to that.

[Jale]

Well perhaps we might see a game that has a cart that comes out of the slot and curls round to the underside of the DS. That would be a massive game.

[SgtShiversBen]

My heart goes out to Blackknight here, I also believe that ignorance is what caused the death of carts back in them days.  Heck, it is still even happening now, what with the Mega Man Anniversary Collection.  The people who made those kept on saying "Oh no, we don't have enough room to put 7 games that were on carts no bigger than 8 MB on a 1.5 GB disk!! THE HUMANITY!!"  The same way is with SquarEnix...."we MUST put movies in it!! It MUST be 97685 hours long!!" GAH!! Stupid people and their FANCY cars and beautiful women...Victoria Silvsted: Playmate of the Year.....F**K!!

[ABlueflameA]

Well, I thought that I'd just be the devils advocate here for a sec, please dont hate me. (oh, I use the term "cart" here to represent not only cartridge based media, but also disc based as all of the points apply to both)

Multiple carts:
Cost more money for the cart itself
Takes twice as much time to produce the same amount of games as single carts
Require a non-standard cart holder
Require coding in the game so that it will know when to ask to switch to cart 2
You have to get off of your butt and switch carts

Its not so simple as "lets just make multiple carts for a game because its so easy". There is a lot more that goes into it and for game makers it is probably a big pain in the butt.  Therefore, say, a competing cart that can hold 10x the memory of cart A would be looked upon favorably.

This argument doesn't stand up when a cart has more than enough room for ANYTHING the game maker may choose to put into a game.  However, this has NEVER happened so far.  Maybe if blue-ray discs become the standard in the future (as PS3 is said to use) the 30gb or whatever insane size the disc holds will finally be enough even for Square-Enix and their 20 hours of uncompressed FMV sequences.

[NWR_Lindy]

Blackknight131 is absolutely right about game sizes.

Resident Evil 2 (N64) - 512 Megabits (Mb) or 64 Megabytes (MB)
Initial Nintendo DS cartridges - 1 Gigabit (Gb) or 128 Megabytes (MB)

So, right out the gate the smallest Nintendo DS cartridges have twice the capacity that the biggest N64 cartridge ever did.  Sure, you could knock it by saying that it's been eight years since the N64 came out so twice the storage capacity isn't that big a deal, but since the DS seems to be the rough equivalent of a handheld N64 it's a fair comparison.  The bottom line is that N64-sized games won't be a problem, and there were some damn good games on the N64.

silks

[Blackknight131]

Quote
Well perhaps we might see a game that has a cart that comes out of the slot and curls round to the underside of the DS. That would be a massive game.

Sorry bro, not sure if you were joking with this...but just in case, if by "bigger" game you mean capacity-wise, a game that is literally 1 Gigabyte in solid state memory would be on the same size DS game card as a game that is 128 MB. The physical size and shape of the card is not affected at these levels. Maybe it would make for a cool/trippy aesthetic thing tho...

Quote
My heart goes out to Blackknight here, I also believe that ignorance is what caused the death of carts back in them days.

I definitely appreciate the shout-out, but that is actually not what I was getting at....carts as a medium were overrun by CDS for good reason: it made sense for the game market. Much much cheaper and much much faster to manufacture. The storage capacity was of course also a factor for developers just getting their feet wet on such (at the times) powerful hardware capable of full movie and sound playback (some developers of course went overboard a bit with such capacity for the first time). It made sense for the industry to move that way at that time, and that is why Nintendo was left behind. Carts ARE great for video games....but the deficiencies of those carts was too great in the face of a very attractive alternative.

The point I was trying to make was that the DS's media first of all does not suffer the same deficiencies as the OG carts (games can theoretically be ordered and manufactured in days instead of weeks, for example)...and that the market in which these media are competing is NOT the console market: its the portable market, where power consumption and sturdiness become key issues. Those differences are important, I think.

[Jale]

Surely you can pack more into a bigger cart. Say you have a thing 4x bigger than a normal cart. It has all that stuff that a 1 Gigabyte cart has, but 4x as much. Wouldnt that hold 4 gigabytes?

[odifiend]

Jale: I don't know about the memory part, but could you imagine how much more fragile that cartridge would be?  

