Limewater wrote:The switch runs on cards that are, essentially, cartridges.
You also DO have loading time from a hard drive/flash drive. It's still a serial data link. The older cartridges you could sort of claim "no load times" because memory could be directly addressed and read with parallel address/data lines.
Well Nintendo is known to do wacky things like the N64 controller and the mini disc for the NGC so SD cards for Switch is in line with their style but the question is will it last? The Switch already surpassed 5 years .
I am not a technical person and not sure what memory can be directly adressed compared to serial data link but in all cases the speed of flash storage is fast enough to claim no loading. I still remember dreading to open a door in RE1 because I had to go through yet another load screen. It was scarier than the game itself.
Limewater wrote:Yes! You can see an example of this on a cartridge game with the N64 version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.
There is a level where you ride a minecart in a big loop, room to room. If you go full throttle the game can't keep up with the textures, so you wind up seeing texture-less rooms.
You reminded me of those games that start then the textures loads in, they irritate me. Just looked up that title and it looks like Tomb Raider with Indiana Jones skin
complete rip off.MrPopo wrote:It's also a matter of how much data needs to be transferred. On an NES cart your worst case is needing to fully refresh the background and hit the sprite limit, which is a total of 1.25kb that needs to be written, and usually you don't need to do a full background refresh; the tiles persist across frames and you only need to update when you scroll, and the way things are architected you can do it a line of tiles at a time. By contrast, a modern game is going to use a ton of memory for the textures that will be rendered on the scene, and transferring all of that data is going to take much longer, comparatively speaking.
Its mind boggling that you can do fun games like TMNT on NES with that minute amount of memory. I would say its better made than many modern titles. Shows that creativity and attention to details can make wonders. Heck even the GB version is fun and I have no idea how much memory that is.
