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Running a GameCube (23 watts) literally nonstop for a year would use a little over 200 kWh.
Assuming average USA electricity prices, in 2002 electricity cost ~$0.09 per kWh, so one year of that would cost an additional $18.00. That number only tends worse going forward.
A GameCube memory card would cost about $11.
As usual, it's more expensive to be poor.
Sir Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness
I love when I idly wonder something about a post, click into the comments, and the top comment is exactly, specifically the answer to my idle curiosity. Cheers.
9 cents is probably just generation. I'd expect to pay about the same for delivery.
Yeah, total cost is going to be at least $0.15 USD / kWh, and can be as high as $0.25 USD / kWh. I've lived all over the US and it's never been less than $0.15 USD / kWh.
paying over $0.40/kWh where I am.
I'm paying $0.11 kwh currently. My last house was $0.15 kwh. That's after the fees. I think we're going up to $0.13. I am not considered poor where we live now and $0.25 kwh would significantly change my family's habits
That’s super nice. If you drive an EV and charge at home, $0.11 / kWh * 75 kWh = $8.25 for about 300 miles of range.
Definitely can't beat that!
Back in 2002? I don't think they separated generation and delivery for most utilities, at least in the US. In 1996, federal regulators made it mandatory for utilities with delivery infrastructure to accept generators' electricity on fair/nondiscriminatory terms, and gave them some time to implement policies. Then, the actual generators started negotiating deals, but the early days were a bit chaotic, with issues in California with rolling blackouts, then the Enron bankruptcy, and then generators actually entering long term contracts with some price stability in the early 2000's.
For a typical residential customer who didn't go out of their way to look for side deals with generators, they wouldn't have needed to see their bills be segmented out into generation and delivery, since most of the utilities still already had long term contracts (or owned their own generation facilities) still in effect from before the regulatory reform.
Personally, I didn't see those numbers separated out on my bill until around 2009. And I remember my electric bill in 2000-2005 being roughly 10 cents per kwh, flat rate.
I call counterfeit and homoerotic.
Fabricated and jolly, I say!
Prevaricated and flamboyant
Spurious and flaming
It's actually still not a sad story! Because eventually they would have had to turn it off or they would lose electricity. This marked the start of their new saveable journey!
I didn't know GC memory cards were hotswappable....
Old-school proprietary memory cards like that generally are, because they don't mount a filesystem in the way a modern flash drive would.
You can safely remove the card without problem as long as there is no current write operation happening.
You often needed to switch memory card to change between games, depending which card your save was on, and people would certainly not turn the console off to do that, nor does the GameCube manual say you should.
You often needed to switch memory card to change between games, depending which card your save was on, and people would certainly not turn the console off to do that, nor does the GameCube manual say you should.
You didn’t need to turn the console off to change games? In a disc based system? Wut?
Nope. It was pretty normal for multi disc games. Once you got so far, the game would give you a "insert disc X" screen," where you'd hot swap the discs and keep playing. I remember FF on PSX doing this.
Not to mention the games that were cool enough to let you swap in a music CD after the game loaded, so you could have your own soundtrack!
I still to this day get upset that I've never been able to fully play through Legend of Dragoon because BOTH COPIES I managed to find in my little hometown had Disc 3s that were too scratched to be read even after multiple attempts to repair them.
Yeah that was the real problem with hot swappable discs. The kids who actually physically performed that operation were often too impatient and careless to put the disc somewhere safe from scratching, because they wanted to immediately get back to playing.
the same thing happened to me with Suikoden 2. My dad bought a copy off eBay, not knowing it was a 2 disc game so I never got to finish it. Naturally I had to buy it when 1 & 2 were rereleased.
You could start a game, open the lid, swap discs, reset, and play the second game (can confirm on PS1, not sure on PS2 or GC). Unlike swapping cartridges in a SNES or MegaDrive and resetting without powering down, doing this wouldn't lead to a super weird game.
The PS1's Monster Rancher games would give you different monsters depending on what disc you put for the game to read when it asked.
:(
If they could afford the GC in the first place they could afford the memory card. As usually the parents are lazy and don’t ask their kids any questions.