24th October 2004, 2:12 PM
Carts do have their advantages, but they are nearly moot at this point. So long as you keep your disks out of the hands of the incompetant (kids, pets, and the occasional total idiot who you know just keeps all their disks stacked on top of each other precariously at the edge of a table over a litter box), they do fine. It's just a matter of ALWAYS making sure the disk is either in the system, in it's case (or a quickly obtained replacement case for it), or in your hands going between the two. (For some people, this seems to be a rather difficult task :D.) Also, back then, it was nice to have one system that had instant load times, most of the time. (I remember a few games like The World is Not Enough actually HAD load times, actually, decompressing the game's textures apparently took a while. That was annoying... Oh and, later in the PS1's life programmers found a way to really work around the 2X speed limit on the disks resulting in later games having small to nonexistant load times.
Anyway, now it's all optical media. Those blue ray disks (which, as you can imagine from the name, uses blue light which is even smaller than the red of DVDs and the infrared (just below red, not like WAAAY below red) of CDs), seem to store a lot of data. Considering I have yet to see a single mutli-DVD game, I kinda wonder if that space will even be needed for a while. I mean, it'll take games at least needing two or more DVDs before they start wanting a bigger storage medium. As it is, DVD is more than enough space, though it might be just barely.
Eventually though, they will reach the highest wavelength they can manage to reflect off those disks (blue light is already very troublesome, what with how utterly flat the surface needs to be, and how easy it is to refract it at an off angle), and at that point, after exxhausting every trick they can think of, optical media will be "tapped out". That could be just a decade or so away actually. So, the question is, what's the next medium? Having big stacks of the future "gamma ray disks" is no good to anyone after all (well, nope, no gamma rays, there is NO way to get those to bounce off, you can just barely register them by using very very low angle of incidence slight reflecting, but you get what I mean), isn't any good to anyone.
Anyway, now it's all optical media. Those blue ray disks (which, as you can imagine from the name, uses blue light which is even smaller than the red of DVDs and the infrared (just below red, not like WAAAY below red) of CDs), seem to store a lot of data. Considering I have yet to see a single mutli-DVD game, I kinda wonder if that space will even be needed for a while. I mean, it'll take games at least needing two or more DVDs before they start wanting a bigger storage medium. As it is, DVD is more than enough space, though it might be just barely.
Eventually though, they will reach the highest wavelength they can manage to reflect off those disks (blue light is already very troublesome, what with how utterly flat the surface needs to be, and how easy it is to refract it at an off angle), and at that point, after exxhausting every trick they can think of, optical media will be "tapped out". That could be just a decade or so away actually. So, the question is, what's the next medium? Having big stacks of the future "gamma ray disks" is no good to anyone after all (well, nope, no gamma rays, there is NO way to get those to bounce off, you can just barely register them by using very very low angle of incidence slight reflecting, but you get what I mean), isn't any good to anyone.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)