Cartridge port for Amiga in 1985?

[orb85750]

They could have quashed the low-end game machine stigma by only having available (at the time of the A1000 release) "instant-load" applicaton software in cartridge format, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. -- leaving the game software entirely to 3rd-party companies.  Even if cartridges were expensive to produce, application software was still very expensive in the 80s and they could have easily sold it for over $100 per cartridge.

[MskoDestny]

Sure, as most of those were 16kb-64kb carts, weren't they? Amiga games were all over the map, but most were closer to the 512kb+ mark. That would have made for one extremely large, heavy, bulky and expensive ROM scenario back then.

The original Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System was 512KB (4 megabit) and it was released in 1987 (in Japan anyway, US release was a little later). The biggest limitation on cartridges then was probably the limited address space of the consoles at that time. When you've only got 64KB of address space and have to bank switch to access more than 48K of ROM or so, high capacity cartridges don't necessarily make a lot of sense.

The infamous bust of the video game market in the '80s seems to have ended the use of cartridges on consumer machines until game machines underwent a revival in the '90s.

Cartridges were still quite successful in the 80s on the NES, at least in the US anyway. I get the impression that the Master System did okay in at least some parts of Europe. Cartridges didn't just disappear in the period between the 2600 and the "16-bit" consoles.

In the end though, cartridges don't make nearly as much sense on machines with a reasonable amount of RAM. Cartridge based game consoles had tiny amounts of RAM (the Genesis had only 64KB directly accessible by the 68K) compared to the Amiga. On a system with a floppy drive and a reasonable amount of RAM, the cost advantages of floppies make it silly to develop a cartridge based game.

[nikodr]

I am an owner of 2 msx computers.An msx2 8235 and a nsm8280 msx2 from philips.Both were with diskdrives but had many cartridge games.I think that cartridges were very common for my machine and that disk cracks appeared.
I am under the impression that machines with diskdrives do not need cartridges.Msx was the exception because it was not only a game machine but ran dos,cpm and the philips nms8280 models were used in tv stations because of the genlocking stuff present.

What i mean is that cracked games from disk load too fast and that most disk games too.Back in the day in the amiga it would make no sense to have a rom solution.In the start games were only 1 or 2 disks,3 disks came later but i think by that time any thought to have other mediums must have surely been something not an option.

However don't forget the action replay cartridge,in theory this is what we are talking about.Someone could design a game that would run under cartridge like the action replay does.

[quarkx]

I think it was just the simple matter of thinking that Cartridges meant an 8 bit system (most or all 8 bit systems had Carts and 16 bit computers didn't. Just as the same mentality as floppy drives (IBM -PC exception)- 8 Bit systems had 8inch or 5 1/2 floppies, where as most 16 bit systems had 3 1/4. I don't think there were true technical reasons other than cost involved, just the mindset of the day.

Remember, most early 8bit systems were not even made with floppy disk or hard drives in mind, they were made with the assumption that Tape drives and Carts were going to be the most convenient way of inputting and storing data, because in the late '70's early eighty's, floppy drives cost way more cash than the systems themselves (see ad below). I know with the TRS-80 Color computer, the floppy controller was actually on cartridge, so the floppy drive was super expensive. With Commodore, it actually all started (back with the pet) with a floppy drive in mind, and that was carried forward on to the VIC and C64.
Also, the simple fact that everyone used Commodore (MOS) ROMS for the Cartridges in the early days, Could have lead Commodore to promote the use of Cartridges in all the early systems, but by 1985, the cost of putting software on ROMS made no sense any more due to the fact that the floppy drive had become so affordable, that it was internal or included with all computers

[fishy_fiz]

Heh, 2 mentions of the Tandy Coco machines. A Coco1 was my very 1st computer, fun times
Dont know how many of you remember this, but there was almost some games realeased in "cartidge" form for a600/a1200's via the pcmcia slot.

[Nlandas]

Why not?  Was the memory capacity of cartridges too low, or were they simply becoming too expensive to manufacture?

;^D I know darn it, why didn't they include a punch card interface while they were at it? Was it that the the paper cuts were only 2-bit or that the modern cooling fans blew them out of the holders?

[B00tDisk]

On the IBM PCjr, Lotus 1-2-3 came on cartridge (yes).