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Yeah adding a CD-ROM onto those early 16-bit consoles was doomed from the start. The megadrive and similar consoles had just a few kilobytes of RAM so they had

Yeah adding a CD-ROM onto those early 16-bit consoles was doomed from the start. The megadrive and similar consoles had just a few kilobytes of RAM so they had no hope of really loading or taking advantage of any high quality assets on the disc. You ended up with the same kinds of games and graphics but with a few full motion videos or CD audio tracks playing at times. Nintendo was planning to do a similar thing with the SNES and a CD-ROM addon but canned the whole project to instead build a new console with more memory.

danbolt 4y ago
While it didn't have as much of an impact in the west, I do think there's a lot more interesting content for the CD-ROM² add-on for the PC Engine. I sometimes wonder if the Sega CD's library would be more fondly-remembered if FMVs weren't as forefront and the extra technical abilities were more tastefully applied.
ajmurmann 4y ago
Didn't Nintendo's planned system disintegrate due to political shenanigans between them and Sony rather than technical reasons?
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  The concept system actually materialized and was pretty underwhelming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg The big issue is that most of those early consoles were designed with the expectation that games were on ROM chips directly connected to the CPU bus and mapped into memory so you wouldn't have to load all the assets in RAM (which was miniscule, a few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most). If you just bolted a CD-ROM onto that architecture it can't be mapped into memory so now you have to cache things in RAM or architect your game to allow for seeking and getting them on demand. Sony did take all the learnings from the SNES CD-ROM and used it to design the Playstation hardware. They added 2 megabytes of RAM, a huge increase over the SNES, which worked much better with games on CD-ROM.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Yeah. A good demonstration would be the CD-i version of Lost Eden, it takes up to 3 (three!!) seconds to get a response for the action. 1x (and even 2x) CD-ROMs are unbelievable slow by any modern standard. [0] https://youtu.be/evZw8WFqQ5g?t=398 https://youtu.be/evZw8WFqQ5g?t=398 (6:38)
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      Slower to load compared to cartridges, yes. But that doesn't mean they cannot be used in place of cartridges. The fact that Lost Eden and the Sega CD exists is proof that systems could handle CD-based games just fine. And as I've said elsewhere, we were loading games off cassette and floppy disk in the 80s so writing games that had to support slower access times wasn't exactly a new concept. The reason the Sega CD tanked was because you had to buy two games consoles (the Mega Drive + Sega CD) just to use it. The fact that Sega CD games had no copy protection probably didn't help much either (the Famicom Disk System suffered a similar problem there too).
      - justsomehnguy 4y ago
        > Slower to load compared to cartridges Access time. You loaded from the cassette, but once loaded you didn't need it. CD-ROM games (like LE) needs to access the disk for everything and with an already minuscule RAM you can't cache anything. I played LE on the PC (and with 2x drive and SMARTDRV) and I don't remember such big lags, though it was 25 years ago so of course my memory could deceive me. Of course if you can find some balance not using the CD all the time then of course it could greatly enchance the experience. Syummary: yeah, they could be used, but access time was another small, but a nail in the coffin, at least IMO.
        hnlmorg 4y ago
