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Game CARTRIDGES make a comeback ... for smartmobes

Plan calls for games once Big in Japan to become small in Japan again

A Japanese company named Beatrobo has revealed plans to revive games cartridges, for use in smartphones.

Beatrobo already makes a device that plugs in to a phone's audio port and sends a sound to the phone to authenticate you as someone able to access content stored in the cloud.

The company's now planning to use the audio port again, this time as a way to have vintage games run on smart phones. At the Tokyo Games show this week the company says it will debut a device called a “Pico Cassette” that mimics the shape of the cartridges used by Nintendo's Entertainment System (NES) and Super NES.

Deals for games haven't been done yet but the company hopes that copyright holders will be keen to wring yet more revenue from retro-gaming-obsessed Otaku around the world.

Cartridges were a very popular format for games for many years, starting from the first wave of consoles such as the Atari 2600. Even early micro-computers like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 had ports for cartridges, which loaded faster and were a rather more robust medium than audio cassette tapes. Once the first Playstation and its peers adopted optical disks, cartridges quickly faded into obscurity on platforms other than portable gaming devices.

Beatrobot thinks gamers will be happier with a physical copy of their favourite old games, even if they're in a slightly weird format. ®

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