The PC-Engine CD-ROM was excellent. But I never was aware of it back when it was alive. But it contrasts with the Sega CD and the proposed SNES CD which both wanted to not just add a CD-ROM drive but also shoehorn extra features on. I think that was a mistake with the PC-Engine's successful CD-ROM as support for the argument. All the PC-Engine device did was allow massive storage and redbook audio. The amount of RAM available was upgradable by the user with just a new HuCard. The Sega CD I think might have done better if it took the same approach just being access to the storage medium and starting with whatever an economical amount of RAM was at the time and allowing a new cartridge with more RAM to be added later on. They didn't need another 68000, additional sound channels, the sprite zooming or whatever graphical effect it had. Maybe then the add-on would have been significantly cheaper and done better. Or perhaps without the cost of the additional enhancements they could have put the money where it would have made more of a difference, more RAM. They still needed to have better direction like away from the shitty FMV craze, but it would have had a better chance I think. It's interesting when you see all they managed to pack into SNES games and all the compressions used in those games to fit it all in. What could they have done if they had CD-ROM storage? And with CD Audio for music they could have freed up precious Sound RAM for more or higher quality sound samples. The Playstation and Saturn don't really need any credit for bringing CDs into mainstream as I think everyone (but Nintendo) could see Cartridges were a dead end now and that CD was the only way to go. By the way, I think that PC-Engine CD-ROM had only 64Kb of RAM (half a megabit), and the Super CDROM upgrade had only 256Kb of RAM (2 megabits). The Arcade CDROM upgrade card brought you up to I believe 2048Kb, a massive 16 megabits. Games like Sapphire using the arcade upgrade showed off some of the beautiful animation you could do with all that RAM combined with CD storage. One other point is that I'm not really sure what the cost was for the PCE/TG16 approach to CD-ROM, but in the 16-bit era it was really too expensive for more people. Though I heard the Turbo DUO was supposed to address that issue but I have no idea how well it actually did.
From what I understand the PSX is what the SNES CD was going to be. If that's the case then I dunno....
regarded to the little amount of data the single-speed cd had to read from the disc into the memory, it isn't that surprising anymore games like Gate of Thunder feeling like played from a normal cartridge. later when you had the 2 MegaByte ACD add-on, it was a bit different story. altough those 2MB shouldn't take that very long either. @150 KByte/s = approx 13 secs.
far from it, in name only. The released version of the PS1 is not to be confused with the various PSX projects. Those weren't conceived with 3D in mind for the most part, not in the way that the PS1 was, despite lacking an FPU.
one big flaw of the sega cd was not uping the colors. if they bumped i to at least 256 thing would have been much better.
The Mega Drive had 512 colours, 64 on screen, if I remember correctly.. Though if you mean 256 on screen at once, then do excuse me
Wikipedia tells me.. Colors onscreen: Maximum of 482 (241 background, 241 sprite) Palettes: Maximum of 32 (16 for background tiles, 16 for sprites) from an available 512.
My father brought home an external SCSI CD-burner from work, that thing was HUGE and EXPENSIVE! Media was expensive too!
My first PC (A tandy) didnt even have CD-rom drive, I think we ended up installing Windows 95 from a Floppy Disk. Oh, the days where my Mom could upgrade the computer with ram and an operating system, sooo different.
I remember the days before we had a cd drive and all about my house where shed loads of floppy for PC hardware we no longer had as well as amiga games...etc. I remember the first CD burner we got, it took an age to burn discs but it was great. I even still have a DVD-RAM drive which takes those dvd's in a cartridge case simmilar to MD or even UMD but larger. The main attraction of CD in the early days for me was the storage space available and the fact you could fit tons more content on them for level/content in games.
Yeah! I remember the exact moment when I first witnessed a CD being burned. A cousin of mine burned me a mix CD featuring The Cars and Presidents of the United States of America. And a little Queen. It blew my mind! Those were the days... :lol:
Mentioning the Saturn or PSX in this thread is just cheating. The first CD game I remember being impressive to me as a little Star Wars fan was Rebel Assault on PC. It looked really awesome for the most part, even though the parts taken from the movies were pixellated even then. Too bad I soon found out the gameplay wasn't too great, even though the presentation was. Overall, it seemed that CD-ROM, much like 3D graphics later, seemed to be something developers didn't know how to use properly for a few years, and the early CD consoles (CD-i, SCD, and for the most part the 3DO) were just filled with "interactive movie" crap, which was short on the interaction and hilariously bad on the movie side of things.
Actually, the CD-ROM is 25 years old. The Yellow Book (CD-ROM) standard was published in 1985. It wasn't seen in a games console until very late 1988, though. One of the first CD-based gaming experiences available in the UK (remembering PCs were for the rich in the 1980s and CD-ROM was very uncommon in homes) was the Codemasters Game Pack, released in 1990 for various home computers including the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It relied on a CD player, which connected to the computer via an included interface cable, and played high speed audio tracks (the sound was sped up to compress the data on the disc). Whilst not a CD-ROM, this was the first CD gaming technology that made me go "Wow!" I can't help but chuckle at some of the answers here - machines released almost 10 years into the CD-ROM's life! Here's a bit of a timeline: Red Book (CD-DA standard) - 1980 First CD pressed - 1981 Sony CDP-101 (first CD player) - 1982 First CD sold - 1982 Yellow Book (CD-ROM standard) - 1985 Philips CM-100 (first CD-ROM drive) - 1985 PC-Engine CD-ROM - late 1988 FM Towns - 1989 Codemasters Game Pack (audio CD, not CD-ROM) - 1990 FM Towns Marty - 1991 Commodore CDTV - 1991 Philips CD-i - 1991 Mega CD - late 1991 White Book (VCD standard) - 1993 Amiga CD32 - 1993 3DO - 1993 Sega Saturn - late 1994 Neo Geo CD - 1994 Sony Playstation - late 1994 NEC PC-FX - late 1994 Atari Jaguar CD - 1995 (Dreamcast, GameCube, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 don't use CD - they're DVD or proprietary formats!) Before the FM Towns, there weren't really many PC CD games... and only a handful of PC-Engine CD-ROM games. As you can see, technically those who answer Saturn and Playstation are talking about some of the LAST CD-ROM consoles! The 'young days' were really the 80s, although for gaming purposes you could argue early 90s, too. Yamaha CD-E100? I'm STILL looking for one of those! lol
the PCEs palette and color management was its BIG advantage vs. the MD. but then, the MD had real parallax in contrary. the PCE had to use huge sprite tiles or other tricks (simple line sync, etc.) to do parallax.
