Before magnetic storage swept through the market and then bowed to optical media and direct downloads, game distribution relied on the venerable cartridge—a format that began its great adventure with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. Easy to connect, handle, and maintain, the cartridge wasn’t just practical; it was nearly indestructible. What’s its secret? Once again, The 8-Bit Guy is here to explain.
My first cartridge-based console was a local clone of the historic Atari 2600. You had to maneuver a bit to insert certain cartridges, but they always worked. By the time I got to the first NES clone (technically, a Famicom clone), I’d already been seduced by the VGA graphics of the PC, and its games lived on floppy disks and hard drives.
But the cartridge was always something special. Besides growing up with it, it offered guarantees that magnetic media didn't have back then. A damaged sector on a floppy could ruin an entire game, and the same went for a cassette sitting on the TV or a speaker. The cartridge worked even in the harshest conditions, and all it asked in return was a puff of air, or cleaning its contacts with something soft like a pencil eraser (the white kind). How did it pull that off?
The host of The 8-Bit Guy explains it in this recent video. It all starts with a personal anecdote: more than once he tried to record onto tape the contents of cartridges for his Commodore VIC-20, but it never worked. You see, the MOS 6502 chip in the VIC-20 can access 64 kilobytes of memory, but the computer itself only had 5 KB of RAM and about 20 KB of ROM (if I recall correctly, the effective free RAM was 3.5 KB). That means the memory map has several empty slots, which each cartridge fills when plugged in.
This reveals one of the most surprising aspects of cartridges: they were games and, at the same time, hardware expansions. Over the years, as technology advanced, the cartridge became a formidable way to enhance the capabilities and specifications of certain consoles. One of the most famous (and media-friendly) examples is the Super FX accelerator coprocessor, which Nintendo first used in Star Fox.
In short, cartridges were those "paladins" that helped us enjoy advanced games during an era of scarce and expensive RAM. As available RAM grew in both computers and consoles, the cartridge’s relevance plummeted. That shift also unlocked the potential of magnetic storage, and despite slower load times, the content quality was vastly superior.
The video has several additional examples worth checking out, but today we have consoles with whole gigabytes of RAM and hard drives of one or two terabytes. Why would we ever go back to the cartridge? One key is Flash memory. Its drawbacks have less impact with each generation, and its price keeps falling. With some games demanding multi-gigabyte downloads, dumping the whole thing onto a "flash cartridge" and letting the console store updates on its internal drive (patches, hotfixes, etc.) doesn’t sound so bad.
