Cartridge: Difference between revisions

Cartridges have some advantages over [[Optical Disc|Optical Discs]]s. First is durability. The cartridges only have the outer connectors exposed to wear, and the systems themselves have no moving parts to wear out or overheat. Second, the games run faster; load-times are very short since data doesn't have to be physically sought on a disc or hard drive. But most importantly, the game itself only takes up a small physical part of the cartridge. The rest of the space can be used for extra chips, which can be used to increase the power of a system. Let's say the system doesn't have enough memory to run the game on the chip, but can accept extra memory from the cart. So an extra RAM chip is included. Early games with save points (like the NES ''Zelda'' games) used this trick, and included a watch battery inside the case to keep the RAM from erasing itself ([[Flash Memory]], which doesn't need a backup battery, was several years off at this point).