For context: I have basically 0 experience with anything pre-PS2 except that I had a PS1 as a kid with a few games. Never had an official gaming handheld console, Gameboy, DS, PSP or anything like that.
I’ve recently started playing the GBA game Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced on my R36S (Chinese low end emulator handheld) that was collecting dust and wow, the game boots up blazing fast!
It’s very convenient as I don’t want to leave the thing on sleep mode, as that drains battery.
Is this how it was like on the real console too and how were the loading times on the previous Gameboy and Gameboy Color? How about the NES and NES? Were the handhelds more optimized to be picked up on the go: were the PSP loading times short too?
I remember having to wait quite a while on the PS1 and PS2 and that is still a thing on an emulator on an actual gaming pc while this 27€ handheld boots GBA games so so fast.
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Cartridge games were always fast to start. There are essentially no loading times on them, just maybe some logos that you would have to wait through. CD based systems are what introduced the concept of loading times to console gamers, because cds read data from the disk at a massively slower speed than a cartridge.
ohh, that makes a lot of sense!
Also the data on a cartridge is read using addresses just like memory, whereas on a disc you use tracks and then do a long sequential read. If you want one byte of data from a specific place you have to read much more than one byte from a disc, but from an addressed system you may be able to read an individual address then move on.
Also if you have 600mb to work with you tend to be a little less frugal thab if you have only a few megs to work with like on a GBA.
Traditional cartridge based games (NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBA, Sega Genesis) had pretty much no load times, this is because a cartridge is a memory chip you connect directly to the console, so its contents can be read instantly. There are a few exceptions, some cartridge games still have loading screens because they need to decompress assets (an example that comes to mind is crazy taxi for GBA).
Disc based games (PS1, PS2, Xbox, PSP) have load times because they need to physically spin the disc and move the laser to read its contents. This was also the case with floppy disc and tape based games (commodore 64).
To expand on what the others are saying here, cartridge based systems load quickly because they are more or less directly accessing the data in the cartridge as if it were memory. In fact, in many older systems the cartridge storage area is mapped directly into the memory (RAM) address space. Disk based systems need to sequentially read data into memory temporarily in order to use it for anything, and are inherently limited by their small amount of memory so they can’t load anything even approaching the entire contents of the disk at once, and they also tended to have slow drives in order to make them cheaper. A Playstation 1 has 2 megabytes of memory but a CD can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 or 700 megabytes of data. There’s no amount of programming trickery that’s going to get the entire game into memory all at once unless your game is hilariously small, so the system is going to have to pull the parts of it needs off of the disk as it needs them, which necessitates loading screens.
Meanwhile a cartridge based system can access all (deliberately leaving more complicated topics like bank switching out of the conversation, here) of the data on cartridge more or less instantly.
Things are starting to come full circle here a bit with the Switch and Switch 2 which are indeed cartridge based, but have to load as if they had a disk because the data on their cartridges is both encrypted and compressed, so it can’t be used directly off of the cart like in the good old days and instead has to be unpacked and copied into the system’s memory first.
The games are tiny so it doesn’t take long to load stuff.
yeah but the hardware is also really low powered right? and the emulator emulates that hardware
Emulators don’t necessarily try to mimic all aspects of hardware. It would be more appropriate to say most emulators are translation programs. There are some emulators that do emulate all aspects of hardware though. So “it depends”.
