@Felthry iirc they lost some of the devs by sticking to cartridges, can't release a FFVII on that, and they just didn't come back for the gamecube

@noiob hm, makes sense

not sure why cartridges couldn't have had a game like ffvii on them though? unless you mean just storage limitations, which yeah i guess so
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@Felthry I mean size and support for FMVs

@noiob oh yeah, fmvs were big at the time yeah, forgot about that

yeah i guess it'd be hard to port a game with lots of fmvs to the n64
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@Felthry no, it would be impossible. The only game I know of that has some fmvs is Resident Evil 2 and that's basically a single-disc game (they put it on two because they messed something up and because it made it look larger)

@Felthry oh and also RE2's FMVs and voice lines are super-compressed and don't look or sound great (plus the N64 has no hardware-aceleration for FMVs like the PSX has)

@noiob you could probably do it with modern tech, but at the time yeah definitely not, that makes sense
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@noiob actually even doing it with modern stuff might require trickery like a codec on the cartridge or something
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@Felthry ha, that'd be possible, yeah

@Felthry nodern codecs also need much more compute (or hardware acceleration), which old consoles don't have

@noiob yeah that's what i meant by putting a hardware codec on the cartridge, you can get those pretty inexpensively now
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@Felthry yeah but then you can also just put a terabyte of storage on the cart

@noiob hence my distinction between doing it now and doing it at the time, it's kind of cheating to use modern hardware
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@noiob hardware codecs did exist at the time and it would have been possible to put one on the cartridge at the time but it would have been way more expensive than would be worth it

if several manufacturers agreed on a standard they might have been able to do something that went in the expansion port or something and contained a hardware codec so you wouldn't need one in each cartridge, but there wasn't any incentive to do that when they could just release on psx or saturn
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@Felthry yeah, plus large cartridges would still have been really expensive to produce, even if they'd managed to somehow put the video on there, and it would've probably still looked bad

@noiob as much as we like cartridges, disks had a lot of advantages

now that there's cheap flash memory cartridges make more sense again (hence their continued use for portable stuff) but disks made more sense basically from the 90s until the 2010s

i think now we just keep using disks in stuff like the ps4 and xbox one out of habit and customer expectation
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@Felthry blurays are still way more economical than flash memory

@noiob even considering the extra cost of the reader hardware to put in the systems?
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@Felthry that doesn't eat into the publisher's profits