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GameCube (Games) Entertainment Games

GameCube Coders Caught Out By Gigantic Memory Card 104

Posted by simoniker from the whoops-apocalypse dept.
Thanks to GamerFeed for its news story discussing compatibility problems with some GameCube titles and the new Nintendo Memory Card 1019. The news story explains: "The [official Nintendo-produced] card has 17 times the memory capacity of the original Memory Card 59", and describes issues, some due to the card's four-digit block size, with a number of more minor third-party games, including Sonic Adventure 2 Battle ("If there are more than 999 free blocks on the Memory Card 1019, the game cannot display the amount of free blocks"), WTA Tour Tennis ("The game does not recognize the Memory Card 1019 properly, and should not be used"), and, disastrously problematic for many memory cards, Mary-Kate And Ashley: Sweet 16 ("Graphics sometimes will not display properly if a file is loaded and restarted after quitting the game.")
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GameCube Coders Caught Out By Gigantic Memory Card More

GameCube Coders Caught Out By Gigantic Memory Card

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  • Damn, well, there goes my sale.

  • No Mary-Kate and Ashley? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:28AM (#9428368) Homepage
    (*#&$#(*&#!

    I knew I should have gotten the PS2 instead.

    • But they are 18 now! And Legal! And...why am I posting this on slashdot instead of searching for their b-day pictures!?!?!?
      • Because except for being twins, intelligent and not homely, they're not that attractive?

        Hey, just being honest. I don't require the person I'm with to be drop-dead gorgeous ... but my google image searches, that is another thing entirely!
        • Let me tell you, they are much more attractive when they are not in public. I saw a special for their new movie on E! (it was Sunday morning, nothing else was on and it had Eugene Levy) It showed a few of their family pictures at their home, and they looked so much better -- not only in an attractive way, but also in an "I'm not a hoochie" way -- without all the makeup plastered on their faces.
          • " and they looked so much better -- not only in an attractive way, but also in an "I'm not a hoochie" way -- without all the makeup plastered on their faces."

            As if the 'plastered' look was ever worth going for in the first place ; If you got something to hide : I rather not go for it.

            Got to love the confident women still around that don't f*ck up their face with all that plastering.

  • Bad Games Anyway (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shadowcabbit ( 466253 ) <cx AT thefurryone DOT net> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:00AM (#9428564) Journal
    OK, at first glance of the list of incompatible games, the only one that even strikes me as worth playing is Sonic 2, and that's just a minor glitch (copy/move all your other game files to the 1019 and you'll have no problem, especially if you have an Animal Crossing game going). Darkened Skye was just plain terrible (played it on PC for about five minutes before realizing it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for Skittles candy, I kid you not), and I'll spare my criticism of the MK&A game simply because it's been done to death.

    It looks to me that Nintendo did something very very smart when they initially set up the design of the memory card system, ie allowing it to be any arbitrary size (as opposed to the old PS1 cards which were 15 blocks, take it or leave it), and these are just poorly-coded games (SA2 included, though it pains me to admit). It's not that big of a deal in the long run, but of note if you happen to have the games mentioned.

    • Nintendo Tech Requirements Checklist (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Scorchio ( 177053 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:33AM (#9428865)
      I've not worked on GameCube, but all the console manufacturers have huge checklists covering memory card use, naming conventions, screen use, demo lengths and all kinds of miscellaneous details. All games must meet these requirements before they are approved for publishing. It sounds like Nintendo hadn't specified an upper limit or that capacity could increase in the future, and definitely weren't checking titles for behavior with larger capacity memory cards.

      Console hardware is generally predictable, so what works today will work tomorrow. If this large memory card was part of Nintendo's road plan from the beginning, it should have been clearly documented and tested from day 1, even if the consumer hardware is not yet available. If the documentation states that the largest capacity was memory card 251 and developers work to those specs, then this is more Nintendo's fault. If the only limit on larger capacity cards was cost, then Nintendo should be stating the maximum capacity handled by the hardware and testing to that limit instead.

      • Re:Nintendo Tech Requirements Checklist (Score:5, Informative)

        by shadowcabbit ( 466253 ) <cx AT thefurryone DOT net> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:36AM (#9429577) Journal
        That's the thing-- from what I can gather/infer/guess there was never a capacity cap to begin with. Remember, Nintendo promoted a SD Card adapter when the Cube was first announced; they had to be ready for the possibility that an SD card would eventually be larger than the largest standard memory card they could produce, and as a result they would have made sure games were ready for this, probably by providing standardized memory card libraries for their developers. With the exception of SA2, most of the games listed were by off-brand developers who would be more likely to tweak the memory card libraries or ignore them completely in favor of their own versions, not realizing that Nintendo's code was ready for whatever would be announced. (I suspect that Sega used an older version of the library or was using a "homebrew" one for SA2 as it was one of the first Sega titles for the Cube. IIRC, when I had SA2 it for whatever reason did not like the off-brand 2x size card I had, but that was a good ten months ago or so.) As for why NOA missed the memory card thing, I imagine it was because they themselves didn't have such a large memory card, either in prototype form or otherwise.
    • nintendo likes to copy protect their saves. I dont know if sega did it too, but you cant copy just any save

