By which I mean larger consoles to be plugged into a TV in your living room.
I remember the short loading times (between level scenes that couldn’t be skipped not-withstanding) of my N64 compared to my Gamecube fondly. There were of course sacrifices in sound and graphics because of the small cartridge in comparison to a PS2, despite the apparantly faster chip in the machine.
Which got me thinking, if I can have a keyring memory stick with a GB of space on it, could a cartridge be cheaply produced with a capacity above that of a CD and approaching that of half a DVD?
Flash memory based console games would be much more expensive to make. Checking at good old Newegg, the least expensive 1GB flash drive cost $35 dollars, while for that price you could buy 100 pack of DVD+R discs. Even with the game company getting nice discounts based on volume, the cost of media would force them to either cut their margins by quite a bit, or raise game prices, which people wouldn’t like, especially since you couldn’t fit as much stuff on the flash drive anyways.
Is there any chance of a return to solid state cartridges? Could a future console have a HD and download games in a jiffy via broadband for faster access?
Yeah, but the whole thing doesn’t have to be flash memory, only perhaps a small part for saving games. What about regular ROM chips? How much do they cost these days?
Mask ROMs do not have the capacity to hold what modern CDs and DVDs do, not even with a fair number of them on one cart. And the cost to manufacture carts with a dozen or two mask ROMs on a board is prohibitive compared to a cheap plastic-and-aluminum disc. People already complain about the price of games released on disc media – you might as well double or triple their price if you want those same games on solid state media. No one will go for that.
Heck, back in '94/95, people were already critisizing Nintendo for sticking to solid state cartridges in the design of the N64 when virtually everyone else was moving to CD. The price difference was noticeable even then: Big name games were consistently $10-20 more than comparable titles released on CD for other machines. At the time it didn’t stop the N64 from being a success, largely because they had the benefit of well-known franchises and characters, and the perception of better graphics than the PS2 and Saturn. Come the following generation however, Nintendo finally went to optical media along with everyone else, and solid state died out.
It is conceivable that as flash memory grows in size and speed, the smaller capacities will come down in price enough to make the idea of solid-state media feasable again – but then by that time games will likely have become even bigger than they are today and won’t take well to the now-old and smaller media cards. After all, games are coming on DVD now, and a 4-gig+ memory card would be required to build games as rich as what’s being produced on DVD. That ain’t cheap, and it won’t be cheap even come the generation after the currently emerging one.