The CD-ROM: An LGR Retrospective
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
nicolashrv
It's really weird to recall we had times with no internet, no STEAM, no nothing. if you wanted to find out about a game, you had to buy computer magazines, sometimes they had CD demos of some games. I remember the MICROMANIA from Spain sharing BASIC softwares and game-hackers in order to achieve extralife, full ammo and all that BS on some earlier games. Such awesome games and software. I remember one called BANNER which allowed you to design and print greeting cards and banners (d'oh, and of course you had those old printers which made a huge noise and took like 2min per page to print. games like CASTLE MASTER 2 (one of the first real 3D games I ever recall. NEBULUS. all those awesome DOS games. SOKOBAN.
And that's the charm of all of that era. you didn't had access to all of the new stuff, nor variety of games, so each time you grabbed a game, you played it untill squeeze all the juice out. Take DOOM for example. you played it around 5hs a day after school, finding hidden chambers, tricks, secrets, etc. and then next day you went school to share your discoveries, to see who else discovered something new.
Then a huge boom of gaming: someone learned how to deconstruct and edit Wolfenstein 3D and later DOOM. you could basically modify yourself the games and change enemies (I remember a DOOM ALIEN mod, way before the AVP game arrived) or the famous PORN DOOM.
Today all went to hell. games became too linear and have twice the cutscenes, sometimes they waste more time than the actual game. all are clones of DOOM. franchises ruined due to bestsellers (like Prince of Persia, which was killed by making a clone of Tomb Raider after PoP2. or the Commandos franchise ruined by trying to make a FPS due to the success of the Call of Duty franchise)
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It's really weird to recall we had times with no internet, no STEAM, no nothing. if you wanted to find out about a game, you had to buy computer magazines, sometimes they had CD demos of some games. I remember the MICROMANIA from Spain sharing BASIC softwares and game-hackers in order to achieve extralife, full ammo and all that BS on some earlier games. Such awesome games and software. I remember one called BANNER which allowed you to design and print greeting cards and banners (d'oh, and of course you had those old printers which made a huge noise and took like 2min per page to print. games like CASTLE MASTER 2 (one of the first real 3D games I ever recall. NEBULUS. all those awesome DOS games. SOKOBAN.
And that's the charm of all of that era. you didn't had access to all of the new stuff, nor variety of games, so each time you grabbed a game, you played it untill squeeze all the juice out. Take DOOM for example. you played it around 5hs a day after school, finding hidden chambers, tricks, secrets, etc. and then next day you went school to share your discoveries, to see who else discovered something new.
Then a huge boom of gaming: someone learned how to deconstruct and edit Wolfenstein 3D and later DOOM. you could basically modify yourself the games and change enemies (I remember a DOOM ALIEN mod, way before the AVP game arrived) or the famous PORN DOOM.
Today all went to hell. games became too linear and have twice the cutscenes, sometimes they waste more time than the actual game. all are clones of DOOM. franchises ruined due to bestsellers (like Prince of Persia, which was killed by making a clone of Tomb Raider after PoP2. or the Commandos franchise ruined by trying to make a FPS due to the success of the Call of Duty franchise)
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Achilleas
When multimedia computers became easy with windows 95 the largest size of most hard disks was less than a Gigabyte. At the same period CD ROM drivers became affordable. The 650 Mbyte of a CD ROMs was a huge step from the 1. 44 Mbyte of floppy disks and opened new wonderful horizons to the software and game developers.
The step from floppy disks to CD ROMs was not only enormous but safe too. Until early 2000, CD Recordable drives were very expensive for ordinary users and the copy of games and software wasn't an easy and cheap task as with floppy disks, data cassettes or even paper tapes.
Without doubt the CD ROM boosted the computer industry, many years before the spread of internet. Before the wide spread of CD ROM there was the Zip drive with 100 Mbyte but wasn't adopted by game or software companies.
CD ROM was more robust. Floppy disk could be demagnetized easily and the contact with the heads of floppy disk drivers was unavoidably destructive after prolonged constant use.
CD ROMs aren't touched by anything and with some normal precautions against dust and scratches can be used constantly for ever.
I remember well that era. It was very romantic.
The advent of DVD ROM and Bly-ray was less impressive.
reply
When multimedia computers became easy with windows 95 the largest size of most hard disks was less than a Gigabyte. At the same period CD ROM drivers became affordable. The 650 Mbyte of a CD ROMs was a huge step from the 1. 44 Mbyte of floppy disks and opened new wonderful horizons to the software and game developers.
The step from floppy disks to CD ROMs was not only enormous but safe too. Until early 2000, CD Recordable drives were very expensive for ordinary users and the copy of games and software wasn't an easy and cheap task as with floppy disks, data cassettes or even paper tapes.
Without doubt the CD ROM boosted the computer industry, many years before the spread of internet. Before the wide spread of CD ROM there was the Zip drive with 100 Mbyte but wasn't adopted by game or software companies.
CD ROM was more robust. Floppy disk could be demagnetized easily and the contact with the heads of floppy disk drivers was unavoidably destructive after prolonged constant use.