[Jale]

That is true, but it would still be able to hold a huge game.

[Draygaia]

Most games that are multiple discs don't really need the movies at all.  Now I haven't played too many PS2 games but I did play a lot of PSX games and so far very few games were pretty good with the movies.  

For example  FFVII.  They have movies where everything can't be done on gameplay, then they have movies where the characters look like what they were during gameplay, and then they have movies where it could be done during gameplay but the characters are only CG but still not any better.  Even the ending and beginning movies weren't really needed since they could have done better and added more if movies was a bit of a challenge.

Chrono Cross.  Only 2 discs but whats with the FMV movies here and the FMV movies there and no FMV movies in any other place?  It was like random, "WTF?"  They should hav just made it 4 disc and put a lot of FMV movies or no FMV movies at all.

I thought FFIX did a good job of it.  Probably the only game where I was ok with it.

But yeah I think the main point is that people shouldn't bash the DS for using a cartridge.

[Blackknight131]

Quote
Originally posted by: Jale
Surely you can pack more into a bigger cart. Say you have a thing 4x bigger than a normal cart. It has all that stuff that a 1 Gigabyte cart has, but 4x as much. Wouldnt that hold 4 gigabytes?

What I am trying to get at is that at this scale, you wouldnt have to make a larger cartridge casing...although again, the DS does not utilize the carts we are used to in our GBAs and N64s.
Anyways, 32 MB, 128 MB, 512, 1 gig, etc. It comes on the same size card...its pretty much exactly like your flash data cards in your digital camera. The form factor (e.g. a literally BIGGER cart/card) is not the issue here.

[Jale]

I do understand it all being on the same cart. I also know that there must be an upper limit. There are little things called transistors which are what make these thigs work. On the 'bigger' carts, they are smaller but if they get too small they burn out. Therefore there must be a limit.  

[ABlueflameA]

I dont think that its really if they get too small they burn out.  I think that the future of almost all electronics is nano-tech and that is a LOT smaller than any transistor.  Its more of how many transistors or whatever they can fit on a chip.

[Jale]

Nano-Technology is something totally different. At the moment the transistors do burn out if they are too small. Therefore the only way to make the space bigger it to make the card bigger.

[Blackknight131]

No, there are other ways to fit more transistors per same size silicon wafer....one of the ways as you guys discussed was to shrink the transistors. They are approaching what they feel is going to be a limit on the miniaturization processes...some sort of limit will be reached eventually anyway. Other techniques beyond just miniaturization must be explored. That is where 3D Memory comes in, and it is likely the technology around which the DS game data cards are manufactured.
They allow more transistors to be fabricated on the same size silicon wafer by building up...like multiple stories...it saves real estate, so to speak and cuts back in costs because you are still using the same amount of silicon, just allowing more storage capacity over what was previously possible.
This is why DS games will likely be much cheaper to produce than cartridges ever were, and at memory capacities than was economically feasible. See Jale, the most important thing is the economics....if you go to a high enough amount of memory, yes you may need a larger piece of silicon and a larger casing to put it in (if the capacity exceeds the miniaturization levels). But number one, that amount of storage would be very, very high...far beyond what we are seeing now in Flash Memory cards (and we are seeing flash memory in the gigaBytes now). And Number two, the cost for that much flash memory....it would be ungawdly. No one could afford it, even after taking into consideration the new 3D Memory techniques and bulk orders. It would be so expensive there would just be no point.

[ABlueflameA]

Blackknight, what you're talking about is, in a way, similar to what i was talking about.  Both 3D memory blocks and nano-tech are alternative ways to get massive amounts of electronics - transistors or otherwise into a small amount of space.  Which will come first, however, I do not know.  Both stand to have HUGE amounts of storage memory, potentially even bigger than the PS3's blu-ray discs (23 gigabytes) and without moving parts like a hard drive.  However, I bet its going to be another generation or two or three before we see anything like that.  My bet is that Gameboy Advance 2 will be something like SD or compactflash...but proprietary of course.  Nintendo has never embraced a standard like cd's or dvd's because they are just too easy to pirate.

