I don't see what the big issue is with SRAM - sure you lose your games every 10 years or so but just crack open the cart when you get it, solder in a new battery and give it a good clean while you're there. I do that with every cart I get and its only a few minutes for each one. Then you're set for another decade or so.
Unlike Flash RAM which has a limited number of write cycles, and once that's dead its gone for good unless you can get a pin-compatible replacement and solder it in. I'd imagine some of these 15-20 year memory cards will be nearing the end of their lives soon if they've been seeing regular use.

My Sonic 3 cart doesn't save any more but I believe that uses some funky RAM called FE-RAM and there aren't pin compatible replacements for it available. It was still supposed to be good for tens of thousands of write cycles.

The other annoying thing about memory cards is that you often ran out of space and had to delete saves for other games - or your sibling/friend would do it for you. At least with carts with onboard memory the saves stayed with the game. Or worse, you lost the card and lost a bunch of savegames.

I don't own a controller pak for my N64, every game I want to play saves on the cart 😀

The whole CD's versus carts thing is an argument itself but having been repeatedly frustrated over the years by optical media that refuses to read, or loaning CD's to friends and having them come back scratched, yet never coming across a cart that didn't work, with nothing more than a good cleaning, I think there's something to be said for carts (if you ignore the capacity limitations - but CD's of the era tended to be filled with ugly FMV that you'd mash the buttons to skip anyway 😜 ).

Of course making repro games is much easier for CD based systems 😀

I neither have soldering tools nor skills unfortunately 🙁 but if you bring up the topic of reprods: I don't see why they shouldn't be able to make PS1 memcards like that. There are flash cards for every cartridge based system under the sun too after all. Heck you can even connect those memcards to a PS3 and slap your old saves on there, and transfer them back wherever you want.

As for the CD vs. cartridge thing, yeah that dispute's older than humanity... I'll put it that way, CD was pretty much the biggest reason why PS won over N64. Discs were far cheaper to manufacture than cartridges, meaning that PS devs could also go for more risks than N64 devs. Loading times weren't nearly as bad on the PS1 as anyone seems to think, with the FF SNES ports being the exception from the rule here. I don't know what the people who made these ports were thinking.

With current games of course it's all the other way around, optical media is quite limiting and playing stuff from HDDs or flash memory is the way to go. I'd like to see a cartridge revival instead of digital distribution 😀

For me it was the Mattel Intelivision with the Voice Module.

B-17 Bomber anybody 😉

d1stortion wrote:

With current games of course it's all the other way around, optical media is quite limiting and playing stuff from HDDs or flash memory is the way to go. I'd like to see a cartridge revival instead of digital distribution 😀

There's been talk for quite awhile about console games in the future possibly using flash chips (similar to SD cards and the chips Nintendo's handhelds use) to store games, thanks to the ever-decreasing cost of fast portable flash memory. Now of course that's all speculation, but it makes sense. I'm convinced that, while online distribution for consoles will probably become more prevalent, that they will continue to market physical copies for a long time still, and if so, flash memory seems like it'd be a good way to go to me.

BigBodZod wrote:

For me it was the Mattel Intelivision with the Voice Module.

B-17 Bomber anybody 😉

Beeeee.... ok, that's enough 🤣

BigBodZod wrote:

For me it was the Mattel Intelivision with the Voice Module.

B-17 Bomber anybody 😉

I'm surprised the Intellivoice didn't get more support, seeing as how every 2nd or third Intellivision console on ebay seems to come with one. Rounding up all the games that support it isn't hard, either, so it's not like nobody was buying the games that were released. The only game with Intellivoice support that is hard to get is World Series Baseball and that also requires the ECS module.

d1stortion wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

The Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), Sega Saturn and Neo Geo are at the top of my list 😀.

Saturn seems to get named pretty often in terms of underrated consoles. I think the 3D graphics are most of the time inferior to the PS, it also couldn't do transparency very well. The biggest problem with it perhaps is the fact that a lot of good games for it were only released in Japan since the system had its longest shelf life there.

I definitely want to play Panzer Dragoon though 😁

There was a time when I wondered whether the Playstation was going to make it. I would walk into Toys R Us and there would be a huge Saturn section and only a little Playstation one. I even used to recommend Saturn over Playstation because it seemed for a while like it had the most third party support and it's third party support that makes or breaks a system.

Maybe in the really early times. By the times I started gaming I didn't even know what Saturn was, that's how early they killed it off. Perhaps if Sega wouldn't have always screwed their customers with the "buy our next great console" thing they could be still around with own hardware now!

