Why did Nintendo use ROM cartridges instead of floppy diskettes?

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>>3659646
Nintendo did use floppy diskettes in Japan.

They are way, way, way less reliable than carts, so they were not suitable for the American market.

They did try it with the Famicom Disk System.

Also, cartridges are much sturdier than disks, which is good for everyone, but especially for kids who made up a large portion of the userbase.

>>3659646

If you were an Amiga bro, trust me, you'd know damn well why.

FDS games went corrupt all the times, and the system itself died after a few years of use. Also the loading times were horrible. Even worse than early CD games.

>>3659646
>being too new to know about the FDS
kek

>>3659667
Yeah, and that was in japan where people generally take care of their shit.

In America you'd have the cool kids getting keychain magnets just so they can fuck with your Nintendo disks if it was released there. Same way that EVERYONE was aiming at each others eyes with the laser pointer keychains.

>>3659658
>piracy

Motherfucker, do you know how rampant FDS piracy was? Nintendo would've had to be fucking insane to standardize that format.

They used a format similar to floppy disks for the N64DD but nobody attempted piracy on that thing because it was such a huge failure.

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>>3659791
>magneto optical
>similar to floppy disks

What? Well, aside from being SLOW. And minidiscs and even more professional alternatives having similar capacity to zip disks, LS120's and such.

How come N64 emulation still doesn't work? Because they figured out how to prevent piracy of the FDS and dind't use that.

>>3659789

Even without...fuck that shit. Having disk 7 of 13 go corrupt... NEVER AGAIN.

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>>3659809
What the hell are you talking about?

>>3659646
>being THIS new
that or I fell for the bait

>>3659917
Everything is bait.

It's nice to think you've stumbled across an idiot and want to point it out, but regardless of what this site says most people aren't hopelessly retarded.

>>3659834
>not having having disk 13 out of 13 disks go corrupt
>installing something, waiting countless minutes just to have it fail at the last diskette
>that feel man, that feel...

floppies are not as fragile as everyone would have you think. if you grew up on them, then you'd know that they were fairly reliable, most often it was the DRIVES that went bad. In my case anyway, and definitely for the FDS

>>3659751
I hate this fucking meme. After importing tons of shit from Japan, I have easily come to find that Japanese people are just as fucking disgusting as anyone else.
A big difference tho is their stores. For the most part, if you go to a store that sells games everything is usually very clean compared to the stock of most of the stores in the us.

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>>3659958
I did use floppies a lot, but they were unreliable, ever heard of the click of death? Though they probably weren't as unreliable as hard disk-disks!

CDs could at least be really reliable, as well as also possibly being flaky.

>>3659958
they are pretty unreliable, and considering people are still booting up their old nintendo systems today, they would not be worth using in the slightest.

>>3659979
>>3659982
Chinese 3"1/2 floppies that flooded the market in the late 90s up to the end of the 00s were shit, but most floppies were okay. I still have fully working 30 years old floppies, and the vast majority of the floppies I have are more than 20 years old and still working perfectly. It all depends on how you store them.
>clock of death
That's Zip disk drives that does this, not your conventional floppy disks.

>>3660034
I have floppies from the 80s that works, and ones from the early 2000's that don't. They aren't reliable. Nintendo making them wouldn't solve this inconsistent reliability.

>>3660038
>ones from the early 2000's that don't.
Like I said, chinese shit that flooded the market in the late 90s and 00s. The chinks didn't respect the ferrite density necessary to make HD floppies (some can be found to have a density inferior to DD floppies), some didn't even test them (and still marked them as tested) or even worse, didn't even put the anti-static cloth inside the floppy's case.
>Nintendo making them wouldn't solve this inconsistent reliability.
They would if they controlled their suppliers tightly. They didn't make them to begin with though, it was Hitachi/Maxwell that supplied FDS disks.

>>3660048
cartridges are still better in every way except cost.

>>3660052
Agreed, but I was answering to the "floppies are unreliable garbage" question.

>>3659954

Fuck. Yeah.

>>3660048
>it was Hitachi/Maxwell that supplied FDS disks.
Look like I mistook Hitachi/Maxwell's 3" disks for Mitsumi's 3*4" QuickDisk.

