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CD ROM vs. Cartridges:
Issues Past and Present

Article By: Jason Estey

Jason Estey is a freelance writer and Xcessive Gamer Editor. Jason also has his own video game site.
Visit: Jason Estey's GAME REVIEW

Cartridges used to dominate the video game industry as being the storage medium of preference for home gaming consoles, and when the CD ROM drive was first introduced, it seemed to be an unlikely competitor. Nearly half a decade later, CDs have managed to prove themselves as the new established technology of preference for video game consoles, but the transition has been a rough ride for gamers (not to mention game console designers), and there is still some debate about whether or not cartridges have outlived their usefulness.

Past Issues

When the CD ROM was first introduced, the storage capacity of a CD was considered to be enormous. People marveled at how an entire set of encyclopedias could be conveniently stored on a single CD and accessed by their home PCs, but there were also some very obvious drawbacks to the new CD ROM technology. Cartridges were safe from being replaced by CDs so long as the two biggest problems remained: reading data from a CD was incredibly slow with the early CD ROM drives, and CD ROM drives were also very expensive at the time. However, most people realized that these two drawbacks would disappear as CD ROM drives became more and more advanced.

I can still remember when I used a CD ROM encyclopedia for the first time: it was at a friend's house, and his father had purchased the CD ROM drive for around $800. We were blown away with the technology even though it could take minutes to search the CD for what we were looking for (it was almost as slow as searching the internet!) But when you think about it, the technology of the time wasn't practical for home gaming consoles. Right off the bat, it is obvious that very few people are going to pay in excess of $800 for a home gaming system. It was when the cost of CD ROM technology began to drop that the designers of game hardware began to seriously consider it as a possibility for the next wave in game technologies.

There was, however, a bigger problem with CD technology than the cost of the drive. An arcade style game running in real time requires data to be loaded into memory as quickly as possible, especially when the internal memory of the game system running the software is relatively limited (as it was in earlier game consoles.) Even modern CD ROMs use caching techniques to help overcome the problems posed by CD load times, and gamers are known to gripe constantly about the load time of the games they have for their CD ROM based systems. Cartridges carry no such problems since they load extremely fast (much faster than is needed for most games.) Cartridges also had some very appealing advantages over CD ROM drives during the early days of CD ROM technology. For years, console games that had a save option had depended on the storage capacity of the cartridge to temporarily store game data (usually via some small amount of memory kept running by a long life battery.) CDs, however, are not a rewritable storage medium and are therefore completely unsuitable for storing saved games or any other variable game data. This meant that the game system itself would have to provide some kind of method for storing game data, like an additional disk drive or an internal storage device. At the time, cartridges were a much more appealing option to the developers of game hardware, since carts were the cheaper and less radical option.

The Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo arrived far too early to take advantage of CD ROM technology, but Sega and Nintendo were nevertheless faced with the challenge of how they intended to make use of the technology in later years when it started to become a feasible option. Sega hopped on board early with an add on for their Genesis system called the Sega CD, and it was a very impressive system that just happened to have some serious flaws. People were amazed by the things that the Sega CD could do; Sega CD games frequently made use of CD quality sound and the crude full motion video of the time. Unfortunately, in all of the rush to provide high tech games for the Sega CD, many producers completely forgot about the basic elements of game play and fun. Hence, Sega CD games acquired a reputation for having dazzling graphics and sound, but being absolutely no fun to play. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of good Sega CD games as well (the Sega CD is, after all, one of my all time favorite consoles), and many gamers were happy with their Sega CD system, especially in the beginning. But the Sega CD games really began to get crappy when game budgets dropped because of the limited game market. Limited game market? The other fundamental flaw of the Sega CD was its outrageous cost. Not only was a Sega Genesis system required to begin with (and 16 bit systems at the time were not cheap), but the Sega CD add on cost nearly as much as the Genesis itself. Hence, only the hard core (or very lucky) gamers ever got their hands on a Sega CD. The result was that, in the end, the Sega CD was not a real hot system for game developers to make money on, and the Sega Genesis remained a more appealing option.

Nintendo decided not to bother making any kind of CD ROM upgrade option for the SNES. Instead they opted to spread a whole bunch of statistics on how slow CD ROM technology is and gripe about how difficult it would be to make good games run off of a CD ROM drive so that their loyal followers wouldn't feel as though they were missing out (Nintendo seems to have grown quite adept at spreading propaganda, they're doing it right now in the fight against Sony.) At first, it was a pretty even split between the Sega fans and the Nintendo fans. Sega fans argued for the advantages of CD ROM technology and showed off the capabilities of the Sega CD. Nintendo fans argued for the advantages that cartridges have over CDs and continued to be more than happy with their cartridge based games. When the Sega CD turned out to be a flop, the Sega fans were sent for a rough ride (they got royally screwed over) and the Super Nintendo became the number one console in the gaming industry. Nintendo definitely won out over Sega in the final analysis, but that doesn't mean that Nintendo was right in saying that CD ROM wasn't the wave of the future. After all, we're living in that future now, and CD ROM seems to be the way to go.

