How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

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dougeff
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by dougeff »

If we assume 1500 bytes per minute,
256 kB PRG-ROM = 170 minutes of music.
average song length of 3.5 minutes
means you could fit 48 normal songs on a normal cassette.

I still feel like you could fit 100 songs, though. Probably songs shorter than 3.5 minutes with that estimate.

There were some 512k PRG-ROM games. That would be 96 songs. I guess I should have used that number as a basis.
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lidnariq
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by lidnariq »

rainwarrior wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:56 pm I feel in a lot of ways, the amount of space wasted by floppy disk formatting is proportional to how long the data on it should be expected to last.

At least, in the long term I've seen so many more failiures when trying to read old disks that had some kind of "oversize" formatting versus something like IBM's more conservative formats.
It's weird, because I can't see why that would be true unless it's literally just a game of darts, and by leaving roughly 1/4 of the disk holding nothing, 1/4 of the time nothing had happened.

I do see problems with rewriting overformatted floppies, because the purpose of the wastage is time for the controller to switch from "scanning looking for the sector header" to "starting writing instead of reading". Maybe it's that when a single 512B sector or its CRC is damaged, the FDC doesn't have to reread as many bytes (relative to larger sectors) to determine what the sector should have been? Maybe? I don't know.

Reminds me of mapper 328.

But ... well, this is the difference between theory and practice, innit?
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rainwarrior
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by rainwarrior »

lidnariq wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 6:38 pm
rainwarrior wrote:At least, in the long term I've seen so many more failiures when trying to read old disks that had some kind of "oversize" formatting versus something like IBM's more conservative formats.
It's weird, because I can't see why that would be true unless it's literally just a game of darts, and by leaving roughly 1/4 of the disk holding nothing, 1/4 of the time nothing had happened.
Well, my observations are fairly anecdotal, but when I was going through a lot of old disks, I think well over half of the "standard" format floppies came out fine, and the large majority of over-filled ones didn't. I don't have much of a theory for that... maybe the weakening of the signal isn't so independent, and nearby errors accumulate in a way that longer gaps help mitigate? I've got some fluxengine dumps of damaged disks that I eventually want to go over in more detail, but it's kind of a large time investment for small gain situation.
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by Pokun »

rainwarrior wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:33 pm
Pokun wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:05 pmAnd I don't see why media makers suddenly had to start using the conventional use of kilo (which isn't what will be displayed on the screen with most programs reading the disk), and on top of that even failing to write the correct value for the actual unformatted space the media has, every time. Talk about confusing the customers to no end. I guess factory bad blocks in things like FLASH are part of it though which might be unavoidable.
I don't think it's sudden. They did it since the beginning and just never stopped. Software and binary-addressed memory really are the only places that 1024 is the standard.
I see, I've had been told that HDD makers used to list the exact unformatted space in kibibyte, and at some point they started to use true kilo as some kind of scheme to make their products appear bigger while pretending that they "use terms that customers are used to and understands" (but really just screwing things up further for customers). But I didn't really get into computers until the later half of '90s, so I wouldn't know if they really did.
If that the difference was small in the MB era is the reason people didn't notice, it makes sense why this misconception is so common.

Isn't power of 2 used all the time in digital engineering?
Only when there's a stage where there's physically N address bits, either in space or time.
Makes sense to me. I know some older computers uses decimal numbers, and in some systems a byte is 10 bits, but I've read that the reason that power of 2 is used so much (and why a byte is often 8 bits) is because a bit is binary in nature.
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rainwarrior
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by rainwarrior »

Pokun wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 6:43 amI see, I've had been told that HDD makers used to list the exact unformatted space in kibibyte, and at some point they started to use true kilo as some kind of scheme to make their products appear bigger while pretending that they "use terms that customers are used to and understands" (but really just screwing things up further for customers). But I didn't really get into computers until the later half of '90s, so I wouldn't know if they really did.
If that the difference was small in the MB era is the reason people didn't notice, it makes sense why this misconception is so common.
I found a nice article subsection on Wikipedia on this topic with a few good references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Disk_drives

As far as I know, hard drives always used 1000, and that article basically says it goes right back to the beginning of hard drives. However, maybe the transition from floppy disks which did use 1024 to hard drives would seem like something had changed? Or the transition from MB to GB? I definitely felt duped the first time I got a hard drive that had a GB value on the box. With MB sized hard drives I noticed the formatted value wasn't quite what I expected, but the difference was small and I figured it was due some system partition or something I didn't understand. Even floppy disks had a bunch of space reserved and you'd never see the size on the box as the free space in your OS' listing, despite not having the 1000 vs 1024 disparity.

I dunno if it would ever change. I couldn't see drive manufacturers changing it without some government regulation that mandates 1024 sizing for the sake of transparency to the consumer. I think there have been many lawsuits about that already. Though with Apple going rogue and switching to 1000 in their operating system a few years ago, I imagine the confusion will live a long time into the future.
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by tepples »

The first 256 MB CF card I bought for use with a GBA Movie Player had 256 MB of capacity on a presumably 256 MiB underlying NAND memory. I assumed that the controller reserved the other 4.8% for wear leveling. Likewise with the other 7.3% on a 1 GB microSD card that I bought for an R4 adapter: as density increases into the GB range, you get fewer erases before the errors overwhelm ECC and thus need stronger wear leveling.
lidnariq
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by lidnariq »

If nothing else, "3-level-cell" flash don't have to be a power of 2, because they store 3 bits (8 levels) in each gate.

Most of the time when I've looked at SLNAND, it comes as two conjoined arrays. For example, the 1GByte YH58NYG3S0HBAI4 has (4096+256)bytes * 64 pages * 4096 blocks, 9Gbit, 8.5Gibit. This 1/16th extra seems to be standard, for example in Spansion's S34ML parts.

Although there are 13 address bits, there's not 8192 bytes per page. They don't say what happens if you try to address a column beyond 4351, but when programming or reading a page you do just read 4352 bytes in series.
tepples
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by tepples »

I imagine that extra 6% in a raw NAND memory is intended for storage of an error correcting code, analogous to CD-ROM XA's difference between form 1 and form 2 sectors. You don't see it in a finished CF, SD, or SATA because the controller in such a card handles the ECC calculation, passing on "reliable" sectors to the host device. The layers above that are still powers of two (64 * 4096).
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nin-kuuku
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Re: How many tracks can a NES cartridge have?

Post by nin-kuuku »

You can also fit six hours of wacky trance into 40k ROM :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjLWJIFM1ho
edit: Apparently it's 46 days long ...
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