Nintendo have released some turds of consoles before (Virtual Boy, N64, Wii U) but they all had some good games.
Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.
I like the N64, but for the sake of argument (from a few different directions, and each one debatable whether it made it a "turd"):
- Sony moved over three times as many Playstations, and there were about 2600 PSX games and 400 N64 ones. In contrast to the previous generation, the SNES handily outsold the Genesis, even with somewhat fewer released games.
- The cartridge format caused problems with production price and storage potential, which disk-based systems didn't have
- It was an overly-complex, difficult-to-program machine
- The 4K of texture cache and other weird design choices really hampered the graphics quality.
In the era of optical media and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, N64 was still using cartriges. They were expensive and offered little space, so a non-trivial amount of hackery was needed to even squeeze a soundtrack there. In fact, all N64 development was arcane magic due to this.
The biggest advantages of using ROM chips were their speed and ease of access. You could just address any data in the ROM space, without caching or transferring anything to RAM, essentially expanding the avaliable memory. Today you are forced to keep the memory hierarchy because the different memory types have different speeds/latencies, so using cartridges would make little sense in any modern system.
If you want to get technical, it's flash ROM chips; more akin to an SD card than SSD (though the technology between the two isn't far apart these days). But for all intents and purposes Nintendo's Game Cards are cartridges. They're designed in the spririt of cartridges and thusly are often referred to as cartridges.
But they're not cartridges, regardless of how people refer to them. To be a cartridge, as traditionally applied to video games, the ROM must be directly accessible from CPU space (whether completely, or through banking).
They might be designed in the spirit of cartridges, but they load files into RAM from a filesystem, and never access them directly from the storage media. Thus they're fancy SD cards that really, really want to be carts, but aren't.
Cartridges died with the GBA. Unless you count the myriad unlicensed, bootleg, or knockoff consoles that exist with multigame carts.
Edit (30 minutes later): The inherent nature of cartridges also allows direct access to peripheral chips (coprocessors, etc) found in the cartridge in CPU space as well.
You're confusing typical implementation as a technical definition. There's no actual rule which states a "cartridge" has to follow that definition (and in fact some 8bit micro computers with support for cartridges didn't follow your specification).
Given modern systems have a fat OS rather than a thin layer of firmware like the consoles of old, it would but highly illogical to build a cartridge system to the identical specifications of the 70s to mid 90's consoles. But that doesn't diminish the literal definition of the term "cartridge" just because you happen to nitpick the technical implementation.
If we're going to quibble about the definition of cartridge, I'd submit a far more interesting dimension is the ability of a cartridge to extend the console in meaningful ways, in the way that a SNES can not, on its own, run Star Fox.
That new definition covers off the majority of 8 bit micros (to the best of my knowledge) but I believe the CPC 464 Plus (read: not the regular CPC 464 but a later gaming model) couldn't be extended by it's cartridges; and frankly why would you need to as it had its own expansion port in addition to the cartridge slot.
I'd also like to add that I wasn't quibbling over the definition of "cartridge". I understand the term is quite broad but I am happy with that recognised definition even if it isn't a technical description. I know us engineers have a need to describe technology but not everything needs to be jargon.
I was just trying to inject an interesting angle to the discussion, not trying to be precise about what they are. It was an interesting characteristic they had for a while there. Personally I'm satisfied with "if it looks like a cartridge, it is", in which case absolutely yes the Switch uses cartridges.
Even thier "turds" weren't because of a lack of customer focus. Sometimes bad decisions can be made for seemingly right reasons.
> N64
The biggest problem with the N64 vs other consoles of its generation was the lack of a CD-ROM. But carts were specifically picked because Nintendo, at the time, thought they were better for consumers (eg less time spent on loading screens).
> VirtualBoy
This was originally planned as a virtual reality handheld device but as the project progressed different safety concerns were raised (eg what might happen to kids wearing the device in the car during a car crash). This is what lead to the device being crippled to the extent it was.
Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.