Eli5: how exactly did game developers put their game on a N64 cartridge? And how did the pins on the cartridges allow you to play the game once inserted into the game system?

Question

Also, how did they mass produce said cartridges with said game on them?

Bonus question: same question with cd’s

In: 7

Answer 1

Very crudely, a ROM chip contains thousands (or millions) of individual bytes, each in a numbered location. You send a number to the chip, and it sends back the data in that location.

Because everything in a computer is numbers this makes things very easy. You can represent the game as a long list of numbers, and then each of these is in the corresponding location in the chip.

Numbers are processor instructions. So the CPU goes to the first location, pulls some numbers from it and those numbers tell the CPU what to do.