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.
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.
San Diego? SDGE is the worst.
Sir Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness
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.
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.