        > Access time. You loaded from the cassette, but once loaded you didn't need it. CD-ROM games (like LE) needs to access the disk for everything and with an already minuscule RAM you can't cache anything. I was specifically on about load times. As already discussed several times in this thread, most CD-ROM games systems had onboard RAM to solve the access time problem (Sega CD especially so). Sure there might be some outliers of bad CD systems, but there’s also bad cartridge systems too (like Amstrads attempt at rebranding the CPC 646 architecture as a games console). You simply cannot compare the worst CD systems against the best cartridge systems if you want a sensible discussion. > I played LE on the PC (and with 2x drive and SMARTDRV) and I don't remember such big lags, though it was 25 years ago so of course my memory could deceive me. I’ve not played LE so cannot comment on that game specifically but there are such things as bad console ports of good PC games even on consoles that are technically capable of playing the game well. I own a few examples of this myself. It’s far better not to compare one game and make a conclusion based off that in isolation. > Syummary: yeah, they could be used, but access time was another small, but a nail in the coffin, at least IMO. Again, the Sega CD had a large on board RAM. I have a Sega CD (well, the Mega CD because it’s PAL) and games play fine on it. I wish HN wouldn’t perpetuate this complete fallacy that console CD addons were as limited as their host systems. It’s completely false. I even have the hardware to prove it.
Longlius 4y ago
The CD-ROM format was a godsend for certain genres of games. RPGs could pack a ton more content into a CD and even games that weren't like that could be made better thanks to the co-processor on the SegaCD.
gwbas1c 4y ago
CDs were cheaper to manufacture, but the tradeoff was that the CD-ROM consoles were more expensive.
mikepavone 4y ago
The Sega CD actually had a fair bit of RAM in it for the time. 512 KiB dedicated to the second 68K, 256KiB that could be swapped between the two processors or split into two 128 KiB banks with each processor getting one of those and 64 KiB of PCM RAM (there's also a little RAM for the CD-ROM drive's buffer and some battery backed up RAM for saves, but those aren't directly useful for game assets). The library is very much a mixed bag, but I think a large part of that was game developers needing time to figure out what to do with all the extra space. The largest cartridge released during the Genesis/Mega Drive's heyday was only 5 MiB and most were a fair bit smaller than that. CD-ROM gave you two orders of magnitude more storage. The other problem is that Sega of America didn't believe there was much demand for RPGs in the US so while there were quite a lot of them released for the system in Japan, only a few of them made it here. I think the main thing that did it in was the cost though. CD-ROM drives themselves weren't cheap at the time, all the RAM wasn't cheap and neither was all the extra hardware they stuffed in there. The much more modest CD add-on for the PC Engine/TG-16 sold almost as many units despite the base console being much less popular than the Genesis/Mega Drive and it seems likely that hardware costs were a major factor in that.
hnlmorg 4y ago
That's not really a fair assessment of CDs. There were lots of advantages: + CD audio (this advantage cannot be overstated given the limitations of sound chips of that era + higher storage (cartridges were very limiting. It's why Sonic 3 was originally split over two carts (Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles) + Cheaper to produce The issue wasn't that the world wasn't ready for CD-based consoles. The issue was that it was effectively buying a whole new console as an addon to an existing console. In fact the Sega CD had it's own RAM, CPU and graphics processor too. I cannot blame families for not buying the Sega CD because why would you when you already had the Mega Drive? So the issue wasn't a lack of technical capabilities. It was just that it was an expense too many for most people. As an aside, I do have a Mega CD (PAL) and a bunch of games hooked up in my games room. It's a great system. I love it. However I got it when it was cheap retro hardware (before the 16bit retro market exploded). I love collecting hardware and even I wouldn't have paid release prices for it at the time.

