SMG1 has quite a bit of FMV (intro, cutscenes, ending, library stuff). SMG2 is all real-time, if I remember correctly...that would reduce it by a lot.
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3DS Game Card Sizes
- Thread starter lunchwithyuzo
- Start date
SMG1 has quite a bit of FMV (intro, cutscenes, ending, library stuff). SMG2 is all real-time, if I remember correctly...that would reduce it by a lot.
Like DS in its prime?
Because of course, having readily available flashcarts (even on amazon!) affected the DS a whole lot, didn't it? (answer: it didn't. not one fucking bit. The PSP's problems were due to other issues entirely).
Anyway, I'm out before this discussion gets too heated.
frankie_baby
Member
And I'm sure if one happens you'll only be playing snes games you already own WON'T YOU????
Of course. All I want is Donkey Kong Country 2 (not the GBA one, gahh) and Super Metroid handheld. Literally, that's it. I have them both on cartridge (brought DKC2 in 1996! heh), and on Wii VC.
Chittagong
Gold Member
Hmm... Wondering whether the 16GB card will be enough since the 32GB is not available in EU and I wanted to go DD only.
Would an imported HK/JP 32GB work in the UK... And would it be sensible in terms of cost?
frankie_baby
Member
well then I hope a flash cart gets made that only you buy and the 99% of ds flashcart owners are somehow unable to buy
Wouldn't importing from US be cheaper?
Also, remember that the cart sizes don't equal the DD download size.
For example, Uncharted is on the 4gb cart but the DD size is 2.7gb.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
I found a reference to it online, but it hasn't been "officially" released through the scene so it might not be correct. Wasn't there some speculation that MH3G would use a 4GB card?
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
I should point out the actual sizes are smaller in all those cases, that's just the minimum size for the card. For example the file size for Ridge Racer Vita is actually 561MB, but that'd mean a 1GB card.
Capcom would've said something about it if they had used a 4GB card; they've been trumpeting RE:R as the first 4GB game for quite some time now.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
They did add an orchestrated end song fwiw. That alone is probably a larger file than all the N64 sound data combined.
Chittagong
Gold Member
Ah ok, got it. Yes US import would be optimal, the only problem is the launches are simultaneous so I would be with a brick for a week or so.
woo and indeed hoo
Banned
My ears disagree with your ears.
frankie_baby
Member
Modern cartridges are pretty much just prewritten flash cards
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
OoT 3D has some of the highest quality textures of any 3DS game so I'm not surprised about it being 512MB (plus that orchestrated ending music alone would be bigger than the entire N64 original ROM!)
I didn't know that 3DS cards even went as small as 128MB!
Such a shame that MH3G only uses a 2GB card. It could've done with that extra space for higher resolution textures.
I wonder how big Cave Story 3D is? (I'm betting on it being 128MB)
I didn't know that 3DS cards even went as small as 128MB!
Such a shame that MH3G only uses a 2GB card. It could've done with that extra space for higher resolution textures.
I wonder how big Cave Story 3D is? (I'm betting on it being 128MB)
frankie_baby
Member
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought only 1gb, 2gb and 4gb existed, this list only comes from the rom sizes and what they could fit into?
frankie_baby
Member
Getting resident evil 2 on an n64 cart was pure witchcraft
Yup, even with those gifi "videos" it's my preferred version of the game.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
These are the rom (or card) sizes. Evidently 128MB/256MB/512MB cards do exist. 4GB is the current maximum, though they'll undoubtedly go larger in the future.
Largest commercial game rom sizes for previous cart/card based Nintendo systems:
NES: 1MB
SNES: 5MB
N64: 64MB
GB/C: 2MB
GBA: 32MB
DS/i: 512MB
frankie_baby
Member
Apparently they'll go up to 8gb, I wonder how good visually games on older systems could've gone had the systems stayed around even longer and carts carried on getting bigger
Pimpbaa
Member
I don't think people would have liked paying neo geo game prices for n64 games. Carts would have to be much bigger physically too (to fit all the ROM chips).
DonMigs85
Member
Also I think these newer chips actually have slower access times right? More like flash rather than true ROM.
Gianni Merryman
Member
I'm a little surprised to see that Resident evil revelations, Kingdom hearts 3D and Metal gear 3D take more space than Monster hunter 3G, but what about Love plus?!
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
I remember there was this whole Matrix Semicontductor being the memory supplier for DS with new magic 3D rom thing, but the company was bought by Sandisk years ago and a lot of their docs are now hard to come by. From my understanding though, the cards are less like flash and more like stacked rom. Presumably 3DS and probably Vita are using newer iterations of the technology, both Nintendo and Sony were big investors in Matrix way back.
