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.
- 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.