Just as sort of a sci-fi note, potentially the best harddrive will be crystal with each atom representing a bit of data, and that would be a HUGE storage capacity. (terrabytes+)

Of course, all of this is just pure speculation.
-Blue

p.s. in a related topic, windows users can partition their hard drives into exabytes(sp?)... 1 exabyte is more than sufficient to download the entire internet onto.  If any of you can actually do this *cough**only bill gates could...maybe**cough* let me know.

[Jale]

Ahh, I see that makes a lot of sense.

Also a good hardrive would be a tank of Nanobots devotd to storage. Just keep pouring em in to upgrade!

[NWR_Lindy]

Side tangent: one of the things I enjoyed about the "old days" of cartridges was when you had the release of the first game to use a bigger cart size than anything out there.  Like, "This is the first game to use a 64Megabit cartridge!"  <ooohs and aaahs ensue>

I'm glad that'll have a chance to continue with the DS.

silks

[Blackknight131]

First of all, Silks, I feel ya there. I remember those "Ooohhs and Aaahhhs" most clearly when I think about Street Fighter II and the miracle that was the 16 MB cartridge...

At any rate, BlueFlame, you are on the money with regards to fitting more more more on the same size chip. What I wasnt clear about however is whether you realize that 3D Memory is HERE and NOW and will likely be a key to the success of the new DS media...media which will NOT be cartridge as we've known them. They will be like memory cards, very similar to SD or Compact Flash (etc.). I agree that Nintendo will throw some proprietary measures in there to keep it all honest but in terms of manufacturing the suckers and their size and build, they practically ARE the memory cards we utiliize now. That is my strong impression from the information Ive been reading anyway.

The name of the company that has been developing this particular 3D Memory technique is Matrix Semiconductor....a company that Nintendo just happened to make a sizeable investment in about 2-3 years ago...and that MS and Sony also hold stakes in, heheh.

[SuperMario35]

I wanted to know if the DS game cards have more memory than PSone,N64,Sega Saturn because someone told me that all of these systems have more memory storage?

[Blackknight131]

Well, its like this:

PSOne and Saturn's media was the CD. Capacity was something like 600-700 MB.

N64 media was cartridge, just like the SNES before it. Cartridges come in different sizes depending on how big a game the developer wants to make. They ranged anywhere from 8 MB to 64 MB (the largest N64 game, Resident Evil 2).
Obviously, even the biggest N64 cartridge was hundreds of MB smaller than a CD.

The DS games will come on cards/carts (they are technically "carts", but really they look more akin to flash memory cards), probaly of various sizes, currently the largest being 128 MB. I'll say right now that a 256 MB card is practically a stone's throw away from that, and merely awaits a devloper who needs to utilize that much memory.
Obviously however, even tho DS games will generally have much more capacity than N64 games, they will still hold much less than CDs.

Why is this? The answer is cost. A CD  (or DVD, or even UMD like the PSP uses) is much cheaper to manufacture compared to the kind of cartridge memory an N64 or even GBA game comes on. For example, a DVD (and UMD) costs around a few bucks. Although you can get the same capacity on a cartridge (carts can hold as much as you can afford, even 100s of MBs) it costs a heckuva alot more per MB than on these discs.
The DS games will be much cheaper to make than past cartridges ever were tho...and hopefully this will painlessly allow developers to expand to cartidge sizes previously thought unaffordable.

Hope that explanation helps.

[ShyGuy]

Hmm a 256MB flash card for a digital camera is around $40-$50 retail US, right? I'm assuming the DS is going to use similar technology. I think they're going to be able to fit a LOT of game into a 128MB "cartridge"    

maybe Nintendo should call them flash cards, ROM cards, solid state media cards  or something to remove the stigma of cartridges

[SuperMario35]

So what you're saying that is that if a developer wants to make a game like Final Fantasy 7 or one even bigger will they have the choice to expand the memory of the DS game card or will they have to put the game on more  than one DS game cards?
Also is it true that a CD takes more battery because of the spindle? I think thats Nintendo's main idea of using carts because they dont take much battery and also they dont load as much. But Sony is using UMD which probally needs a spindle and will load alot and thats just going to drain juice out of the battery. That's why Nintendo uses the cartridges because of there semiconductor technology. But Nintendo should make the DS media more bigger than just 128 MB.

[Jale]

They are bigger, 128MB is just the starting block.

I heard that they are just cards like a SIM card or something.