Growing up I only had two main consoles:

Preteen age, early teens:

Famiclone - I only had two games with it one 32in1 and another smup(cant remember then name)
Megadrive - This was to replace the above when it got stolen, I had Sonic 2 and Eco the dolphin.

As a teen I had:

Playstation 1 scph-9004 - Had lots of games for it as I worked (weekends) at a game place, most notably was Final Fantasy 8,9, and Parasite Eve 2, Resident Evil series
Playstation 2 scph-3004 - Basically a upgrade to the above, and more of the same, first console I bought for myself loaned money from my parents and payed them back over 2 years with interest.
Xbox 1 - But not for the games, as you would expect.

My favorite console was the Xbox 1, not for all its games, but for what I could do with it, upgraded its hard drive , filled it with emulators and movies, the emulators opened up a whole new world to me, of games I never owned or could play on my older systems, it got me into retro console collecting, and today I own a whole lot of other consoles and games simply because of it 😀,those were the best of times.

The other consoles close to my hart today are:

Nintendo 64 - for its excellent game library and the fact that it was the last cartridge home console.
Sega Saturn - a 2d Powerhouse in a 3d world, what a pity it had to go down the way it did, it was a amazing console.

PS If its not obvious I was a pc gamer most of my life, and had a pretty powerful computer even when I was young,my father would see to that, and never got me anything console related because "I already had the best PC for any child my age".

Edit: Most overrated, I dont think there is any , all consoles have some merit.

d1stortion wrote:

Maybe in the really early times. By the times I started gaming I didn't even know what Saturn was, that's how early they killed it off. Perhaps if Sega wouldn't have always screwed their customers with the "buy our next great console" thing they could be still around with own hardware now!

The Saturn was around for quite a while, it didn't get killed off that quickly (unlike the Dreamcast and the original Xbox). The Saturn was actually more reliable than the PS1 at the time too! I remember when the early PS1 consoles were plagued with heat issues (the 'audiophile' model as it's now known).... The PS1 also had some weird geometry issues with some games (take exhumed for example where it was like looking through a fisheye lens). There's something the hardware couldn't handle properly, but i can't remember what it was!

PS1 and Saturn had their had some flaws, but they provided many hours, days, weeks, months years of enjoyment 😁.

You're talking about the lack of perspective correction, also known as texture warping. I think it needs to be stressed more that all of that was due to ancient 1994 hardware, and the good developers found ways around this later on. Games like the Spyro and Crash series barely suffer from this problem and put Mario 64 with its muddy textures easily to shame.

As for the reliability, I got the SCPH-7502 which already had the laser unit made out of metal. It works to this day. And I'm pretty sure the Saturn was dead in Europe by 1998. PS was kicking until 2005 or so.

d1stortion wrote:

You're talking about the lack of perspective correction, also known as texture warping. I think it needs to be stressed more that all of that was due to ancient 1994 hardware, and the good developers found ways around this later on. Games like the Spyro and Crash series barely suffer from this problem and put Mario 64 with its muddy textures easily to shame.

As for the reliability, I got the SCPH-7502 which already had the laser unit made out of metal. It works to this day. And I'm pretty sure the Saturn was dead in Europe by 1998. PS was kicking until 2005 or so.

It had a good 4-5 year run in Europe and funnily enough it's now more desirable than a PS1 for retro gamers/collectors 🤣. The Saturn was fine when it came to perspective correction (that's what i was trying to remember 🤣) and it's hardware is also around the same age. That fisheye effect in some games made me a bit nauseous at times.

Sony definitely milked the PSone and managed to squeeze every last penny from it, but 90% of PS1 games released after the PS2 were a bit crap... How much junk did 'Midas' churn out in the ps1 twilight years? Amongst other crap games from relatively unknown crap devs trying to make some quick cash. The quality of multi-platform games certainly went downhill for the PS1 too.

The saturn did very well in Japan and still had games for it developed several years after sega pulled it in the west.

Sony allways had problems with initial console releases,

PlayStation 1 SCPH-100x lasers would fail due to all the heat caused by the motherboard and power supply,they also had fmv skipping issues from the start, scph-550x solved this.

PS2 SCPH-100x-300x had shoddy B-type lasers that would wear out rapidly especially if used to watch lots of dvd-movies, sony fixed this with the scph-300x-R, and finally with the C-type lasers.

Slimline PS2 SCPH-700x blew laser left right and center, due to the RS over volting the laser if the mechicon crashed.

The early PS3 consoles had YLOD, and some laser problems.