>>3660034
Zip disks are floppy disks, and they were pretty damn conventional, that's why the originals are that much more important than the newer 250s. In a way, they were less conventional than LS120s, but in another way, they were more conventional than those too.

>>3660921
It's true that I kinda misused the word conventional. I should have said "other types", because the click of death is only an issue with Zip disks, I've never ever encountered any other type of floppy drive having that kind of issue (step motors dying yes, head knocked out off alignement yes, loosening belt yes, but no clicking).

>>3660935
And yet these famicom disks are said to have awful reliability issues. And as a bonus, they're tiny.

Nintendo learned a lesson and went MO. Can't think of what else they could have done, maybe 2.88 disks for SNES or LS120s for N64, assuming they couldn't have fixed the reliability horrors of Zip.

>>3660964
Give a floppy disk that doesn't have a protection on it's read/write window to kids and you can bet that a whole lot of them will try to touch that part at least once and that they'll put them on top of TVs. Only a few games had such window.
As for the size, they're roughly the same as 3" Amstrad disks (3*4" mitsumi Quick Disks).
>2.88 disks for SNES
If they were going to resuse Quick Disks, it would have been pretty dumb to use different format that store less data than the one they used for the Famicom.

>>3660989
No, the disks were tiny, less spacious than amstrad disks, and much less spacious than that quad density pseudostandard ED floppy. Unless there's some serious misinformation out there.

So 2.88 MB disks for SNES sound fairly reasonable, though a common format sounds likely to have been a huge pain piracywise.

>>3661057
Kek I though you were talking about 2.8" disks not 2.88MB ones.
As for the size of the disks (3"*4" rectangular case with a 2.8" disk inside) the width is the same as an Amstrad's disk, and I take back what I said earlier, it's height is actually slightly higher than the one of an amstrad disk (I just mesured one of mines, it's 3,8~3,9" high, compared to the 4" of the FDS disks). Yes, it stores less data than even lower-sized quick disks (64kB/face for an FDS disk vs 100kB/face on your average 2.8" quick disk) and even less than your Amstrad 3" disk (which store the same amount of data as 5"1/4 DD ones). Storing such a low amount of data on a double density disk should have increased the disk's reliability though (that's why I'm suspecting it's more the fact that it was handled by kids primarily without having any window protection that made it so fragile).
For the 2.88MB disks, yeah, almost no computer back then had a controller that could support such drives, though having nintendo use such format could have as a side effect the spread of controller cards (and later on-board controllers) capable of handling such format.

>>3659646
Cartridges are easier to control distribution of and much harder for idiot children to damage.

>>3659646
Floppy data got corrupted easily u 90s born retard.

>>3661104
Depends on where you put your disks. Properly stored disks rarely ever get corrupted (given they're not chinese trash). Putting your disks on top of/in front of/next to your monitor/speaker/any source of heat and/or magnetic waves is as good as trashing the data by yourself.

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>he thinks using floppy drives would make the system more reliable than carts

>>3661079
>though having nintendo use such format could have as a side effect the spread of controller cards (...) capable of handling such format

I similarly would have wondered that. Or, I'd suspect an SFC-FDS might have gotten hacked to just use standard 1.44 meg floppies.

It kind of seems easier to imagine nintendo using LS-120 leading to that catching on, though it must have been too slow for that use, not suitable for either retail or pseudo-rental games.

They'd have been best off just using minidisc, as an add on for SNES. Sony should have been satiated having their technology boosted and able to give nintendo a reasonable deal.

>decide to see the huge changes with the FDS versions of games
>woah slightly different titlescreen for metroid
>woah 2 minute loadtimes for a 64 kb sized game
>PLEASE SWITCH TO SIDE B
>woah Nazo no Murasame Jou (its ONE game)
>that could have been on the nes
i dont understand how its supposed to be more reliable

My FDS games are stored in an airtight/weatherproof container in the dark.

That's how fragile they are to temperature, humidity, etc.

>>3659646
My dad told me a story once about how he was asked to figure out why somebody's floppy drive wasn't working. It turns out that the user was attaching the floppies to their filing cabinet with magnets. People are dumb. Cartridges are hard to fuck up with any kind of dumbness.

>>3659745
fds haven't been memed as much as psx so it's less known