CD ROMs aren't touched by anything and with some normal precautions against dust and scratches can be used constantly for ever.
I remember well that era. It was very romantic.
The advent of DVD ROM and Bly-ray was less impressive.
reply
Jonathan
5: 22; I played the crap out of Diablo and even more so Diablo II. As far as disc formats go I'm all about Blu Ray they don't scratch very easily even when they are shipped in the mail and had come loose in the disc case. What I find frustrating is that there is no reliable free software to just pop in a Blu ray into a PC and watch a movie. I bought a blu ray drive and I can't really use it as I had intended. They have been out for a long time now, why can't they just be thrown in a PC and watched without issue! Would be nice to be able to do so so I could use my headphones and amplifier to watch things.
I know that wasn't really the topic of the video, but just what it made me think of. I feel like physical PC releases of games are almost completely gone too. I bought a physical copy of a game a year or so ago, but it's just a PC DVD rom and the rest of the game has to be installed on your PC, games these days are too large for even DVDs. I do like to get my games physically for PS4 though.
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5: 22; I played the crap out of Diablo and even more so Diablo II. As far as disc formats go I'm all about Blu Ray they don't scratch very easily even when they are shipped in the mail and had come loose in the disc case. What I find frustrating is that there is no reliable free software to just pop in a Blu ray into a PC and watch a movie. I bought a blu ray drive and I can't really use it as I had intended. They have been out for a long time now, why can't they just be thrown in a PC and watched without issue! Would be nice to be able to do so so I could use my headphones and amplifier to watch things.
I know that wasn't really the topic of the video, but just what it made me think of. I feel like physical PC releases of games are almost completely gone too. I bought a physical copy of a game a year or so ago, but it's just a PC DVD rom and the rest of the game has to be installed on your PC, games these days are too large for even DVDs. I do like to get my games physically for PS4 though.
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fattomandeibu
Talking of shovelware, I have tons of old Amiga Format and Commodore Format cover disks/CDs/tapes.
The Format series were computer magazines published by Future Publishing in England from the '80s and '90s for pretty much all major and some minor home computer formats, and had a tape, disk or CD on the cover every time. Those disks/tapes are full of shareware, PD and the odd bit of pirated stuff(games, utilities and the CDs even had OS upgrades, and were an absolute goldmine when I was younger, especially those Amiga CDs since Amiga games were usually 2-4mb in size, they always had awesome stuff they'd just plucked from t'internet.
Not sure how interesting those'd be to anyone else, though. Especially since an Amiga CD drive would be required to run some of them, and the C64 ones are all tapes.
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Talking of shovelware, I have tons of old Amiga Format and Commodore Format cover disks/CDs/tapes.
The Format series were computer magazines published by Future Publishing in England from the '80s and '90s for pretty much all major and some minor home computer formats, and had a tape, disk or CD on the cover every time. Those disks/tapes are full of shareware, PD and the odd bit of pirated stuff(games, utilities and the CDs even had OS upgrades, and were an absolute goldmine when I was younger, especially those Amiga CDs since Amiga games were usually 2-4mb in size, they always had awesome stuff they'd just plucked from t'internet.
Not sure how interesting those'd be to anyone else, though. Especially since an Amiga CD drive would be required to run some of them, and the C64 ones are all tapes.
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QuantumBraced
What's interesting is for a long time in the 90s, a CD was either larger or a very significant portion of the average HDD size. Many people had a 200MB - 1GB HDD and a CD-ROM drive, and many dreamed of having an HDD the size of a CD, which is silly to think about now. Back then HDD storage was expensive and badly needed, meanwhile CDs were cheap. So when the first CD burners came out, it was this amazing thing that could basically back up your entire HDD almost for free, like suddenly you had access to tons of free storage. CDs just sort of preempted Moore's Law in a way, they first came out in the early 1980s when 600-700MB of data was an INSANE amount, yet they were relatively cheap. I can't think of another example of something like this.
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What's interesting is for a long time in the 90s, a CD was either larger or a very significant portion of the average HDD size. Many people had a 200MB - 1GB HDD and a CD-ROM drive, and many dreamed of having an HDD the size of a CD, which is silly to think about now. Back then HDD storage was expensive and badly needed, meanwhile CDs were cheap. So when the first CD burners came out, it was this amazing thing that could basically back up your entire HDD almost for free, like suddenly you had access to tons of free storage. CDs just sort of preempted Moore's Law in a way, they first came out in the early 1980s when 600-700MB of data was an INSANE amount, yet they were relatively cheap. I can't think of another example of something like this.
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lwvmobile
I too, purchased my first game on CD-ROM before even owning a CD-ROM drive. Purely by accident actually, but it was Police Quest 2 and I bought it at K-Mart on discount or clearance, fully intending to play it on my Zenith Datasystem 32 286 computer. Sadly though, that didn't have a CD-ROM drive in it, and I was 12 then, so I didn't know what I was doing just yet. Didn't get a CD capable computer until I was 14. Upgrading to a brand new shiny Acer Aspire K6-2 300Mhz Windows 98 Computer with a 3GB HDD and 32MB of RAM. Then I could play the game, but it ran TOO FAST. Had to find a software CPU throttling download to make it work.