Sonys later revisions are rock solid, Psone SCPH-10x and Pstwo 790x-900x are extremely strong consoles,you can probably kick a stone outside and find a PSone or Pstwo buried below it, still working.

Why funnily? Actually quite logical that the more exotic/rare thing is more desirable to collectors. That's why people blow horrendous amounts of money on the pratically useless Creative 3D Blaster VLB cards as well. 🤣

Now Saturn wasn't junk, but you'll have a hard time trying to sell a console that's more expensive (PS was $299 at launch, Saturn $399) and has inferior graphics/gameplay in like 70-80% of multiplatform titles. And it indeed used quads instead of polygons but I don't see the point of that. They couldn't even get Doom to work right on this thing. PS version has colored lighting and runs far smoother. This Doom port must have been a real kick in the face for Saturn owners back in the day.

d1stortion wrote:

Why funnily? Actually quite logical that the more exotic/rare thing is more desirable to collectors. That's why people blow horrendous amounts of money on the pratically useless Creative 3D Blaster VLB cards as well. 🤣

Now Saturn wasn't junk, but you'll have a hard time trying to sell a console that's more expensive (PS was $299 at launch, Saturn $399) and has inferior graphics/gameplay in like 70-80% of multiplatform titles. And it indeed used quads instead of polygons but I don't see the point of that. They couldn't even get Doom to work right on this thing. PS version has colored lighting and runs far smoother. This Doom port must have been a real kick in the face for Saturn owners back in the day.

The original Quake was a kick in the face for PS1 owners back in the day too 😁... But any sensible person would play those games on a PC Anyway (unless of course they didn't have one). There were some great ports on both patforms... some better than others.

I wouldn't class the Saturn as 'exotic' or 'rare'... And i really hate ebay sellers who list them as rare when there's plenty of them available. Saturn was no slouch at 3D, but 2D was the Saturns main strength! Even without the extra RAM cart it was still better than any console at the time when it came to 2D detail and animation (possibly even better than the legendary Neo Geo).

All this talking makes me want to play old PS1 and Saturn games 🤣.

Ummm... 9 million Saturns worldwide vs. 102 million Playstations worldwide according to Wikipedia. Is that enough to class Saturns as rare? 🤣

They indeed didn't bring Quake to the PS saying that it's not possible. Then another company had a shot at Quake II and suddenly it was possible. 😀 Of course with a lot of levels cut, but good graphics and framerate. I only played through the PC version for the first time last year and IMO that port is a great representation of the game. There also was a N64 one with original levels but it had choppy animation/framerate etc

The good thing about these consoles is that there are so many obscure releases which are actually pretty good. I still play the PS1 to this day (well, on a PS2) and I think the library is a lot better than that of the PS2, which was somewhat overrated. The texture quality of the PS2 was simply not up there with Xbox, GC and even Dreamcast at all too. A lot of PS2 textures actually remind me of the N64. 🤣

d1stortion wrote:

Ummm... 9 million Saturns worldwide vs. 102 million Playstations worldwide according to Wikipedia. Is that enough to class Saturns as rare? 🤣

Well it's definitely not rare in Europe... The UK alone has quite a few available on ebay, so no i wouldn't use the word 'rare' with a Saturn Unless it's the Samsung Saturn (Hitachi and Victor Saturns are probably quite common in Japan).

d1stortion wrote:

They indeed didn't bring Quake to the PS saying that it's not possible. Then another company had a shot at Quake II and suddenly it was possible. 😀 Of course with a lot of levels cut, but good graphics and framerate. I only played through the PC version for the first time last year and IMO that port is a great representation of the game. There also was a N64 one with original levels but it had choppy animation/framerate etc

I personally didn't like the console ports of Quake II (or the original quake)... One of the worst PC to console ports i've played for cutting levels/areas was Deus Ex on the PS2! It was crap compared to the PC version 😒. Doom on the N64 was interesting though, and Duke Nukem 3D on the N64 was rubbish!

d1stortion wrote:

The good thing about these consoles is that there are so many obscure releases which are actually pretty good. I still play the PS1 to this day (well, on a PS2) and I think the library is a lot better than that of the PS2, which was somewhat overrated. The texture quality of the PS2 was simply not up there with Xbox, GC and even Dreamcast at all too. A lot of PS2 textures actually remind me of the N64. 🤣

There's still sooo many games i've not played or finished with both the PS1 and Saturn... The PS2 had some great games, but i loved the Shenmue games on the Dreamcast (still looks better than the Xbox version) and Dead or Alive 2 was better on the Dreamcast too 😀. I'll never finish all the games i want to play in my lifetime 😒.