| ▲ | beloch 8 hours ago |
| "For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast! In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's. |
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| ▲ | gbil 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Ah Phantasmagoria, that was an interesting case with my CDROM drive at the time, I think it was a Mitsumi one and there was a compatibility issue with specific discs from the 7disc bundle, so I buy the game, going home and start playing with some friends - that was common practice back then - we finish day 1 and I enter the 2nd disc and the FMV is choppy as hell! Try again and again and again and I assume the disc is problematic, so we go back to the shop and they ask what CDROM drive I have, I say Mitsumi and they tell me that it is a known issue with some drives and there is no workaround, so they offer to exchange the game for a different one, oh this "Harvester" game looks intriguing :) Fun times! |
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| ▲ | ColdStream 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I find it so funny that there are new games that are are smaller than Wing Commander 3 despite the 32 year gap. To be fair, they obviously pack their data very differently. |
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| ▲ | mook 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Meh, in the early days of DVDs I recall a game that came with uncompressed 48kHz audio. Compress it to mp3 (which the game naively accepted if you had the correct Windows filters) and it fits in a CD. | | |
| ▲ | beloch 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game. | | |
| ▲ | zorked 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | For reference: I had a 486 DX2 66 MHz, and I played MP3s by decoding them in batch to PCM and then playing that as it couldn't really do that in real time. Perhaps only if you didn't do anything else and the MP3 was low bitrate enough and ideally mono. | | |
| ▲ | Sesse__ 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | MP3 decoders have, thankfully, gotten faster since the 90s. But yes, a 66MHz is pushing it indeed. |
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| ▲ | danielheath 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency. | | |
| ▲ | orhmeh09 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I never noticed any problems, but I did have the mmx version. It wasn't fast but never did the playback stutter , even with dreamweaver and several browser windows | |
| ▲ | Espressosaurus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, I remember an mp3 rating >50% CPU time on one of those early pentiums we had | | |
| ▲ | vanviegen 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah. Seeing that made me very happy, being the proud owner of a dual CPU (no, not dual core!) AMD K6. :-) |
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| ▲ | stevekemp 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | And don't forget to engage your "TURBO" button, to make the playback slightly better! | | |
| ▲ | somat 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best to reboot? I sort of hate whatever marketing genius figured out to label it "Turbo" instead of "Slow" But they definitely earned their bonus. The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose. |
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| ▲ | ColdStream 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When Metal Gear Solid 4 released on Ps3, they used uncompressed audio. I think part of it was just to show off how much storage Blu Ray had. The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running. | | |
| ▲ | zorked 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Why would it play the compressed version if it had the decompressed audio right there though? |
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| ▲ | kbelder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They're doing that with Blueray games now, writing gigabytes of uncompressed audio for no particular reason other than to use up space and sucker the occasional audiophile. |
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| ▲ | NopIdoN 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs |
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| ▲ | shmoe 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today. |
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| ▲ | beloch 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Chris Roberts is still doing his thing. Elite:Dangerous is still getting updates and there's also Star Citizen/Squadron 42, both of which could either turn out to be epoch-defining or fusterclucks of truly epic proportions. | | |
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