danbolt 4y ago

While it didn't have as much of an impact in the west, I do think there's a lot more interesting content for the CD-ROM² add-on for the PC Engine. I sometimes wonder if the Sega CD's library would be more fondly-remembered if FMVs weren't as forefront and the extra technical abilities were more tastefully applied.

ajmurmann 4y ago

Didn't Nintendo's planned system disintegrate due to political shenanigans between them and Sony rather than technical reasons?

qbasic_forever 4y ago
The concept system actually materialized and was pretty underwhelming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg The big issue is that most of those early consoles were designed with the expectation that games were on ROM chips directly connected to the CPU bus and mapped into memory so you wouldn't have to load all the assets in RAM (which was miniscule, a few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most). If you just bolted a CD-ROM onto that architecture it can't be mapped into memory so now you have to cache things in RAM or architect your game to allow for seeking and getting them on demand. Sony did take all the learnings from the SNES CD-ROM and used it to design the Playstation hardware. They added 2 megabytes of RAM, a huge increase over the SNES, which worked much better with games on CD-ROM.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Yeah. A good demonstration would be the CD-i version of Lost Eden, it takes up to 3 (three!!) seconds to get a response for the action. 1x (and even 2x) CD-ROMs are unbelievable slow by any modern standard. [0] https://youtu.be/evZw8WFqQ5g?t=398 https://youtu.be/evZw8WFqQ5g?t=398 (6:38)
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    Slower to load compared to cartridges, yes. But that doesn't mean they cannot be used in place of cartridges. The fact that Lost Eden and the Sega CD exists is proof that systems could handle CD-based games just fine. And as I've said elsewhere, we were loading games off cassette and floppy disk in the 80s so writing games that had to support slower access times wasn't exactly a new concept. The reason the Sega CD tanked was because you had to buy two games consoles (the Mega Drive + Sega CD) just to use it. The fact that Sega CD games had no copy protection probably didn't help much either (the Famicom Disk System suffered a similar problem there too).
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      > Slower to load compared to cartridges Access time. You loaded from the cassette, but once loaded you didn't need it. CD-ROM games (like LE) needs to access the disk for everything and with an already minuscule RAM you can't cache anything. I played LE on the PC (and with 2x drive and SMARTDRV) and I don't remember such big lags, though it was 25 years ago so of course my memory could deceive me. Of course if you can find some balance not using the CD all the time then of course it could greatly enchance the experience. Syummary: yeah, they could be used, but access time was another small, but a nail in the coffin, at least IMO.
      - hnlmorg 4y ago
        > Access time. You loaded from the cassette, but once loaded you didn't need it. CD-ROM games (like LE) needs to access the disk for everything and with an already minuscule RAM you can't cache anything. I was specifically on about load times. As already discussed several times in this thread, most CD-ROM games systems had onboard RAM to solve the access time problem (Sega CD especially so). Sure there might be some outliers of bad CD systems, but there’s also bad cartridge systems too (like Amstrads attempt at rebranding the CPC 646 architecture as a games console). You simply cannot compare the worst CD systems against the best cartridge systems if you want a sensible discussion. > I played LE on the PC (and with 2x drive and SMARTDRV) and I don't remember such big lags, though it was 25 years ago so of course my memory could deceive me. I’ve not played LE so cannot comment on that game specifically but there are such things as bad console ports of good PC games even on consoles that are technically capable of playing the game well. I own a few examples of this myself. It’s far better not to compare one game and make a conclusion based off that in isolation. > Syummary: yeah, they could be used, but access time was another small, but a nail in the coffin, at least IMO. Again, the Sega CD had a large on board RAM. I have a Sega CD (well, the Mega CD because it’s PAL) and games play fine on it. I wish HN wouldn’t perpetuate this complete fallacy that console CD addons were as limited as their host systems. It’s completely false. I even have the hardware to prove it.

Longlius 4y ago

The CD-ROM format was a godsend for certain genres of games. RPGs could pack a ton more content into a CD and even games that weren't like that could be made better thanks to the co-processor on the SegaCD.

gwbas1c 4y ago

CDs were cheaper to manufacture, but the tradeoff was that the CD-ROM consoles were more expensive.

mikepavone 4y ago

The Sega CD actually had a fair bit of RAM in it for the time. 512 KiB dedicated to the second 68K, 256KiB that could be swapped between the two processors or split into two 128 KiB banks with each processor getting one of those and 64 KiB of PCM RAM (there's also a little RAM for the CD-ROM drive's buffer and some battery backed up RAM for saves, but those aren't directly useful for game assets). The library is very much a mixed bag, but I think a large part of that was game developers needing time to figure out what to do with all the extra space. The largest cartridge released during the Genesis/Mega Drive's heyday was only 5 MiB and most were a fair bit smaller than that. CD-ROM gave you two orders of magnitude more storage. The other problem is that Sega of America didn't believe there was much demand for RPGs in the US so while there were quite a lot of them released for the system in Japan, only a few of them made it here. I think the main thing that did it in was the cost though. CD-ROM drives themselves weren't cheap at the time, all the RAM wasn't cheap and neither was all the extra hardware they stuffed in there. The much more modest CD add-on for the PC Engine/TG-16 sold almost as many units despite the base console being much less popular than the Genesis/Mega Drive and it seems likely that hardware costs were a major factor in that.

hnlmorg 4y ago

That's not really a fair assessment of CDs. There were lots of advantages: + CD audio (this advantage cannot be overstated given the limitations of sound chips of that era + higher storage (cartridges were very limiting. It's why Sonic 3 was originally split over two carts (Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles) + Cheaper to produce The issue wasn't that the world wasn't ready for CD-based consoles. The issue was that it was effectively buying a whole new console as an addon to an existing console. In fact the Sega CD had it's own RAM, CPU and graphics processor too. I cannot blame families for not buying the Sega CD because why would you when you already had the Mega Drive? So the issue wasn't a lack of technical capabilities. It was just that it was an expense too many for most people. As an aside, I do have a Mega CD (PAL) and a bunch of games hooked up in my games room. It's a great system. I love it. However I got it when it was cheap retro hardware (before the 16bit retro market exploded). I love collecting hardware and even I wouldn't have paid release prices for it at the time.