In its financial report, Macronix said ROM fell to 5 percent of its sales. A year ago, it was at 26 percent. Macronix’s chairman noted that capacity is limited and is going to NOR and eMMC memory chips instead.
Analyst David Gibson, who shared the news, pointed out that Macronix isn’t Nintendo’s only game memory card maker. In other words, collectors don’t have to worry yet about physical games being phased out – at least not yet.
Nintendo still has other chip suppliers, but this is a noteworthy development I think.
When physical media really does die off for good, know that datacenters are to blame.
I was having a look into the cartridge structure, and I’m struggling to nail down if Switch 2 cartridges use the ROM (discontinued by Macronix) of the Switch 1 cartridges, or if they use commodity NAND. Has anyone got an idea? I don’t really want to tear down my game cards, but knowing that would tell us how much this affects Switch 2. The headline revision suggests NAND, which would imply that there’s going to be continued supply for as long as Nintendo wants for Switch 2 considering NAND is everywhere, but some other sources are saying ROM.
Then time to switch to optical minni discs, sort of like the PSP
Optical disk supply is also getting shrunk, probably more than ROM chips.
It would require a complete redesign of the console. Optical media are more fragile, cumbersome and read data slower and more unreliably. The drive would reduce battery time.
Nintendo ain’t going to turn to optical media.
