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Why did Nintendo go with tiny ass discs for GameCube when full sized discs fit fine?
- Thread starter Velocity:Design:Comfort
- Start date
It was about about cutting cost. Not having DVD and using the cheaper Dolby Pro Logic II audio format saved them a few buck per unit Backnon my Planet GameCube days we had a break down on cost of each license and howmuch it rasie the price. It would not have been $199 at launch had it those 2 features. (Or so I remember)
Also dont GameCube drives spin backwards so DVD wouldn't spin the right way in the drive anyway.
Also dont GameCube drives spin backwards so DVD wouldn't spin the right way in the drive anyway.
The fact that the Dreamcast was so easily cracked probably played a role in them not wanting to just use regular CD/DVDs. It's funny how I had no clue about that for years either.. the world was a very different place then.
Another cost saver: Nintendo didn't have to pay royalties to the DVD Forum by going proprietary.
And Nintendo doesn't use miniDVD, just a derivative of it (not dissimilar to how the Wii doesn't use DVD, but a derivative, and how the Wii U doesn't use Blu Ray, but a derivative).
This. Piracy was soooooooo bad with dreamcast. It was so easy, a boot disc and away you go.
DVD is owned and licensed by the DVD Forum, Blu-ray by the Blu-ray Association.
Sony is one member (of many) on either consortium, but at no point would Nintendo have had to sort out anything with Sony.
Did they not develop the standard or something of that nature? Have I been lied to all these years?
It was Nintendo being Nintendo. They did not want to pay royalties for the use of the DVD format.
They developed the hardware spec but not the format the discs use. That's why they only had to use the miniDVD, DVD and BD formats are used in their systems but cannot play back any normal format discs without software changes.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think GC's drive is a standard DVD drive, there's nothing special about it. A hacked console can read regular DVDs. They just cut them down for reasons, and certainly for piracy it wasn't effective, the PSO hack released quickly, in 2003 or so.
It was to avoid paying any royalty most probably. They did the same with the Wii not having movie playback.
It was to avoid paying any royalty most probably. They did the same with the Wii not having movie playback.
Not quite standard. GC mini DVDs were burned and read backwards as an anti piracy measure. Besides spinning backwards, I don't know if there was anything else special about the drive.
Well the size constraints of the smaller discs when compared to its contemporaries did limit what the discs could do. Some games had to be on multiple discs, or sometimes audio and video had to be more compressed, for example. It always seemed unnecessary to me.
I always wonder how this would have done in America. Probably just as badly. This would have blown my mind as a preteen Nintendo fan.
Nintendo's "control" thing was often about making themselves indispensable towards their so-called allies. Remember, before the NES, anyone who was capable of making games for a system was able to make games for that system. Like, Activision (originally founded by former Atari employees) made a bunch of Atari 2600 games, and Atari had no control over those sales and never saw a dime from them. Which is why Nintendo invented the lockout chip, as a weapon against Nintendo's "allies". Nintendo's third parties are only Nintendo's third parties when they are aware who is the boss in this relationship.
In the NES/SNES days, Nintendo told their third parties that there was a silicon shortage and so the prices had to go up, and that Nintendo needed more control over the size of print runs, and many third parties complained about that, and Nintendo's attitude was "Well, you can't make cartridges, only we can make cartridges, so that makes us the experts and that makes us right, so STFU and get back in line." And then Namco proved that they could make cartridges in response to Nintendo's dare, which caused some friction (and led to Namco supporting Sony heavily at the PlayStation launch, because they were tired of Nintendo's BS).
CD's/DVD's were something easy. They were something that anyone could produce. Which terrified Nintendo, because now the only thing holding your place as leader is your worthiness to lead (which is something that Nintendo should have worked on more and had more confidence in, but instead they responded by going in the opposite direction, and made bad leadership decisions because they were afraid that they were unworthy leaders).
If blank DVDs were something you could get from your local Walmart, that undermined Nintendo's position as their exclusive provider. If exclusive mini-DVDs were something you could only get from Nintendo, who could only get them from Panasonic (who agreed not to sell them to anyone else), that's more comfortable for Nintendo. It validates Nintendo's reason for existing.
The only speed advantage GameCube had over XBox was that GameCube games were forced to be tiny.
In the NES/SNES days, Nintendo told their third parties that there was a silicon shortage and so the prices had to go up, and that Nintendo needed more control over the size of print runs, and many third parties complained about that, and Nintendo's attitude was "Well, you can't make cartridges, only we can make cartridges, so that makes us the experts and that makes us right, so STFU and get back in line." And then Namco proved that they could make cartridges in response to Nintendo's dare, which caused some friction (and led to Namco supporting Sony heavily at the PlayStation launch, because they were tired of Nintendo's BS).
CD's/DVD's were something easy. They were something that anyone could produce. Which terrified Nintendo, because now the only thing holding your place as leader is your worthiness to lead (which is something that Nintendo should have worked on more and had more confidence in, but instead they responded by going in the opposite direction, and made bad leadership decisions because they were afraid that they were unworthy leaders).
If blank DVDs were something you could get from your local Walmart, that undermined Nintendo's position as their exclusive provider. If exclusive mini-DVDs were something you could only get from Nintendo, who could only get them from Panasonic (who agreed not to sell them to anyone else), that's more comfortable for Nintendo. It validates Nintendo's reason for existing.