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I too, purchased my first game on CD-ROM before even owning a CD-ROM drive. Purely by accident actually, but it was Police Quest 2 and I bought it at K-Mart on discount or clearance, fully intending to play it on my Zenith Datasystem 32 286 computer. Sadly though, that didn't have a CD-ROM drive in it, and I was 12 then, so I didn't know what I was doing just yet. Didn't get a CD capable computer until I was 14. Upgrading to a brand new shiny Acer Aspire K6-2 300Mhz Windows 98 Computer with a 3GB HDD and 32MB of RAM. Then I could play the game, but it ran TOO FAST. Had to find a software CPU throttling download to make it work.
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fanjoy
What's the best way to back up games on CD-ROM? I've been trying to create ISOs of some old discs, but most of them don't co-operate. They get stuck near the beginning of the process, and I seem to get the same error on all the discs that fail, so I don't think it's just scratches. I've tried them in multiple different drives. Is it some kind of copy protection? Is there some way around it? Strangely I've never had any issues doing this with games on DVD, even ones that only use disc presence as copy protection. I've been looking but haven't been able to find any solutions yet, so I'd appreciate it if anyone has any insights!
reply
What's the best way to back up games on CD-ROM? I've been trying to create ISOs of some old discs, but most of them don't co-operate. They get stuck near the beginning of the process, and I seem to get the same error on all the discs that fail, so I don't think it's just scratches. I've tried them in multiple different drives. Is it some kind of copy protection? Is there some way around it? Strangely I've never had any issues doing this with games on DVD, even ones that only use disc presence as copy protection. I've been looking but haven't been able to find any solutions yet, so I'd appreciate it if anyone has any insights!
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scottcol23
My first Audio CD was Ace Of Bass. But I remember my father getting Michael Jackson Bad on CD when it was new. For CD ROM. We got our first one installed in a IBM PS/1 486DX (the kind with floppy drives behind a flip down door. I believe the first CD ROM we ever used was the Windows 95 upgrade from 3. 11. Oh the memories. Im glad my father was a tech nerd. we got all the new fangled tech right away. It wasnt until I started to watch your videos, that I realized I had been spoiled AF as a kid when it came to computers. I had my first computer in my room when I was in 6th grade. (1994) it was a IBP pc compatible 386 33mhz
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My first Audio CD was Ace Of Bass. But I remember my father getting Michael Jackson Bad on CD when it was new. For CD ROM. We got our first one installed in a IBM PS/1 486DX (the kind with floppy drives behind a flip down door. I believe the first CD ROM we ever used was the Windows 95 upgrade from 3. 11. Oh the memories. Im glad my father was a tech nerd. we got all the new fangled tech right away. It wasnt until I started to watch your videos, that I realized I had been spoiled AF as a kid when it came to computers. I had my first computer in my room when I was in 6th grade. (1994) it was a IBP pc compatible 386 33mhz
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Michel
To me, the CD vs. cartridge format war that characterized the 5th console generation symbolized a tug of war between -living, breathing worlds- and -pick up 'n play, - with the former philosophy winning out over time (albeit at the cost of seamlessness, i. e. little to no downtime from load times. Now, with SSDs and larger memory pools gracing the PS5, XS, and newer PCs, it seems like we're getting closer to reconciling both -living, breathing worlds- and -pick up 'n play. - The newest challenge, however, will be storage space, as we've seen with the likes of the latest COD and Medal of Honor releases.
reply
To me, the CD vs. cartridge format war that characterized the 5th console generation symbolized a tug of war between -living, breathing worlds- and -pick up 'n play, - with the former philosophy winning out over time (albeit at the cost of seamlessness, i. e. little to no downtime from load times. Now, with SSDs and larger memory pools gracing the PS5, XS, and newer PCs, it seems like we're getting closer to reconciling both -living, breathing worlds- and -pick up 'n play. - The newest challenge, however, will be storage space, as we've seen with the likes of the latest COD and Medal of Honor releases.
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Achilleas
The CD ROM drives became affordable to anyone after the advent of Windows 95. For a long time before there were the Zip drives with 100 megabyte of affordable storage. The CD ROMs were offering more than six times that.
However CD ROM couldn't be written by users. CD-R drives became affordable to anyone much later at the end of 90's.
For games and multimedia software like encyclopedias it was a giant leap forward from the floppy disks of 1, 44 Mbytes to the typical 650 MBytes of CD Rom disks. For a long time there wasn't a problem with the capacity of games.
reply
The CD ROM drives became affordable to anyone after the advent of Windows 95. For a long time before there were the Zip drives with 100 megabyte of affordable storage. The CD ROMs were offering more than six times that.
However CD ROM couldn't be written by users. CD-R drives became affordable to anyone much later at the end of 90's.
For games and multimedia software like encyclopedias it was a giant leap forward from the floppy disks of 1, 44 Mbytes to the typical 650 MBytes of CD Rom disks. For a long time there wasn't a problem with the capacity of games.
reply
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