[orbital-decay]

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.

[gonzo41]

I think if would be a bit of fun to see a revival of cartridges. Though just jam a 250bg ssd in it and bang! big games and no restrictions.

-edit, on second thought, i don't really want to be paying > $150 bucks for the game and the storage medium.

[orbital-decay]

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.

[laumars]

The Nintendo Switch uses cartridges.

[LocalH]

No, they use solid state disks.

[laumars]

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.

[LocalH]

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.

[laumars]

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.