Hey there,
I had a tech talk about retrogaming on OG Hardware. We ended up with the point that discs, some GBA,(3ds) and Switch games just die and cannot be used anymore.
So i question what is the use in collecting then. Its basically dead money. Its not really a cheap Hobby.
What do you think about it?
Why would it just…die?
Write-once ROMs tend to be pretty reliable for a long time as long as there’s no physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can do that.
There are some old rewritable ROMs that work by shining UV light on them to erase them, and then you can write to them again. Those can go bad, especially if the sticker falls off and they’re exposed to light. They aren’t common in cartridges, but you’ll see them in arcade motherboards.
Magnetic media will lose its magnetic domains over time. A lot depends on the quality of the disk and the environment it’s stored in. Commercially released floppy disks tend to be pretty reliable, but retail blank disks were increasingly cost-optimized into hot garbage as time went on. The new-old-stock disks we get these days are terrible. That said, quality stuff properly stored can last a long, long time.
Optical discs will inevitably get scratched when you use them. Commercial pressed discs can last a long time in storage, though. Burned discs, not so much.
Modern flash memory may lose its cell charge with time without any read/write cycles being involved. AFAIK, there’s not much out there about using flash for long term archiving. Most people who are interested in archiving, especially for large corporations, use quality magnetic tape stored in a controlled environment. They aren’t interested in flash, so there’s not much info out there.
carts also have the added bonus that if there is a failed chip or PCB, you can generally find replacements to repair it with.
and if parts ceased to become available, someone inevitably creates some kind of adapter for a more modern technology that seemlessly installs and works in place of the original.
I think you can, from scratch, make a 100% functional and compatible SNES cart, for example… with exception for the handful of games that used special chips like SuperFX
but yeahl optical disks are a ticking time bomb. Even if you take care of them and don’t scratch them, eventually the bitrot will eat them.
Flash memories don’t last forever, and some of the 3DS cartridge batches in particular were rather shit and age quite poorly, a lot faster than DS cartridges for example.
Optical discs are subject to “disc rot”, damage from UVs apparently. Some are more vulnerable to it than others. For some reason Wii U discs are quite bad and often have that problem. Sounds very much like Nintendo cheaped out a lot on their media around that time.
I dont know how to explain. I’m not that big of a techie. But yeah. They do somewhen.