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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
I see. I swear I've read about the smaller form factor allowing for constant disc speed, but a quick Google now didn't give me any info. Oh well, guess I heard it wrong.
A piece of hardware that had fewer than a few thousand units manufactured was going to help Nintendo?
Because Nintendo couldn't imagine a situation where you would need more storage on disc because Nintendo games didn't need more storage on disc, and, well, The Nintendo bubble.
Same exact principle as tiny Switch cartridges today. Nintendo makes its decisions based on it's own needs first and third parties will always be an afterthought.
Same exact principle as tiny Switch cartridges today. Nintendo makes its decisions based on it's own needs first and third parties will always be an afterthought.
It's a very common statement that hasn't any basis. All of the information from places like Wikipedia says otherwise, as well as the actual testing. If it were the case there wouldn't be games like Tekken Tag, 4 or 5 that load almost instantly. It's down to the tech used and the implementation of it. there were a few launch games in Japan that got reworked a bit for the US release to add anti-aliasing and, at least in a few cases like CvS2, they switched to a DVD and pushed the data to the outside of the disc to help loading times on PS2.
I posted it earlier, but this is worth a read on the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_angular_velocity
Oh, so the gc and Wii did have CAV. At least that I got right. So it should still help seek times, at least.
I would have accepted because Nintendo as an alternative answer.
Thank you! Smaller dvds don't load faster. Heck, at constant spinning speed, the outer edge of regular size DVD is faster than the edge of a smaller sized one. It's simple physics.
Weird so many people think otherwise.
Why did Nintendo go with cartridges for the Switch when UMD was fine?
Was such a weird choice.
I remember they packaged a "demo disc" thing with it that the Gamecube couldn't even play. I think it only worked on pc drives.
I took mine back to Kmart thinking it was faulty.
I remember they packaged a "demo disc" thing with it that the Gamecube couldn't even play. I think it only worked on pc drives.
I took mine back to Kmart thinking it was faulty.
According do dev Burnout 3 was cancelled because GC did not have enough CPU power for it.
A lot of talk, on forums then, was about the licensing fees to the DVD consortium. If that was true, we didn't know. It wasn't able to play DVDs at a time Sony was making playing DVDs popular.
Fanboyism mutated that into an uncontrollable fire. In hindsight, that recent comment on Nintendo wanting to only make toys seems important. It was purple and had a handle and launched with Luigi's Mansion. It's not for movies, it was for games.
It's why there's no Netflix on the switch. It's not for videos, it's for games. Any requirements they want from Nintendo already didn't make sense. They want to offer toys to play with and they are serious.
Fanboyism mutated that into an uncontrollable fire. In hindsight, that recent comment on Nintendo wanting to only make toys seems important. It was purple and had a handle and launched with Luigi's Mansion. It's not for movies, it was for games.
It's why there's no Netflix on the switch. It's not for videos, it's for games. Any requirements they want from Nintendo already didn't make sense. They want to offer toys to play with and they are serious.
it was a little more complicated than that, it was because the GameCube's tranform and lighting units were fixed function and would have needed the CPU to step in to assist.
Whereas the PS2 , which was "weaker" had programmable functions which could step in
The reason for that is that the smaller discs were already a standard. They're part of the DVD spec so there were already processes set up for manufacturing them and making them work with standard DVD components such as drives and lasers. The 8cm disc spec is why so many disc trays have that little recessed bit in the middle, which perfectly holds an 8cm disc (which would otherwise be unstable in this kind of tray):
If they'd made a larger disc they'd have had to spec it themselves and gotten custom pressing machines and drives created.
Full-sized discs do not fit fine.
From the description of the video in the OP:
Edit: A lot of people have been finding this video recently and commenting to say that GameCube doesn't fit standard sized 12cm discs. Of course. That's why I made this video. Someone who could not try it himself kept insisting that I try it in my IcedCube case that is specially-designed to fit full-sized discs.
Full-sized discs absolutely do not fit in the Gamecube.
From the description of the video in the OP:
Edit: A lot of people have been finding this video recently and commenting to say that GameCube doesn't fit standard sized 12cm discs. Of course. That's why I made this video. Someone who could not try it himself kept insisting that I try it in my IcedCube case that is specially-designed to fit full-sized discs.
Full-sized discs absolutely do not fit in the Gamecube.
I never owned one but those disks were just the cutest things ever. At the time my take on them going with them instead of regular DVD is to prevent piracy.
Mind blown. So that's what that's for! I thought it was just... there. I never really thought about it too hard. I did have a small dvd once that came with uh...with a bionical toy I think? It was weird. I never did use it because I -thought- I didn't have a special player to play it, lmao.The reason for that is that the smaller discs were already a standard. They're part of the DVD spec so there were already processes set up for manufacturing them and making them work with standard DVD components such as drives and lasers. The 8cm disc spec is why so many disc trays have that little recessed bit in the middle, which perfectly holds an 8cm disc (which would otherwise be unstable in this kind of tray):
If they'd made a larger disc they'd have had to spec it themselves and gotten custom pressing machines and drives created.
Up until last year or so a lot of devices I bought came with driver installation CDs that were mini CDs for the same reason. There's a pretty obvious reason to need driver discs for, say, a wifi dongle versus something else, these days, but I'm wondering how far we are from having flash drives be cheap and disposable enough that they start including little 64MB drives or something with adapters like that. Or even maybe making it have both where the dongle has a small amount of flash memory on it that is detected as a USB drive before the system loads drivers (in the case of Windows and Mac, at least) and once drivers load it switched itself to wifi mode.
