Nintendo NX Rumors: Multinational Consumer Electronics To Use Cartridges For Physical Gaming Media?

Nintendo has been well-known in the console gaming world and has innovated its way to legendary status among gamers. Ever since they birthed the Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1983 (the gaming console that shaped the video game industry to what it is today,) gamers have been looking forward to they are going to do next.

Nintendo utilized cartridges for its early console system in the past until their recent offerings. So for the curious gamers, a question lingers as to when Nintendo will use cartridges again? Will they be re-introducing cartridge gaming to their upcoming NX console? There's possibility, and some have heard rumors regarding the format before today. Now there are more evidence suggesting that old school cartridges is again a possibilty.

Atheerios, a NeoGAF user did some trademark scraping for details, and found that Wii U games specifically state that "optical discs" as their media, though there are no details about cartridges, according to Techno Buffalo. Nintendo 3DS game trademarks contain the phrase "video game cartridges" with nothing about discs being said.

Will cartridges be plausible for the Nintendo NX? It seems that it is. There is the fact the cartridges will not be as cheap as discs, flash memory will offer a whole lot more flexibility in terms of read speed and memory capacity. Utilization of Flash memory could readily provide 1TB of capacity and read speeds could be more than 200MB/s. Flash memory also provides the ability for data writing, so it is possible for Nintendo let gamers keep their save files on both the NX and in the cartridge itself.

For comparison, the Wii U's proprietary discs features 25GB of memory capacity and can read at a speed that has been clocked at 22.5MB/s. Flash memory on cartridges will be significantly of a bigger capacity and at a much higher read speed.

Meanwhile, Nintendo top executives explained why they decided to not show the NX console, Daily Star UK reported.

A Twitter user Cheesemeister tweeted that Senior Nintendo employee and 'Creative Fellow' Shigeru Miyamoto said, they (Nintendo) should have shown NX at E3, however, they are worried about the imitators once they release the info too early.