Nintendo boasted about their partial superiority to PS2 DVDs, but the GameCube's DVD drive was almost identical to the XBox's DVD drive in terms of performance, but with GameCube using the worst 1/3rd of the DVD. Contrary to Nintendo's claims, the smallest part of the DVD is not the prime cut of the DVD, it's the ass of the DVD. The best 1/3rd of an XBox DVD would be the outer ring with a larger hole in the middle of the disc. Every XBox game put the vast majority of their game data on a part of the disc that beat anything GameCube was capable of.
The only speed advantage GameCube had over XBox was that GameCube games were forced to be tiny.
A lot of games were compromised to fit onto the small proprietary disc format of the GameCube, it was mainly a problem for multi-platform titles.
I remember reading about it in Nintendo Power back in the day. I honestly didn't know it was actually released (albeit not in the US) until many years later.
Yes. It depends on if the drive and disc are using CLV versus CAV. GC used CAV which is why games were read outside-in. A lot of PS2 games used this later to get better loading times, but the games being smallish and then the PS2 authoring adding a bunch of padding (either by manually setting an LBA or literally putting in a huge dummy file or two).
Seek times would generally be lower but read times were slower. All other things being equal, a bigger disc will produce better read speeds than a smaller disc.
They wouldn't move away from cartridges until it was emphatically demonstrated to them that discs were the better format for home consoles. That's what the PSone did. They sat there for years watching publishers choose vastly cheaper discs with much higher capacities and eventually it sunk in.
1x DVD read speed was 11 megabits per second maximum. GameCube had maybe a 4x drive? Someone can correct me if that's wrong. The read speeds would have been measured in single-digit megabytes per second at most.
If it could read gigabytes per second there wouldn't have been load times. The GameCube only has 43MB of RAM across all memory pools. A disc with read speed of 1.5 gigabytes per second would have filled RAM in a negligible fraction of a second and you'd never see a load screen. I don't know what you read or heard but, sorry to say, it was bollocks.
They definitely didn't want to pay royalties, but they didn't need to go to a miniature disc to do that. They could have just taken the standard DVD format and altered it on the logical level and avoided royalties that way, which is exactly what they did with Wii and Wii U.
It's actually what they did with GameCube as well. 8cm discs are part of the DVD spec. They took that existing format and altered it enough that it was proprietary.
You'll never get any kind of definitive answer on this. There were certainly people who pirated games who would otherwise have bought them, to Sony's detriment. There were also certainly people who bought the console just to be able to pirate games, to Sony's benefit. There were also people who got introduced to games that way, probably to Sony's short-term detriment and long-term benefit. Accounting for that combination of effects just isn't possible.
The dinky discs were one of the best features.
One of the many reasons the GameCube was the superior console.
Here in South America Sony reigned supreme due to the fact you could buy 20 PSX games for the price of a single N64 game, so the bold part hits the nail on the head.
You may be thinking of the speed of the FSB on the cube - that was 1.3 GB/s. But that was moving around data already in RAM to the CPU and vice versa. Getting the data into memory from the disc was much slower.
"Why did Nintendo go with _________ for ________ when ________ was fine?" is basically an evergreen question.
The Nintendo difference. They needed to be taken kicking and screaming into disc format inclusion. Same with online play.
Another argument they had in favor of the tiny discs was that it meant that less budget-inflated games would have an easier chance to shine on the platform since the disc format meant that most developers would have a hard limit for how much content they'd be pushing.
I don't know that this worked out in practice, though, especially since a lot of quirky, less-expensive games found solid audience numbers on the PS2 anyway and few of them even bothered making their way to GC.
I don't know that this worked out in practice, though, especially since a lot of quirky, less-expensive games found solid audience numbers on the PS2 anyway and few of them even bothered making their way to GC.
I honestly always wanted to peer into the alternate reality where they chose normal DVDs instead of mini and ended up with ports and/or original games that were otherwise on PS2 and Xbox. Imagine not having multi-disc games!
Pretty much what everyone else said: controlled manufacturing and piracy prevention.
Also for everyone more curious about the Panasonic Q, The Gaming Historian did a pretty good video about it:
Also for everyone more curious about the Panasonic Q, The Gaming Historian did a pretty good video about it:
I remember at one point, publishers complained that Nintendo was charging a higher royalty on GameCube than Sony was on PS2, even though GameCube was clearly failing.
Nintendo's response was "We think people are willing to pay a premium for our superior product."
About a month later, Nintendo lowered their royalty rate to match Sony's.
Nintendo was kind of floundering all over the place in that era. They said a lot of things, many of which were good, but they also undermined themselves in a thousand different ways, and it's no wonder they failed.
There was absolutely no faster loading because of the disc format used.
Yes, because the smaller disc allowed Nintendo to spin the disc at a constant speed, lowering the seek times considerably. The gc can stream data faster than the other consoles at the time.
The loading times were only because of the system moving its data faster internally, not because of the discs. They only read 16-25Mbit/s, compared to ~22Mbit/s on a 2x DVD drive like in the PS2. The size of the disc was almost a nonfactor and, if anything, could have hampered it if they didn't push all of the data to the outer edge of the disc and read it inward.