How are there these huge games with huge worlds like Zelda Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, GTA Remastered, etc. on these little circuit boards?
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It’s flash memory in the case of the switch like you might find in an SD card. SD cards of comparable size can hold several times the required data.
A very ELI5 answer would be(comparison): They are USB thumb devices that you can only see the data in it, but cannot write anything in it.
*of course they are no USB thumb ls 😅*
Ultimately a game cartridge stores all the code that you need to run the game. Code is a list of instructions that the processor on the console knows how to execute.
The code on a cartridge is stored in read-only memory. I.e memory that cannot be overwritten. So your save files cannot be stored on the cartridge. That’s why older consoles had memory sticks. Gameboy cartridges that had save data (like the original Pokemon games) had an additional piece of writable memory specifically for save files, but it was very limited.
For older consoles like N64 the code executes straight off the cartridge. The processor in your console asks for the next instruction in the code and the cartridge gives it back. It didn’t have much in the way of an operating system which was why it was so fast to launch a game when you plugged it in.
Newer consoles like Switch operate more like a regular computer. The older model doesn’t work when you need to update your games after they’ve already been sold. You first need to install the game on the hard drive or SD card of the console by reading it from the cartridge. Both options are types of memory that can be rewritten.Then any updates can be applied to that code (since the code on the cartridge is read-only and can’t be updated).
Then when it’s time to run the game, you load the code from the hard drive into RAM. (RAM is a type of memory that is very fast to read or write to, but it is volatile meaning that it loses all the code when you power down the console). And then the processor will get its instructions from there. Save files can also be on the hard drive so no more memory sticks.
Not trying to go too deep into this, but modern consoles also have more code running on the console regardless of what game you’re playing. They have an operating system which drives all the console menus, networking, handles all the loading of games and other applications into RAM, etc. It’s just like a normal computer where the game itself is just another application that it’s running.
Modern video game cartridges are just the same game data they would put on a CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray, but on an SSD instead.
Many older game cartridges became a part of the computer’s memory when plugged in. For example, the Atari 2600 had only 128 *bytes* of RAM (built into the I/O and timer chip), but plug that 4 kilobyte game cartridge in, and that became accessible to the OS same as RAM. That’s a reason there were no loading times on those old games, you literally just ran the game directly from memory.
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