Is slow motion bad for game consoles?

I have always wondered about the long-term affects of slow-motion controller buttons on game consoles and cartridges. If I understand the concept correctly, most of them operate on the premise of a switch that effectively pulses the start/pause button on and off successively at fraction-of-a-second speeds. Now this leads me to wonder about how this affects the long-term lifespan of internal electronic components. My first inclination is that this must exert excessive fatigue on IRC's, processor chips, resistors, fuses and so forth. For instance, if a specific chip or resistor is rated at a life-expectancy of one million cycles, isn't regular use of slow-motion just accelerating the failure of said electronic component? Any thoughts...

It has no effect on electronics. If the console has a CD/DVD drive and spins it down/up on pause/unpause, it might make a difference to the drive, but otherwise it's not an issue.

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Originally Posted by tz101

My first inclination is that this must exert excessive fatigue on IRC's, processor chips, resistors, fuses and so forth. For instance, if a specific chip or resistor is rated at a life-expectancy of one million cycles, isn't regular use of slow-motion just accelerating the failure of said electronic component? Any thoughts...

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Why would pressing pause (rapidly or not) have any additional effect or wear on the electronics? I mean, how did you come to that conclusion?

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

Why would pressing pause (rapidly or not) have any additional effect or wear on the electronics? I mean, how did you come to that conclusion?

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This, in OP...

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Originally Posted by tz101

For instance, if a specific chip or resistor is rated at a life-expectancy of one million cycles, isn't regular use of slow-motion just accelerating the failure of said electronic component?

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it's all software, though, it's no different than if you were tapping the shoot button instead. It's not a hardware thing.

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Originally Posted by 17daysolderthannes

it's all software, though, it's no different than if you were tapping the shoot button instead. It's not a hardware thing.

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Yes. But tapping that start/shoot button causes electronic pulses that count against lifecycle expectancies of said hardware components. Equate it to repeatedly flipping a light switch in your living room, Eventually the switch and bulb are going to go. Is the effect detrimental to internal resistors and IRC's in the slightest. I am not an EE so this is just a guess on my part, but one that seems to be reasonable in some aspects to my limited understanding.

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Originally Posted by tz101

This, in OP...

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But, the hardware and electronics and such are running whether you "pause" the game logic or not. "Pausing" a game doesn't turn off any parts of the hardware per se. Pause just puts the code into a specific loop or condition. Not really any different than any other code. All the hardware is still chugging along.

And going onto a more advance subject, engineers tend to "turn off" things by disabling the output of a particular set of logic, instead of just plainly turning it off itself - because it's easier and cheaper and requires less logic. Unless absolutely necessary to turn it off for resource of something else.

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Originally Posted by tz101

Yes. But tapping that start/shoot button causes electronic pulses that count against lifecycle expectancies of said hardware components. Equate it to repeatedly flipping a light switch in your living room, Eventually the switch and bulb are going to go. Is the effect detrimental to internal resistors and IRC's in the slightest. I am not an EE so this is just a guess on my part, but one that seems to be reasonable in some aspects to my limited understanding.

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Again, no more than any other input. It seems like it would mess it up due to clusterfucking the game like it often does, but if anything it would just cause a glitch and freeze, nothing that would damage the hardware.

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Originally Posted by tz101

Yes. But tapping that start/shoot button causes electronic pulses that count against lifecycle expectancies of said hardware components. Equate it to repeatedly flipping a light switch in your living room, Eventually the switch and bulb are going to go. Is the effect detrimental to internal resistors and IRC's in the slightest. I am not an EE so this is just a guess on my part, but one that seems to be reasonable in some aspects to my limited understanding.

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Digital circuits don't work that way. You're thinking of write cycles in flash memory, where you have a max number of write cycles. That's because it has to inject current through a dielectric to a floating gate - you're forcing current to go where it normally doesn't. Regular circuits don't work like that at all, so the number of "cycles" they can handle if much higher than you think.

Use a little math - you worry about the 100,000 cycles a flash can do, but consider that modern CPUs run at 2 to 3 BILLION cycles PER SECOND. You can run one of those CPUs 24/7 for a couple years without trouble. So we're talking roughly 2,000,000,000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 2 = 126 QUADRILLION cycles (short scale... only idiots and Englishmen use long scale :p ).

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Originally Posted by sega fan

This. When a game is paused (rapidly slamming the button or not) the game just goes in limbo for however long it is paused. The hardware itself is not effected in the least, it just puts the game on hold.

In lamens terms, the wheel keeps spinning but the hamster is frozen in air. Just look at Chilly Willy's avatar.

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Close... I'd say it more like a hamster ball vs a hamster wheel. Playing a game is like the hamster ball - the hamster runs and the ball moves. Pause it like the hamster wheel - the hamster runs, but the wheel doesn't go anywhere.

Pause in older consoles sends to the CPU a wait or halt state. It will not wear anything out. In modern consoles it just runs a software routine.

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Originally Posted by m68k

Pause in older consoles sends to the CPU a wait or halt state.

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No it doesn't. No console does that. The CPU runs all the time, even when the game is paused. All consoles pause via software.

Heh, a twin of the AtariAge thread. ;) http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic...game-consoles/


Another thing someone pointed out there, was that the hardware polls the controller inputs far faster than even a turbo fire mechanism would ever reach.

Odd question. But I admit I used to think a similar thing when I was younger. Rapidly hitting the pause button or tapping a button repetitively playing a sound effect may damage the hardware. It's all in the software TC, it won't cause any damage doing such. A CPU is constantly running whatever state a program is in, unless it hangs.

A modern CPU in a modern console may have power-saving features. These allow some or all of the CPU subsystems to "sleep" when they aren't doing anything else. The times over which they sleep are generally the period between interrupts, which is normally measured in milliseconds. This could be DURING a game. It has nothing to do with a game being paused.