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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

#161

Post by 4thguy »

ColdStream wrote: post #107
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.

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.

The video game Uru shipped with the sounds as ogg files. Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game

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

#162

Post by 4thguy »

raverbashing wrote: post #143
beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

Thank you for playing Wing Commander!

The most polite error message ever

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

#163

Post by anthk »

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…

mp2's files were almost usable on 386 but they used tons of space.

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

#164

Post by fizzbuzzbarbazz »

epihelix wrote: post #159
beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

Myst was the CD-ROM killer game for me. And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride. Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall hav…

..so.. ..you know about RealMyst, right? A 3d first-person adaptation of the original Myst?

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

#165

Post by austin-cheney »

beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

The first CD-ROM gaming experience I remember was the Turbo Duo console from late 1991. It came with 2 disks of games. The first and primary disk contained Bonk I, Bonk II, Gates of Thunder, and a hidden Bomberman 3. The second disk contained a combined Y's I and Y's II.

The Y's combo really stood out. You have to understand that late 1991 was still the age of 8-bit NES gaming. This game was very much an 8-bit game that could have run on the NEW and yet it also contained almost DVD quality animated cut-scenes with top quality digital audio. It really felt next level, because the quality of audio was like a studio music album and the animation quality was better than what was on television at the time. It really felt next level compared to the NES.

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

#166

Post by fizzbuzzbarbazz »

williebeek wrote: post #138
zorked wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it play the compressed version if it had the decompressed audio right there though?

Because with lossless compression you can save a lot of storage space without losing any quality. You are thinking about lossy compression.

I think you misunderstood his question.

Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed?

There's no true use case for that that I can see.

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

#167

Post by seritools »

fizzbuzzbarbazz wrote: post #164
epihelix wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myst was the CD-ROM killer game for me. And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride. Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall hav…

..so.. ..you know about RealMyst, right? A 3d first-person adaptation of the original Myst?

What's the point you're trying to make?

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

#168

Post by anthk »

olyjohn wrote: post #54
fullstop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.

Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.

Audio tracks and WAV/AU files weren't actually decoded, but straightly send to the sound card as bits. That's it, a command like

        cat file.wav > /dev/dsp
Would just work under Unix (/dev/audio under plan9/9front)

Thus, making a function for Quake to read the CD bits to the sound card would create almost no CPU usage, even less with DMA.

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

#169

Post by xtiansimon »

beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

> “In the age before … ubiquitous internet access”

For some bizarre reason when upgrading from the family Mac SE to a Quadra, I had an idea in my head cd-rom drive was unnecessary. Thankfully in less than ten years I was proven correct.

Obviously I didn’t play enough games.

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

#170

Post by fipar »

somat wrote: post #134
stevekemp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget to engage your "TURBO" button, to make the playback slightly better!

The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best…

The way I remember the turbo button it just halved the clock speed when not depressed, but it didn't bring it back to the original IBM PC's speed.

I do remember using it to make older games play less bad, but, as you say, this rarely worked, I think precisely because the speed was never the original one (I don't remember the clock speed of my first PC, but the first one with a turbo button ran at 33 MHz which I'm sure is a lot more than twice the speed of the first one; seems closer to 8x from what a quick search implies).

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