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Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

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Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#101

Post by danielheath »

beloch wrote: post #91
mook wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Y…

Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#103

Post by loeg »

eru wrote: post #77
loeg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.

I guess the path of least resistance then would have been to patch the executable to remove the check.

Right.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#104

Post by Espressosaurus »

danielheath wrote: post #101
beloch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Y…

Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.

Yeah, I remember an mp3 rating >50% CPU time on one of those early pentiums we had

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#105

Post by Espressosaurus »

beloch wrote: post #93
shmoe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.

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.

The latter.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#106

Post by notpushkin »

indrora wrote: post #65
jaredhallen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?

4-conductor audio, generally. Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.

I vaguely remember CD drives with a headphone jack output!

(E.g. this one: https://pavel.network/using-cd-drive-as-poor-man-audio-playe...)

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#107

Post by ColdStream »

mook wrote: post #81
ColdStream wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#108

Post by protimewaster »

Lammy wrote: post #70
jonhohle wrote: post #3

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

> Just don’t forget to skip track 1. There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/in…

IIRC, it's actually debatable if the pre-emphasis flag is supposed to be set. I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was discovered that there multiple releases with bit-identical audio tracks, but some of them have the flag set while others don't. They can't both be correct, because the audio data should've changed if the emphasis was removed.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#109

Post by notpushkin »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #59
fluoridation wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that CD-ROMs are pressed from glass masters, not burned like CD-Rs. I wonder if anyone has tried something like this with burned discs, though.

The multisession standard actually afforded the possibility of CD-PROM; a hybrid disc with a pressed read-only session followed by a writable section. It was only used for Kodak Picture CD (not the same as Photo CD) to hold software in the pressed session. It also apparently standardized a magneto-optical hybrid that never made it to market.

Hmm, it could work then if they’ve pressed most of the game data first and then recorded the encrypted part for each disk. But I guess the tooling for such setup would still be too expensive.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Lammy wrote: post #70
jonhohle wrote: post #3

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

> Just don’t forget to skip track 1. There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/in…

[deleted]
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