    • Re:Bad Games Anyway (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zangief ( 461457 )
      It looks to me that Nintendo did something very very smart when they initially set up the design of the memory card system, ie allowing it to be any arbitrary size (as opposed to the old PS1 cards which were 15 blocks, take it or leave it), and these are just poorly-coded games (SA2 included, though it pains me to admit). It's not that big of a deal in the long run, but of note if you happen to have the games mentioned.

      You should remember that Sega has another (and more critical) bug in its game line up,

  • Here's a question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RyoShin ( 610051 ) <<tukaro> <at> <gmail.com>> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:04AM (#9428621) Homepage Journal
    What I'm wondering is this: who's fault is this? Is this incompatability the fault of Nintendo or the game coders?

    I don't know the mechanics of the memory card, but here we just have the same memory card, but with more memory. So I can't think that the problem arises from Nintendo's side, unless the card requires something else different because of the increased memory.

    It looks like it could be the fault of the game coders. Given, they really couldn't test the 1019 card, but I would think that proper programming would have prevented the problem with Sonic Adventure 2.

    On a side note, if you RTA, you'll see that, according to the article, the Mary Kate and Ashley game (as well as NHL Hitz 20-03) have compatibility issues with the 59 and 251 Memory Cards, so these are nothing new.

    Good thing I won't be buying those two games when I finally get my own Gamecube. [grumble]
    • Given, they really couldn't test the 1019 card

      Theres been 3rd party 1019 cards on the market for a long time, so they aren't anything new. Just now there is an 'official' Nintendo 1019 block card. 3rd party 2038 block cards have even been out for a long time

    • This problem is similar to the Y2K issue. The coder's simply used 3 digits to store how many blocks were available on the memory card. When you have a card with 1000+ blocks, overflows start happening.

      I don't know where the GC Linux team got this info, but if they can find it then developers should have access to is. About a quarter of the way down this page [gc-linux.org] (Section 9.7 Memory Cards) is a list of memory cards including the 8MB Memory Card 1019 and others like the MC 507 and the MC 2043 which don't cur

    • I recently had to contact THQ regarding a glitch in one of their games on the GameCube. Their first question was "are you using a 3rd party memory card", which suggests not all cards are the same (ignoring size).

      Oddly enough we eventually pinned the problem down to the Wavebird (official wireless controller), it frequently seems to be the cause of unexpected behaviour.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:08AM (#9428647)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Bad coder, no cookie! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KDR_11k ( 778916 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:09AM (#9428657)
    Considering third-party-made memorycards of that capacity have been available for quite some time now it should have been possible to catch these errors even before the official 1019 was announced. The games listed aren't exactly the best exammples of good coding, though.

    Also, the claim that the MC1019 could hold hundreds of saves isn't entirely correct, either, since according to the Gamecube's manual a card cannot hold more than 127 files regardless of its size.

    Besides, the Mary Kate and Ashley game's flaw isn't caused by the MC1019, the article states it happens with ALL memory cards, i.e. the game's load function is flawed.
    • Also, the claim that the MC1019 could hold hundreds of saves isn't entirely correct, either, since according to the Gamecube's manual a card cannot hold more than 127 files regardless of its size.

      Aye, but a single file corresponds to a single disc, each of which can have as many save slots as the programmer saw fit to include.

      Eternal Darkness, e.g., lets you save five files. If you bought one hundred games like that, you could indeed have hundreds of saves.

      On a side note, I don't see the 127 file lim

      • Any game can create as many files as it wants and I don't think you can change the size of a file. Games with an infinite number of possible saves create one file per save. Some with a finite number do, too, to preserve space. Examples would be the Lost Kingdoms games, Skies of Arcadia: Legends and Mystic Heroes. PSO saves three different files for some reason. Personally I prefer having one file per save so you don't waste space if you only use one save out of five. That's especially bad with games like Ha

  • So what... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jammac ( 588679 )
    It's about time, Nintendo. I've had my InterAct memory card for a long time now with 16x the memory of the original Nintendo card. Never had a problem with any game, and its been a godsend on saving those damn huge Madden season files.
    • Yeah...WTF, the headline of the story describes the card as 'gigantic'.

      Umm...it's only 8MB.

