OmegaFlareX wrote:That's interesting they'd pick cartridge for a physical release instead of tape or disk. I had a C64 as a kid, but bought used as a bundle off of a family acquaintance and way past obsolescence (1991). Most of the games were on disk. I noticed the few cartridge games were mostly early 80s stuff and weren't that impressive. I think the only time the tape drive was used was my mom playing some typing game, but I've read that was the standard in the UK. Anyway, my point is I assume the cartridge format is quite limited because of the lackluster quality of the games we had. With high enough density ROM chips can it outperform disk and tape?
She actually switched to cartridge only midway through development due to the advatanges it gave (
https://twitter.com/sarahjaneavory/stat ... 1576190976).
Those early cartidges were 8/16k and so as you say the games were limited. There was, however, a brief resurgence in Europe during the early 90s where games were released on cartridges up to 512k. They didn't really catch on, partly because the C64 was nearing the end of its commerical lifetime and probably also due to them being significantly more expensive (even though instant loading was a godsend to anyone used to cassettes!).
These days a lot of people will play on an emulator where a cartridge can be distributed as a ROM image, and there's also a popular device called the 1541 Ultimate that loads cartridge images (along with disk and cassette images) on to real hardware from USB. Or you can buy physical, obviously.
Sam's Journey is a good example of what can be done with cartirgde (although in this instance there is a multi-disk version as well).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YTGaSvbtiY