[I've been thinking lately about the transition video games have taken from a predominately hardware platform to a predominate software platform. You see, back in the day, we had the Famicom, or the Nintendo Entertainment System for those Americans reading this. It was mostly a hardware platform, meaning your game was more than half composed of hardware when it came to what was running your game and making the experience possible. Everything needs software to run, but in those days, the games were chipsets, Printed Circuit Boards that loaded into an expansion deck on the motherboard of the console, and this made it hardware reliant. Thing was, the Famicom did not hold the game decks into the expansion slot very well, meaning bumping the system could cause the game to lock up]

[This was quickly fixed with the Super Famicom [SNES] and mastered with the N64. But the thing that always strikes me about this technology was that because the gaming was reliant on hardware more than software, the games seemingly never glitched up to the point of a gamefreeze. It just didn't happen. I remember shooting infinite rocket launchers in Goldeneye 007 as fast as the game would let me, directly at my feet with the invincibility code enabled. I managed to lower the framerate some, but I'll be damned if I couldn't get the game to lockup. These days, games are larger, harder to work all the glitches out, but there is something more to the vivid increase in game lockups these days. One of the big culprits? How much of our games are stored in RAM, how much software is emulated, and the lack of chip-to-chip data transfer]

[You see, with the cartridges, the process was much faster. The data was on IC's and the consoles basically had the game data on tap. The ENTIRE game. Any part of it could be accessed at any time, and much faster as well. With the introduction of optical media storage, the necessary introduction if I may be so bold, we gained a lot of great technological advances, but lost that data transfer edge. Now an optical laser reads the data from a disc, translates what it reads, and sends the data to the RAM, which then feeds it to the GPU and/or CPU of the console. With all this happening, and the fact that modern games have more and more stuff running in the background, the chances for game lockups are ever increasing, as digital data only requires one clash to make the house of cards fall. Hardware reliant gaming is incredibly limited in terms of what we can render visually, but it was so much more durable]

[Let us look at it from another angle. Houses are typically made from woods, plasters and drywalling. With no windows, there is no view to the outside world, and it can also lack asthetic beauty. We can add windows, gain functions and other things by adding different things to the house, but we are weakening it by degrees with each of these improvements. So, the more abilities we gain via loading things into the software side instead of hardware, the more feeble and unreliable our consoles become. We've taken our brickhouses and slowly replaced the materials with straw and sticks. Even our consoles themselves run more software! The consoles can lock up as well as the game itself]

[In closing, it's amazing how far we've come in technology, and to that angle, gaming technology itself. My PS3 is self-claimed to do everything. But each time we seem to improve our computer technologies, we seem to lose more and more of other things. How odd this feels. I wonder, can we fix the bridges we've been burning so willingly? Time will tell the tale. It always does] -AT9-