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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 flo

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
  [deleted]
einr 4y ago
Lastly you haven't even got your estimations of memory right. The Sega CD had a few megabytes of dedicated RAM (which is at least an order of magnitude more than you claimed) 6 megabits = 768 kilobytes.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> The Sega CD had a few megabytes of dedicated RAM (which is at least an order of magnitude more than you claimed) It added 6 megabits of RAM. The order of magnitude is forgetting to divide by 8. And the SNES-CD that they were talking about only added a 256KB ram bank onto a main memory of 128KB. Playstation had 2 megabytes of main memory, and >1.5 in other chunks.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  > It added 6 megabits of RAM. The order of magnitude is forgetting to divide by 8. Ack dang it. You're right. Though even at 8Mb it's still significantly greater than the GP's estimations. > And the SNES-CD that they were talking about only added a 256KB ram bank onto a main memory of 128KB. The SNES CD was cancelled with only one known prototype made. One could speculate whether those specifications would have made it to the final console or not had the project continued but it would be pure speculation. So I don't think it's all that constructive to compare the SNES CD with the Sega CD.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Ack dang it. You're right. Though even at 8Mb it's still significantly greater than the GP's estimations. Well also the specific phrase of "few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most" was about ROM-based systems.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      But there were systems in that realm that weren't ROM based. In fact in the 80s it was more common for systems to load from slower media like floppy disk or cassette than it was from ROM cartridge. I'm not denying that the access speed of optical media was definitely noticable (than and now) and required designing games a little differently to cartridge based systems, but the GP's claim that it was a deal breaker is completely false. And I have a collection of Mega CD (PAL) games sat behind me that demonstrate just how good the device really was. As well as Famicom FDD games. And games for various Commodore, Amstrad, Acorn, Atari, Sinclair and IBM-compatible PC systems too. The downfall of the Mega CD had nothing to do with CD access times.

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
[deleted]

einr 4y ago

Lastly you haven't even got your estimations of memory right. The Sega CD had a few megabytes of dedicated RAM (which is at least an order of magnitude more than you claimed) 6 megabits = 768 kilobytes.

Dylan16807 4y ago

> The Sega CD had a few megabytes of dedicated RAM (which is at least an order of magnitude more than you claimed) It added 6 megabits of RAM. The order of magnitude is forgetting to divide by 8. And the SNES-CD that they were talking about only added a 256KB ram bank onto a main memory of 128KB. Playstation had 2 megabytes of main memory, and >1.5 in other chunks.

hnlmorg 4y ago
> It added 6 megabits of RAM. The order of magnitude is forgetting to divide by 8. Ack dang it. You're right. Though even at 8Mb it's still significantly greater than the GP's estimations. > And the SNES-CD that they were talking about only added a 256KB ram bank onto a main memory of 128KB. The SNES CD was cancelled with only one known prototype made. One could speculate whether those specifications would have made it to the final console or not had the project continued but it would be pure speculation. So I don't think it's all that constructive to compare the SNES CD with the Sega CD.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Ack dang it. You're right. Though even at 8Mb it's still significantly greater than the GP's estimations. Well also the specific phrase of "few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most" was about ROM-based systems.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    But there were systems in that realm that weren't ROM based. In fact in the 80s it was more common for systems to load from slower media like floppy disk or cassette than it was from ROM cartridge. I'm not denying that the access speed of optical media was definitely noticable (than and now) and required designing games a little differently to cartridge based systems, but the GP's claim that it was a deal breaker is completely false. And I have a collection of Mega CD (PAL) games sat behind me that demonstrate just how good the device really was. As well as Famicom FDD games. And games for various Commodore, Amstrad, Acorn, Atari, Sinclair and IBM-compatible PC systems too. The downfall of the Mega CD had nothing to do with CD access times.