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?
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I personally like having my small collection of games. No idea when any of them will die, but it’s at least nice to have them. For price, I’m lucky enough that the vast majority of games I want aren’t super expensive at a local game store I like to visit.
That, or are cheap enough at a pawnshop near me. Ty the Tasmanian Tiger for PS2 for under $20 (possibly under $10/I don’t remember)? Sign me up! Almost bought it, but decided against it since I wasn’t sure how tight the rest of my college financial aid money would be after all my Christmas shopping.
Edit:
I am also skeptical about things like disc rot because I have heard countless times about it but have never met a single person who has ever had it happen to them.
I don’t collect anymore. I do still have a small amount of stuff that I enjoy but overall it’s too expensive, not enough space, unreliable media etc…
I think having ROM’s on FPGA devices will be preferred way of having ‘collections’ in the future.
That was actually the Initial discussion. It cant die so easily on that…
Cartridges tend to be reliable in the long run as long as you avoid physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can be a problem there.
Optical discs do go bad just by aging in the box.
There’s another angle to this. A while back, Metal Jesus Rocks had a video about a Switch game that had an incorrect cover, and it was going to be corrected after the first production run was sold through. Which means it would be a collectors item.
He bought it, but had a “wtf am I doing?” moment afterwards. He didn’t care about the game beforehand. Its only value to him is that a manufacturer mistake would make it valuable to other collectors. Which is somewhat circular logic.
Edit: to clarify, I don’t think it’s just about rare things, either. Having a collection at all, where you have tons of games that you don’t really care about and they just sit on a shelf, is kinda insane. I don’t have any moral compunction about pirating old games, so why bother? In many cases, I can even play on original hardware with SD card mods, and especially on optical disc systems, the experience is better.
Makes sense. But what are the odds getting such?
I added this in an edit, but I don’t think it’s just about rare things. Having a collection of games that just sit on your shelf is silly. Which goes for a lot of other types of collecting, too.
It amuses me that something so modern as video games already has the problem of fading into oblivion. Maybe that’s why it’s so compelling, because the foundations are still in living memory?
Anyway in the museum, a disk that cannot be read is an artifact just as the plane that cannot fly.
I got rid of most of my physical games, and built a lovely GameBoy & N64 collection. I consider those as goodies, expose them on shelves. Of course, I also use them and would be sad if they do not work anymore, but their value is not only linked to that. I don’t consider the monetary value the games have. I will never buy a game because it’s rare and expensive. I only collect games I love, and sometimes yes, I have to pay a high price, but it’s just because I have to deal with the system.
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.
Not sure why anyone would think that, I have functional machines and games going back to the Atari 2600.
Because facts. I knew about CDs/DVD and so on. New to me ist the GBA, DS, 3DS and Switch run out somewhen.
I have functional music CDs from 1983 and gaming CDs on the Sega CD forward.
Most commercial CDs and DVDs are expected to last about 25 years, although they can last a lot longer than that depending on the quality of the manufacturing process, how the discs are stored, and how they are handled. Keep CDs and DVDs away from heat and light, keep them away from high humidity, and minimize flexing or bending them as much as possible. When discs flex, the polycarbonate layers can split and separate – even just a tiny bit – and moisture can get in. Once that happens, the disc will degrade faster.
Source: Am an optical media nerd and enthusiast and still use optical media every week.
Yup. And when returning them to the case DO NOT spin them so they are “right side up”.
Any dust or grit in the case will damage them when you do that.
