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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

#201

Post by MBCook »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #198
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…

> Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast! SNES games aged a lot less than those silly DOS games. (I mean that SNES games look more sleek and "modern" today.)

Good art lasts.

Some early PS games are truly awful. Realism of people especially didn’t work.

Others still look great. Ridge Racer, PaRappa, Jumping Flash, Ape Escape.

Same reason Mario 64 still looks good and Goldeneye doesn’t.

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

#202

Post by MBCook »

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…

Rebel Assault was the first to blow my mind. I had to have that game. That and the fully voiced version of Day of the Tentacle.

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

#203

Post by MBCook »

fipar wrote: post #170
somat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sur…

It was more than half (depending on age). I thought it always took you to 4.77 MHz to match the original 5150.

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

#204

Post by MBCook »

benj111 wrote: post #171
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…

CDROM and 386 would have been an odd combination though? My 486 had a single speed CDROM but it only had a 500mb and a 100mb hard drive, so still wasn't playing mp3s

There were lots of us. Computers were expensive as hell compared to a cd upgrade.

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

#206

Post by fipar »

nekooooo wrote: post #197
fipar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as late as in 2008 I had such a slow machine that when I had to use NetBeans and I wanted to listen to music at the same time, I'd just play music CDs with headphones plugged into the headphones port of the cdrom drive :)

jeez, were you running a cyrix 6x86 in 2008??

Nope, just a late 90s pentium running linux.

I went through a rough patch from 2002 to 2009 and couldn't afford new hardware, other than when I was finally able to get a second-hand laptop.

Before the laptop, I'd go visit customers with my pc tower and ask for peripherals when I got to their office, fun times. Well, not really, but I can laugh now ;)

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

#207

Post by Xirdus »

guhcampos wrote: post #190
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…

"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). " To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - jus…

PlayStation games had that too - not sure if all, but at least some of them. It was especially funny if the game disk failed to load as a game, but opened just fine in the PlayStation's built-in music player.

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

#208

Post by alt227 »

palmotea wrote: post #88

> By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only th…

The article doesnt say that they claim they invented it.

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

#209

Post by fipar »

MBCook wrote: post #203
fipar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sur…

It was more than half (depending on age). I thought it always took you to 4.77 MHz to match the original 5150.

I didn't know, thanks, you've sent me down a small rabbit hole reading up on this!

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

#210

Post by MBCook »

fipar wrote: post #209
MBCook wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was more than half (depending on age). I thought it always took you to 4.77 MHz to match the original 5150.

I didn't know, thanks, you've sent me down a small rabbit hole reading up on this!

Sure. I never understood it as a kid. The fact it slowed your computer always confused me since I didn’t realize it was on by default.

I didn’t learn the real purpose until long after they were gone.

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