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Although consoles have improved greatly over the past ten or so years, one
thing seems to have improved very little, and that is what our games come on.
Originally it was cartridges for the likes of the NES,Master System,
SNES,Mega Drive, N64 and a few others. The arival of the Playstation say the
change to CD based consoles, the Dreamcast also uses this. Then with the
arival of the PS2 we say the leap to using DVD's to store the game data.
I thought it would be a good idea for the big name companies, mainly Sony,
Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega and some hardware companies to try and create a
new type of storage device that would increase the capacity available to the
programmers.
I heard nintendo had a new type of CD/DVD that they where going to use but
I'm not sure if this is true. I also heard of new technology currently being tested
in Japan, where one small disk (it is square shaped and is about 6cm long) has
the storage capabilities of around 5 DVD's.
Console improve all the time so why not try and make the storage that the
games improve too, this is what we need for the so called "next generation
console". It won't happen with the PS2, GC or X-box but hopefully with the
consoles after that.
Technology changes all the time. The Amiga used to have a 1MG expansion
now we use that as a memory card on a PSX. Eventually the need for better
technology will come and no doubt someone will be there with a new
invention to shock the world.
With a CD you can hold at most 783 MB. The most you can store on a DVD is
around 15.9 GB but thats only if it is double sided and double layered. IBM
have been working on Holographic data storage, early devices have the storage
capacity of around 125 GB and a transfer rate of around 40 MB. Eventually
these devices could reach 1 TB (Terrabyte =1000GB) with a rate of 1GB a
second.
Imagine a games machine that uses this technology. It obviously wouldn't be
for a while but imagine what this could do, instead of buying games they could
be downloaded straight to your console and stored on a small disk, games
developers would have far more room to create games without having to worry
about how much room is left on the disk. I think in the future the storage will
greatly improve, maybe not like this for quite some time but it will gradualy get
there. You could have more than one game on each disk, maybee even between 5 and 10.
Also with the greater amount of space available the way games are made could
be changed offering the new users a new experience.
This technology should be around as early as 2003 so if sony, nintendo or others decide to release new consoles after there current projects then this may be included. The transfer rates are extremely fast, and the storege on one disk could be around the same as 27 normal DVD's.
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But, the technology will be expensive at this time, and widely untested for real-life purposes. Anyway, it won't be till the future future consoles that something with this much space is needed.
Sonic
He believes that as soon as it is produced It will no doubt be the future of storing data unless something better comes along. It should end up being used in PC's, laptops, MPŁ players and games consoles.
So what is holographic memory? For those who don't know here is a bit more about it. it isn't a new idea, I think the idea was started around the 1960's but its been the past few years that IBM decided to give it a try and attempt to develop the idea more. Like a normal cd reader the reader requires a a laser. A blue or green argon laser is used and is split into 2 seperate beams. One beam travels straight through and hits of a spatial-light modulator, its just an LCD panel that displays the binary pattern as dark and light patches. It then travels to a niobate crystal. The second beam takes a seperate path to the crystal and when they meet an interferance pattern is produced which stores the original data as a hologram.
This technology should be around as early as 2003 so if sony, nintendo or others decide to release new consoles after there current projects then this may be included. The transfer rates are extremely fast, and the storege on one disk could be around the same as 27 normal DVD's.
Many say that developers would never use this space, but if you think about it, that kind of space hasn't been thought of so obviously they wouldn't use it just now. But if it was to become available surely they would find ways of making the best use of it ie improving graphics,gameplay, music to much higher levels than we see now.
> I think Panasonic are making another version of the game cube that
> will be able to play CD's and DVD's and will fit in a Hi-Fi system,
> but the original Game Cube will not.
Do you mean a cd/dvd player that looks like nintendos gamecube?
> sorry berzo normal sized disks won't be able to fit into the game
> cube player as it's to small and thats the main reason I think ninty
> are using the small sized disks is because they wanted to call it
> the "Game Cube" not the "Game Brick"
perhaps if you get a few gamebricks and stacked them up right, youd have the small bungalow that is the X-Box...
But you cant say that the latest batch of personal cd players are huge, and the GC looks like one but taller.
It's insanity, I tell ya! It'll be the end of us all!!!