Pimpbaa
Member
Yeah, I think data is loaded off the cart into system ram like modern consoles with their dvd/bluray drives. It's fast enough that load times are not noticeable, except in a few cases like Lego Pirates of the Caribbean which has PSP like load times.
Not really that surprising since there's no VA in MH and CG is kept to a minimum. Don't know about the other two, but MGS3D absolutely needs it for the massive amount of VA that the game has.
Inferno313
Banned
I'd rather have an HD remake for Wii U, personally.
The chips aren't slower, RAM is simply much faster these days and the cartridges can be huge, so mapping them directly makes no sense anymore. They're still "true" ROMs, though.
Handheld all the way May!
cartman414
Member
I wonder how big Devil Survivor OC is.
AceBandage
Banned
Voice acting. Lots and lots of voice acting.
Anyway, for those debating on what the carts are actually made of, I believe it's Mask ROM, just like the DS before it.
Rodney McKay
Member
Wind Waker 3D with extra content
F-Zero GX with online
All I need Nintendo. Please, I beg of you.
On the topic of these cards, I wish that they would allow for more variable pricing.
I know that more GB doesn't equal better game, but using a smaller and cheaper card size must shrink production costs at least a little bit. It would be nice to see those saving carried on to us customers.
Also, I wish the LEGO games would use a larger card, I remember them saying that they 3DS version were suppose to be direct ports of the Wii versions, but in the end I think they just tweaked the DS version and added terrible quality video and weak 3D.
My theory is that since old school carts were so small there wasn't that much data to seek compared to now, so that's why everything was always fast.
There is that. The larger the ROM, the slower the seek times. That's just the physical nature of it. Also the DS/3DS carts only have about half the physical contacts of a GB/C/A cart (and therefore only half the bus width).
Actually, it didn't improve much. The major improvement was hardware-based compressed formats like S3TC (which the 3DS uses), which can approach 24-bit quality with 8-bits or even 4-bits per pixel. On top of that, games can use lossless compression on the files themselves (zlib, lzma, etc), but this is only used if really necessary since it increases load times and uses more RAM (decompression buffer).
Nobody uses stuff like JPEG for textures, except for browser-games, since it produces terrible results and uses far more RAM than S3TC, which can be used directly by the GPU without decompressing first.
Outside of video and streamed audio, textures almost always take the most space than anything else in any game.
At least the intro and the ending in SMG1 are actually 60fps FMV. Those might take quite a bit of space.
Solid state media doesn't have "seek time". There's nothing moving anywhere to "seek" anything. And the number of contacts has little to do with bus width, otherwise USB 2.0 would be as slow as USB 1.0.
The difference between old-style carts and DS/Vita/3DS cards is that the former are mapped as memory (the cart is a chip plugged directly onto the console hardware, and the CPU can see all of the ROM at once) while with the latter the console can only see a block at a time and must tell the card to switch to a different block in order to get more data (this process can be automated via DMA to copy data to RAM without CPU interference), which is similar to how a PC reads data from any kind of storage (HDD, flash, optical, etc).
That's true, but they're clocked like a few dozen times higher, so they're still several times as fast as the old memory mapped ROMs. But RAM is even faster now.
Though I think 3DS ROMs are only four times as fast as DS ROMs. At the same time, RAM increased by a factor of 16 to 32 (depending on how much is actually available to developers), so longer load times are inevitable.
I don't think the 3DS cards are mask ROM. Back in the DS days there were two types of cards: mask ROM (written using lithography) and 1T-EPROM (written by flashing the EPROM). Mask ROM was only available for cards up to 512MBit: 1Gbit cards and up had to use 1T-EPROM and were reported as having smaller transfer rates than M-ROM cards.
Well maybe seek times is not the correct term, but the larger the silicon chip, the slower it is. That's digital design 101.
And I meant, parallel bus width. One contact can only discern one bit of information per clock cycle. The DS/3DS no doubt have a higher frequency rom access clock then their predecessors but the smaller parallel bus width would definitely have some negative consequences. I'm assuming that's what makes it most impractical to directly map DS/3DS carts as RAM.
Mapping to RAM would probably require as many contacts as a RAM stick has. The 256MBit GBA carts (the maximum size allowed by the addressable space) were very expensive, while 256MBit DS cards were much cheaper since their internals could be a lot simpler due to their serial nature.
The serial interface also allowed Nintendo more flexibility in the tech they could use for the cards insides. It paid off a lot with the 3DS: they could vastly increase the cartridge sizes and keep BC using the same card slot.
And you're right: each read request does cause a small delay between the request and the start of the transfer. So, games that read tons of small files will load slower than games that load large files or files that are placed "next to each other" in the card memory. This time is independent of how "far" each file is of each other, however.