Board 8 > Remember when consoles used "blocks" to measure data size?

(+) Yeah! (+)

The horror of balancing my GCN card's memory limit.

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~LtM
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Yes. I remember my Wii

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Adam/Mada

I don't know whose stupid idea that was, but he should've been fired. Seriously. "Let's use an original confusing term instead of universally recognized ones like MB or GB."

I don't get the issue.

It's not like the memory system said you had X amount of blocks, but then everything you downloaded was in MB, and it never told you specifically how it transferred over.

It told you how many blocks you had, and how much space everything took was also in blocks. That's... Basically the same thing.

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SEP Nash, Smelling Like the Vault since 1996
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it's better to use blocks, or people will realize what a bad deal some of those memory cards are.

8 MB memory card for the PS2

Over 1 GB of hard drive space for the original Xbox

God knows how much a block is on the Gamecube

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Yeah.

Sony went the MB route and just looked like jerks selling you 8 MB memory cards for that much.

Nintendo used 'Blocks' and looked nicer doing the same exact thing.

Whoever came up with that idea probably got a raise.

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~InsaneOne

OmarsComin posted...
it's better to use blocks, or people will realize what a bad deal some of those memory cards are.

Like the Memory Card 59 when the Gamecube launched. That size was absolutely pathetic.

Artoo_D2 posted...
OmarsComin posted...
it's better to use blocks, or people will realize what a bad deal some of those memory cards are.

Like the Memory Card 59 when the Gamecube launched. That size was absolutely pathetic.


Yeah, but that also cost a lot less than the 30-40 dollar PS2 8mb cards.

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SEP Nash, Smelling Like the Vault since 1996
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I have a 64mb memory card for my Gamecube, I wonder how many blocks that is, probably enough to have save games of every gamecube games ever.

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it was probably more straightforward for kids as well, especially during the PSX era when it started. you didn't have to do too much math when a game told you it required 1 block, and you remembered that you had 15 total and 3 available on your card.

I think we had two 128 MB GameCube memory cards? Yeah, there was a crapton of save data on each of them.

Predictably, one of them crashed or something and everything on it got wiped.

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PS1/2 memory cards were such BS. Buying 8MB of storage for $20 in 2005? Really? I guess those are the perks of being the leading manufacturer of digital media. Every new console that comes out can have it's own special overpriced media.

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_foolmo_
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foolm0ron posted...
PS1/2 memory cards were such BS. Buying 8MB of storage for $20 in 2005? Really? I guess those are the perks of being the leading manufacturer of digital media. Every new console that comes out can have it's own special overpriced media.


Didn't they start off higher than that? I remember going to buy memory cards as soon as we got a PS2. A PS1 card was like, $20, and then we were like "Whaaaaaaat" because the PS2 one was almost double.

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SEP Nash, Smelling Like the Vault since 1996
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I made it 3 years on a single 59-block card for the Gamecube. To this day almost all of my games fit on two 59-blockers. It helps a great deal that most good games on the system kept their block usage to a minimum. Hitman 2 was a notable exception, taking up 59 blocks with God knows what.

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I've only ever had a single 8MB card for my PS2, and it's all I've been using for the last 10 years that I've had it. So many saves have been deleted off that thing over the years.

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_foolmo_
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I have like 6 8-mb PS2 memory cards and I need more.

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From: Artoo_D2 | #008
OmarsComin posted...
it's better to use blocks, or people will realize what a bad deal some of those memory cards are.

Like the Memory Card 59 when the Gamecube launched. That size was absolutely pathetic.

That card was funny. Most first-party Nintendo games where small enough that it didn't seem like a problem, but then you'd find a game that took like half the entire thing.

I remember renting some extreme roller-blading sports game that had a save that was almost the size of the entire card. I still have no idea why. All it kept track of was collectibles and what levels you unlocked, it was ridiculous.

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What I remember more than blocks was having to manage my saves and delete old game saves because I was out of blocks. Mostly on PS1, I mean 15 blocks? Games like Soul Reaver used 3 blocks for a single save, and then there were games like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid where you might want more than 1 save, and games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 where you didn't want to delete your saves because of time-consuming unlocks...

But the thing that really cheesed me off was when I realized I could play PS1 games on my PS2, and I could move PS1 saves to my PS2 memory card, but the PS1 games themselves could not save to or load from the PS2 memory card. Would it really have been that difficult to create a "virtual memory card" on the PS2 card that the PS1 games could access?

BTW for those criticizing memory card sizes, you have to remember that 8MB for game saves seemed downright enormous back in 2000.

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[NO BARKLEY NO PEACE]

Wait, Wii still uses blocks? o.o

Yea, Wii uses blocks.

Got about 20,000 blocks on my Wii

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Doesn't the Wii use SD cards? They split that into blocks?

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Black: 3310-7431-2094

yeah it shows SD cards in blocks as well

The 3DS uses blocks too!

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"You know what, forget it. Nothing I can think of posting will really be of much use to anyone in any way, shape, or form." ~LinkMarioSamus

Most first-party Nintendo games where small enough that it didn't seem like a problem, but then you'd find a game that took like half the entire thing.

Half? Animal Crossing took up the entire thing, or near it. Now that said, it came with a Memory Card 59. It makes sense for Animal Crossing to use a ton of space (randomly generated town, etc.), but I don't get something like Hitman 2. That said, I have never played Hitman 2, so.

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Doesn't make much sense. Only thing Hitman 2 really kept track of was the guns you had collected

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I'm guessing that GCN games that took up an absurd amount space and weren't Animal Crossing, was probably just the developers not knowing how to compress right.

It appears that the 1019 block memory card is about equal to 8 MB, so it took so long for Nintendo just to reach the regular storage of the PS2 memory card.
And I had a 1019 memory card but the thing corrupted on me when I started using it on the Wii, so I just use two 251 memory cards and keep the GCN game playing on the GameCube itself.

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Weird, I had a huge GC memory card from a third party, and the Wii never corrupted it at all.

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"You know what, forget it. Nothing I can think of posting will really be of much use to anyone in any way, shape, or form." ~LinkMarioSamus

I have a 1019 card that corrupted somewhat often. Luckily for me, I bought it for the sole reason of being able to back up my saves to PC. I never actually lost anything, so it was more of an annoyance than anything.

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Haha, I remember that. I'm mostly concerned that they weren't chunking it into smaller pieces. What does that work out to, a 128K word size? Nice job Nintendo.

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senorhousemouse

i bought a third party memory card for my ps1

it lasted longer than the ps1

and the ps2

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