      The standard Xbox memory card was 8MB. But then again, you have a hard-drive, so memory cards are nearly useless.

      You can get a sweet Hello Kitty [ncsxshop.com] card for the PS2 that came out long before this that holds equal, or more information.

      This story on Slashdot did not play up the excitement of having a whopping 8MB of storage, but I've seen it other places. Nintendo is trying to get people excited about this?!?!

      What's
      • You forgot PS2 Memory cards, which are 8MB as well. That's two whole WWF Smackdown saves. (I think that's the game that had 4MByte saves, it was definitely a WWF game).

        Whatever the Gamecube ones are (I worked it out one time...) they're better than Dreamcast, which had 128KByte as it's only card size. (Apparently the US and Japan got some bank switching 4x one as well, but not in Europe). Completely stupid, especially for an online console. The Sega Saturn had 512kb (AFAIK) in it's memory cartrige (althoug
        • The Saturn actually had 8 megabits (1 meg) in its save cartridges - to be fair to the Dreamcast, the save cards were much smaller and cheaper. All of the non-standard memory card features also count for something. I think you could eventually get memory cards with 16 banks on them, but of course these didn't have a screen, etc. (The Saturn only had 32kb as internal storage, incidentally.)

          The original Gamecube save cards are about half a meg (4 megabits). Pretty pitiful, especially for something released tw
    • Consider yourself lucky. I bought an Interact card the day it launched (before the Memory Card 251 was out and the Interact card was the only way to play Allstar Baseball 2003) and have lost literally dozens of things on it. I'm at the point now where I make two copies of everything on the card, just in case.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @11:01AM (#9429873)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Animal Crossing can only hold one town per card. This is not a space requirement, but a design "feature". You are better off having several smaller cards to hold several towns.

      Also, All-Star Baseball 2004 has a block requirement of 240 blocks to hold data for franchise mode. If you save options and cards then you easily shoot over the 251 block cards just for this one game.

    • Almost agree'd.

      With my ~30 games (although I've never played the 60-block Sims, and don't intend to), I'm using about 265. As it is, I have one 59 (which sucks, being third party), and two 251s, so I'll last for a while yet. Especially if I do some spring cleaning, I'm not likely ever to play games like Spider-man, Clone Wars or Rayman 3 again.
    • Try playing Madden 2004. It uses up my 251 in one gulp :(

  • Its ok (Score:3, Funny)

    by CableModemSniper ( 556285 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .odlapacnagol.> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @11:34AM (#9430292) Homepage Journal
    59 blocks should be enough for everyone!
  • Chances are, if you own any of the games on the list, you already own one of the two earlier cards. And since all these tiles aren't any good, the real question is, why did you invest your money into such garbage? :)

    As for the reasons why we might need a larger card... I'm guessing the reason Nintendo is releasing a larger memory card is so that developers can create games that take advantage of a larger save space. I've heard that some developers have felt the 59 and 251 are too limiting.

  • The bigger issue... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mike Hawk ( 687615 )
    Someone needs to bring up the bigger issue here. Why is this MC just barely coming out now? At launch in the US there was only the MC 59. This retails for $20. A while later they released the MC 251 for $25. Now they have the MC 1019 for $30. 17 times the storage for only $10 more? Noone else sees this as problematic? The PS2 has had an official 8MB card since launch. The Xbox has had that size as well AND included a HD in the first place.

    The ones who got screwed here? Nintendo's early adopters.
    • Memory gets bigger and cheaper over time and the prices of the smaller ones go down... is that something shocking that Nintendo just made up over the last couple years?
    • I would guess that the memory and the cost of production is just cheaper now. PS2, X-box and the cube are all less than half their original retail prices, so if you are going to cry foul on the cards you have to look at the bigger pie as well. Early adopters always get the shaft period, and I have a feeling that early adopters are use to it by now. That is just part of the price one pays if they want the latest new toys. My X-Box, PS2, and cube were all aquired at launch and I knew in advance that I was tak
      • Not all people, but Americans for sure. For the pokemon fans out there, this product, [ign.com] is free in Japan. Stateside its $20. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, because your last post demonstrated that you are willing to defend Nintendo through anything, but merely suggesting you look around. (Ironically, they call it a "bargain price". Its not a bargain when you compare it to free.)

        Early adopters always get the shaft period

        No, early adopters always pay more, but they do not always get the
        • I'm not sure I was defending as much as rationalizing. Whatever, it is a moot point and clearly something to try and put me on the defensive. You make the mistake of assuming that I have some sort of belief to defend.

          Now as for the almighty shaft, it depends on how you define it. I say paying more is a shafting; maybe you do not. I am curious how you define the shaft in the case of early adopters.