Not true, you still had to use Nintendo's discs (NR Discs), not standard DVD.
It's been a long time for me, and I wasn't in the build team, but physically they were the same size as DVD's. For some reason I thought they were standard blank disks. Ahh well lol, it was just nice to not have to use the those carts with the big handles lol.
Oh you know what, I'm probably thinking of the PSP dev kits, the ones with wired psp-like device hanging off it. Those used standard DVDs, not UMD's.
They were still mini-DVD size for Gamecube (Wii had special RVT discs that were full size). The big carts had a harddrive in it, which is fun in its own way :)
And yeah, PSP dev kits use DVDs since there werent any UMD burners. Dev kits could more easily run code over the network compared to a Test kit, but both had DVD drives.
I totally wanted this. Could never justify the import costs when I was young and poor. On the threads topic you could have Googled this one. It was all about piracy protection and it works for a few years.Part of me always wanted the Panasonic Q to come out here.
You're thinking of CLV (constant linear velocity) vs CAV (constant angular velocity).
Constant linear velocity means that the drive speeds up and slows down so that the "line" of ones and zeroes is always passing the laser reader at the same speed.
Constant angular velocity means that the motor is always spinning at the same speed. GameCube and XBox (same year of release) both used CAV drives with the same specs. Picture for a moment, a DVD spinning at 1RPM (one revolution per-minute). That's pretty slow, right? But now picture a DVD the size of the planet Earth spinning at 1RPM. That's faster than a car. Faster than a jet. Faster than a rocket ship. One RPM is unbelievably fast, when you scale it up to that size.
Bigger is faster with CAV. Nintendo tricked you into thinking the opposite was true. They lied (or at least, they misled, and then they shut up and let their fanboys do all the misinformation work for them). Nintendo does that a lot, to cover their frequent "Nintendo" decisions. They deleted the best/biggest/fastest 2/3rds of their XBox-style DVD and kept the worst/smallest/slowest part of the DVD, and their fanboys thanked them for it.
The only thing making GameCube games fast is the fact that they're all tiny, because GameCube games are never capable of being big. An XBox game could choose to be tiny, and it would load faster than GameCube, because they could put all the data on the superior outer edge of the disc. Or maybe they could be big. Or maybe they could put all of their "gameplay" data on the outside of the disc and save the inner rings for movies or high quality audio. On the XBox, you had choices. On GameCube, you had no choice, because Nintendo decided for you that small games should be the only games (and then stuck people with the worst part of the DVD).
I kind of want to see the alternate timeline where they did that and GameCube fans in 2019 are misty-eyed with nostalgia for their silly giant analogue discs.
I couldn't have had it's distinctive "cube" shaped look informing it's name in that timeline, it would probably be something like "GamePizza" (delivered to you by Mario). With lovely huge box art. And the streamlined instruction manuals would be moved to the back of the record sleeve.
Analog code definitely feels warmer and richer than coldly digital videogames.
I do know for a fact, having spoken with developers from this era, that a number of higher profile games intended for GameCube were canned as a result of the low capacity discs. These are games that wouldn't work with a two disc setup either due to the way they're designed. So, in some cases, it was a problem.
lol, I should just stop talking! It's been too long.
Network builds though, they changed everything! lol
It's all good hah, I use the equipment more today than most people :P
I vaguely recall the EA excuse for not porting Burnout 3 being the Gameucbe's diabolical online infrastructure but I may be mixing that up with Starcraft Ghost that ultimately wasn't released anyway.
On the Panasonic Q, they're expensive & made of glass (check eBay, it's a graveyard of broken drives). Mine jammed it's disc tray from sitting on the shelf unused for year.
I do remember rumours (and we're talking just forum conjecture here) way back when about Nintendo trialing whether they could make the GCN's small GODs work in a handheld device.
On the Panasonic Q, they're expensive & made of glass (check eBay, it's a graveyard of broken drives). Mine jammed it's disc tray from sitting on the shelf unused for year.
I do remember rumours (and we're talking just forum conjecture here) way back when about Nintendo trialing whether they could make the GCN's small GODs work in a handheld device.
Having worked in the games industry during this era there's truth in this but also a few other reasons which generally all add up to not making a GC port. Lack of ram was the main thing, whilst the GC had some super fast ram, its main ram pool was smaller than PS2. There's also the fact the machine wasn't really selling after a year and this was the era of 'kiddie nintendo' and 3rd party software really did not shift on the system.
Add that PS2 was the lead platform most of the time and converting to Gamecube required more effort especially when it came to particle and alpha effect stuff (Xbox could just power through things) and you can easily see why publishers wouldn't give the resources to a gamecube port that were required to make a port happen.
I know the games i worked on the GC had barely any resources put towards it which not only meant it was the poorest performing version but also meant the bare minimum got done on it.
Because Nintendo has to do at least one ass backwards thing every generation otherwise they will explode.
Lots of games ports could have been the best on the GC if not for the dumb mini discs forcing developers to compress video and audio.
If anything I suspect piracy actually helped them push more consoles. The price difference between an original N64 cart and a bootleg PS1 CD was huge back then.
It was publishers and developers that got fucked.
Lots of games ports could have been the best on the GC if not for the dumb mini discs forcing developers to compress video and audio.
I don't think it affected them at all
If anything I suspect piracy actually helped them push more consoles. The price difference between an original N64 cart and a bootleg PS1 CD was huge back then.
It was publishers and developers that got fucked.