Present Issues

Just about all of the next generation 32 bit systems which now dominate the game market make use of CD ROM technology. CD ROM games still suffer from load time (only half as bad as before), but full motion video has come a long way and games now demand more storage space than ever before, making CD storage a necessity in the eyes of many developers. CD ROM technology also provides some advantages for game developers that weren't as obvious before. Cartridges are relatively expensive to produce, whereas CDs are just an aluminum plate coated in plastic. CDs are therefore much cheaper to mass produce than cartridges, especially now that they are so common in the music and computing industries (heck, they even send people free promotional CDs in the mail these days), which is definitely an issue that is important to game publishers. The game developers have to worry about load time problems and deal with CD caching issues, but they also have hundreds of times more storage space to play around with than before, which is an advantage that is well worth the additional effort.

The Sony Playstation, now the most successful CD ROM based home gaming console of all time, demonstrates how the gaming industry has learned to use CD ROM technology responsibly, for the most part. There are still crappy games that are all flashy full motion and no game play, but developers are finally clueing in that gamers don't care how much advanced technology a game uses so long as there's no real reason to play it. Games commonly use FMV scenes for their introductory scenes, usually intended for the sole purpose of impressing gamers, and FMV clips have also been effectively used to add to the atmosphere of games such as Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil where short animations illustrate a particular scene or event in detail. Only a handful of Sega CD games that used FMV used it as effectively as this. Sonic CD used FMV for the animated intro, and the Lunar games used FMV animation very effectively for some of the story scenes, but games like Sewer Shark went overboard by providing too much video and not enough game play. Fortunately, things have changed such that FMV is now a blessing rather than a curse.

For the life of me, I can't possibly understand what Nintendo is trying to prove by stubbornly refusing to release a CD drive. Early on it seemed that the Nintendo 64 just might be able to make due with cartridges, even though most of the major developers were putting up a major stink about it. But when Nintendo finally announced that they wanted to introduce a drive that would have increased storage capacity, they affirmed their stubborn stupidity by designing it to not be a CD ROM drive! The 64 DD is an interesting prospect, since it provides larger disk style cartridges that store much more than a normal cartridge while still loading faster than a CD, but CDs still store many times more data than a 64 DD pack, and the CD ROM speed commonly found in home gaming consoles will probably catch up to the speed of the 64 DD within the next couple of years. Not only that, but the Sega CD has already proved that an expensive add on for an already expensive system is usually a formula for failure. Nintendo could conceivably get the best of both worlds by releasing a 64 CD ROM which would allow Nintendo 64 games to utilize both cartridges and CDs, but instead they're trying to go half way with the 64 DD project, and I seriously doubt that it'll work. The only real advantage that the 64 DD carries over anything else on the market is that it's a writable medium, meaning that it'll be able to store large amounts of save data. It would certainly be exciting to be able to design your own 3D levels for Zelda 64, but how many gamers are really going to buy into a device which is essentially a $100 memory card drive? Nintendo should just make a CD ROM drive, then maybe they'd attract the third party developers that they're so desperate for.

Future Issues

If you want to see where the future of console gaming technology lies, you usually don't need to look any further than the PC gaming market. PC games and PC technology are typically ahead of the console gaming world merely because when people buy a home computer, they're buying a $2000 machine as opposed to a $200 machine. The newest wave in CD ROM technology comes to us in the form of the DVD (Digital Video Disc) drive, which holds many times more data per disc than a regular CD ROM drive at the cost of being slower. Dispite its reduced speed, the DVD drive is still faster than the CD ROM drives typically used in home console systems (see how far behind they are?), but DVD probably won't be seen in the console gaming industry until the price comes down. Still, I wouldn't be too shocked if the next wave of gaming consoles (the 128 bit consoles perhaps) used DVD technology.

Finally, one can't help but wonder if cartridges have finally outlived their usefulness. Carts can do amazing things, as Nintendo demonstrated with the FX chip, which allowed the Super Nintendo to run Star Fox - Nintendo's first polygon rendered game. A cartridge drive, assuming that it doesn't add too much to the price of a machine, would be useful as a slot where gamers can put in extra RAM, graphics cards, or math co-processors that boost the performance of their games. An advanced game could use both a cart and a CD working together to boost performance, the cart would store the most crucial game data so that it wouldn't have to be kept resident in memory, and the CD could store the bulk of the game data. But in the final analysis, cartridges may be dead for the time being. The cost and hassle of putting both a CD drive and a cartridge drive into a game machine doesn't appeal to most hardware designers, especially when the usefulness of the cartridge drive would typically be minimal.

Maybe the cartridge will re-emerge someday as the game technology of choice once again. It's difficult to see where technology will end up in the long run; chances are that you're reading this on a computer that is more advanced than the ones depicted in '60s sci fi movies about the future. Then again, maybe CD ROM style devices are here to stay. CD ROM technology is actually simpler than cartridge technology, which makes it a more stable and a more reliable technology in computing circles.We won't know for sure until the future arrives.

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