          The memory card situation is sort of a unique one though. Nintendo's inital offering, the 59(?) was indeed a w
    • I'm a Nintendo advocate so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

      There are 1GB flash cards available [18004memory.com] but I don't think that just because the technology exists that Nintendo should use it. It would simply be cost prohibitive.

      Granted these "new" MC 1019 cards are 8MB which is the same as both the PS2 and Xbox standard cards, 8MB goes a lot farther on the GC. Why? Simply because developers should be used to not having scads of save RAM to use.

      There are other reasons of course. The PS2 MC interface h
      • It's okay - Mike Hawk is a troll, so you really have to take anything he writes with the smallest grain of salt possible. And then some.

        And thanks for the link to the SD card adapter - I didn't know it had finally come out (well, okay, out in Japan).

      • I'd like to point out your pro-Nintendo spin here. I don't think you even realize what you are writing.

        You dismiss Ridge Racer for having a large save. You call Xbox saves "bloat saves" because a few do not fit on a memory card. The flip side of this is that because of Nintendo's decision to severely limit the size of their MC, there are titles thay cannot ever possibly be released on Gamecube. Here is where you spout the standard apologist line of "well we don't want that game anyway". Thats cute,
      • "I don't even want to talk about the Xbox "bloat saves" that can't even be copied to a memory card."

        I have a wide selection of Xbox games. Only one of my saves cannot fit on a memory card, and that one is from a Morrowind game that got waaay out of control. Even this save is only around 600 blocks. The 8MB memory card is 531 IIRC.

        Name a Xbox game that regularly saves larger than 8MB. Even the save I mentioned above is only that large due to the huge amount of junk I've collected in game (I'm a pack r
    • The PS2 has had an official 8MB card since launch. The Xbox has had that size as well AND included a HD in the first place.

      Well to be fair, if you take a look at some of the memory usage for PS2 games, you most of them have some serious memory usage differences. RPGs? You're fine, maybe 20-100 KBs each. But sports games? Some sports games take half the memory card! God forbid you're hardcore and you ALWAYS save and keep your memory data from older versions of football, basketball, and soccer games. A momen

  • Not exactly on topic but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zangief ( 461457 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @12:36PM (#9431187) Homepage Journal
    Also a case of shoddy programming. Most gamecube games asume that you have 1 memory card, on port A. And I'm not talking about obscure, third party, bad games. I'm talking about Metroid Prime, Mario Kart, WindWaker, Mario Sunshine, the Zelda collector disc, etc. If you have more than 1 memory card, you either:

    -arrange your save files to minimize the hassle of swapping cards

    or

    -swap cards.

    Games that I know recognize more than 1 memory card (or the fact that the memory card is on the port B) are Burnout 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 and Animal Crossing (the only first party games that it does!)

    While they make awesome games, Nintendo has a shoddy programmer in charge of save/load games, that hasn't considered every case.
    • Also a case of shoddy programming. Most gamecube games asume that you have 1 memory card, on port A.

      Support for a memory card in Slot A is the only requirement. Programmers who want to ship a console game concentrate on making sure the publisher's requirements are met. With the potential cost of failing TRC check so high, it shouldn't be a suprise that people do the bare minimum amount of interaction with those subsystems.
  • Somehow I dont think the extra 20 blocks was worth the trouble...
  • More frustrating to me is the incredble variation from one game to the next on the required save blocks. Some games use 30, some 11 some as few as 3 blocks. Viewtiful Joe only requires 4 blocks, yet games like Medal of Honor use 11. Medal of Honor cannot be that much save intensive than Viewtiful Joe, can it?
    • Many things affect the size of game saves on the memory card. Games aren't allowed to vary the size of their saves so they claim enough space for their worst case scenario. Beyond the game's own data, the icon, optional banner and description are counted in that block total. A block is only 8KB so a game with an 8-frame animated icon and with a banner could well use 6-7 blocks just for that.

      It's much worse on PS2 where the (admittedly usually very cool looking) 3D models take anything from 50KB to 150KB ea
  • I was distraught when I realised my Mary Kate and Ashley Sweete 16 game did not work on my memory card, fortunatly, being a 20 year old IT guru I was able to download an emulator for my PC. Now I can Mary Kate and Ashley in style. (If anyone finds a way to transfer games to PC I would love to know)
  • Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!

    Ten million Americans will pay for what was done to ten thousand of our brothers in Iraq! We remember al-Fallujah! We remember our mujaheddin in Afghanistan! We know how the Americans support the slaughter of our brothers in Palestine! Soon they will experience a dozen 11 Septembers!

    Death to the Americans! Death to the Zionists! Death to any who think they can destroy or enslave us!

    Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
    Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
    Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!

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