Price of ROM chips and discs

DiscostewSM · Jun 28, 2016

Anyone have an idea of how much these cost to manufacture of comparable capacity, and where this information can be found? Like, the price of a dual-layer BR disc (50gb) vs a 64GB ROM chip. Non-rewritable.

FAST6191 · Jun 28, 2016

I ran the numbers at a few points over the years, mainly when "cartridges are too expensive" came up as a topic of discussion.

I have a whole bunch of electronics vendors but never found anybody selling ROM chips of a suitable size (at all actually, let alone at volumes I would want). To that end I usually substituted for NAND. If you want to try aliexpress, http://uk.rs-online.com/web/ , http://uk.futureelectronics.com/en/Pages/index.aspx?OL=GB&Language=en-GB , http://www.digikey.co.uk/ , http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/st...splay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001 , http://cpc.farnell.com/ , http://www.jaycar.co.uk/ , http://www.element14.com/community/index.jspa -- all sites that will sell you parts by the reel and are used by big boy electronics makers all day long you can, I struggled though.
All the (mask) ROM chips I found were small things aimed at basic bootloaders and what have you for embedded electronics.
Equally Garmin and such will sell me an SD card with updates on it so it would seem to be a bit viable https://buy.garmin.com/en-IE/GB/map...rd/c452-c454-atFILTER_FEATURE_CARD_01-p1.html

For discs I would usually use pressing plants as they they have costs available. It does not scale the best and some of those were from the plant in just paper wallets but I assumed at the volumes being dealt with it would probably even out between 1 million pressings of a disc and 3000 for a small run for a company.
http://www.duplicationcentre.co.uk/prices.html
https://www.discmakers.com/quoter/default.aspx

I don't know what cuts Sony, MS and Nintendo take and if that is in addition to anything the blu ray peeps leverage or instead of but it should get you ballpark figures. The difference in ballpark could well be margin destroying but it is not like it is dozens of times more expensive like it might have been at various points in the past.

Jack Daniels · Jun 28, 2016

FAST6191 said:
I ran the numbers at a few points over the years, mainly when "cartridges are too expensive" came up as a topic of discussion.

I have a whole bunch of electronics vendors but never found anybody selling ROM chips of a suitable size (at all actually, let alone at volumes I would want). To that end I usually substituted for NAND. If you want to try aliexpress, http://uk.rs-online.com/web/ , http://uk.futureelectronics.com/en/Pages/index.aspx?OL=GB&Language=en-GB , http://www.digikey.co.uk/ , http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/st...splay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001 , http://cpc.farnell.com/ , http://www.jaycar.co.uk/ , http://www.element14.com/community/index.jspa -- all sites that will sell you parts by the reel and are used by big boy electronics makers all day long you can, I struggled though.
All the (mask) ROM chips I found were small things aimed at basic bootloaders and what have you for embedded electronics.
Equally Garmin and such will sell me an SD card with updates on it so it would seem to be a bit viable https://buy.garmin.com/en-IE/GB/map...rd/c452-c454-atFILTER_FEATURE_CARD_01-p1.html

For discs I would usually use pressing plants as they they have costs available. It does not scale the best and some of those were from the plant in just paper wallets but I assumed at the volumes being dealt with it would probably even out between 1 million pressings of a disc and 3000 for a small run for a company.
http://www.duplicationcentre.co.uk/prices.html
https://www.discmakers.com/quoter/default.aspx

I don't know what cuts Sony, MS and Nintendo take and if that is in addition to anything the blu ray peeps leverage or instead of but it should get you ballpark figures. The difference in ballpark could well be margin destroying but it is not like it is dozens of times more expensive like it might have been at various points in the past.

you can use multi flashes to get to the point of being usefull... that's what i did at school to get some space for a console... with the right knowledge you might net even need that much flash chips to get a whole lot of extra spce... just dig a bit deeper into the detailes of how it works, and how to adres the spaces... still i'd go for a disc since it's much easier to program the reader... but you could compare a ssd-drive to a bd-drive/hdd-drive... those are large enough i guess.

FAST6191 · Jun 28, 2016

Oh yeah if it had just been "we only sell 16 gig ROM chips" then I would have doubled up and called it interleaved or paged or something. I was just getting back things like http://www.aliexpress.com/item/10pc...10&btsid=58a24c67-5794-40c1-8c3d-bac218af6e42 which is in the megabytes/kilobytes range. When I could then go on amazon and order a single branded 128 gig microSD for $30 I went for NAND instead. 128 gigs is perhaps a bit much here so drop it down a bit and it drops in price too, equally most of those are chips with good write speeds which is not likely to be needed for a game (you have what updates and maybe some persistence in the game world if you are going really fancy) -- you buy a million old NAND chips binned for low speed writes and watch that price tumble.

Mikemk · Jun 28, 2016

These are the ROM chips Nintendo uses in cartridges
http://www.macronix.com/CachePages/en-us-Product-NORFlash-SerialFlash.aspx

Price of ROM chips and discs

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