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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 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
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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.
      - justsomehnguy 4y ago
hnlmorg 4y ago
You still had to load assets into memory even on cartridge based systems. And before that you had even less memory and assets being loaded from cassette (or floppy disk, if you had cash) so it's not as if developers had to learn how to load assets from slower storage for the first time when CDs came along. In fact the Famicom (what is effectively the Japanese NES) also had a floppy disk drive. I've got it and games play fine on it. Also streaming assets from the optical drive on demand is doable too. Plenty of games (old and new) have employed this kind of hack. Lastly you haven't even got your estimations of memory right. The Sega CD had a few megabytes of dedicated RAM [edit: sorry, megabits. Still more than your estimations though]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD#Technical_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD#Technical_specificatio... I was around at that time, buying hardware, playing games and even writing my own games too. While your arguments here and your post before sound informed I'm sorry to say they're completely unfounded.
- Narishma 4y ago
  > You still had to load assets into memory even on cartridge based systems. What do you mean? Weren't the ROMs connected directly to the main bus through the cartridge port? As far as the CPU was concerned, there was no difference accessing RAM or ROM.
  - einr 4y ago
    This is correct. A system like the NES, SNES or Genesis never loaded any graphics or code into RAM unless they were doing special tricks. It was all ROM mapped into the CPU address space. Larger games, especially on systems with a 16-bit address bus (64 kbyte address space), included memory mapping hardware on the carts to swap in and out graphics as needed. It was still all in ROM.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      You couldn't use the ROM as video memory. You could swap sprites in and out of video memory via DMA to the ROM (which you can also do on the Sega CD via the extended RAM) but you still had to load them into video memory to actually do anything with them. The video chipset was the real limitation here. Also I seem to recall the DMA trick was something that came alone a little after the Mega Drives release. Though I could be wrong on that. But I vaguely recall it wasn't something people knew how to do on day one.

deleted 4y ago

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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.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago

hnlmorg 4y ago

You still had to load assets into memory even on cartridge based systems. And before that you had even less memory and assets being loaded from cassette (or floppy disk, if you had cash) so it's not as if developers had to learn how to load assets from slower storage for the first time when CDs came along. In fact the Famicom (what is effectively the Japanese NES) also had a floppy disk drive. I've got it and games play fine on it. Also streaming assets from the optical drive on demand is doable too. Plenty of games (old and new) have employed this kind of hack. Lastly you haven't even got your estimations of memory right. The Sega CD had a few megabytes of dedicated RAM [edit: sorry, megabits. Still more than your estimations though]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD#Technical_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD#Technical_specificatio... I was around at that time, buying hardware, playing games and even writing my own games too. While your arguments here and your post before sound informed I'm sorry to say they're completely unfounded.

Narishma 4y ago
> You still had to load assets into memory even on cartridge based systems. What do you mean? Weren't the ROMs connected directly to the main bus through the cartridge port? As far as the CPU was concerned, there was no difference accessing RAM or ROM.
- einr 4y ago
  This is correct. A system like the NES, SNES or Genesis never loaded any graphics or code into RAM unless they were doing special tricks. It was all ROM mapped into the CPU address space. Larger games, especially on systems with a 16-bit address bus (64 kbyte address space), included memory mapping hardware on the carts to swap in and out graphics as needed. It was still all in ROM.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    You couldn't use the ROM as video memory. You could swap sprites in and out of video memory via DMA to the ROM (which you can also do on the Sega CD via the extended RAM) but you still had to load them into video memory to actually do anything with them. The video chipset was the real limitation here. Also I seem to recall the DMA trick was something that came alone a little after the Mega Drives release. Though I could be wrong on that. But I vaguely recall it wasn't something people knew how to do on day one.