In the 80s you quickly learned to master the art of load time management. I remember getting home from school and immediately heading for my C64c and start loading whatever game I was currently playing. Then go wash my hands, change out of school clothes, have snack or bathroom break and THEN head to the computer to play. That is unless the load failed, in which case it was time to engage in uttering a colorful stream of curses hoping my mother wouldn't hear me.
See, if you were British, that'd be "have a cup of tea", but so would anything involving 2 minutes spare, or not doing. We mark out our lives with cuppas.
It's ad time management these days. So many ads = so much free time to do other things. I have all the ad breaks for UKTV timed. Maybe the skill stems from the old days waiting for tapes to load on the spectrum.
In non-Soviet Russia we've had to use VHS tapes for that, using video stream as data. It was called ArVid and it could store around 2gb per 180min tape which was very good. But this was later in the DOS PC era.
Makes me think of ZIP disks as high capacity rewritable media using magnetic tape, which rather caught on in America until cd-rw technology became consumer grade.
I've also heard of abandoned vhs data storage technology in the US, it's fascinating to see how tech evolves differently in different countries. I had no idea any of the tech in this video existed, lol.
@@0v_x0 Zip disks had a competitor in the LS120 which was a super high density floppy drive with 120MB disks. I bought a drive and 5 disks, it was a great novelty storage device that always baffled my friends when they saw it because Iomega outsold it with the Zip drive and the company vanished.
Seems to me that history has tried to teach us this lesson several times and never gets through; compromise/hybrid storage and playback technology struggles to find its market. Either be low-budget and prolific "cheap and cheerful", or go high and risk it all on commitment to your format "quality uber alles". The middle ground is where entrepeneurs and technically clever ideas go to die.
yeah, basically like: "I just want the basic functionality and don't want to pay for bells and whistles" or "if I'm going to fork out for extra features, I want ALL the extra features"
I think this was someone's first try at putting data on CD. Later competing music companies forced the 650mb later 700mb standard like the blu-ray wars. There is always some pioneer to break the trail through the wilderness of "impossibility" followed by the pavement trucks and mall builders.
I wouldn’t call hybrid cars a failure. It’s almost 25 years since Toyota released the first Prius and its technology has been extended to every model the company sells. (With other companies also copying the hybrid tech to their cars.)
This video reminded me of something I had totally forgotten about. In the early 90s, over in PC-land, shareware disks were all the rage. However, one of my shareware CDs was something I had never seen before. It was a snapshot of the comp.unix newsgroup alongside a copy of Minix. There were thousands of random utilities and games posted, all in the "shar" format. So you would save the message as a .sh file and execute it to unpack it. Those were truly different times.
When I read about this in an imported C64 magazine, I desperately wanted it. But unfortunately I never saw it for sale anywhere. Then 4-6 years later I saw a dusty but sealed copy for sale at a stand at a computer show... as my group were hurrying out to catch our bus and I didn't have enough money with me to buy it. I'm still a little bit upset that I couldn't get it, but seeing videos like this ease the pain. ;)
I remember the Amiga had a zxspectrum emulator. You could play a spectrum tape on a Walkman into a sound capture device plugged into the parallel port. Then you could snapshot the memory like a save state to disk and reload without original tape/loading times.
Man, this is so late-80's-early-90's. That Boombox and this CD hackjob gives me the vibes of young Mr. John Connor Hacking the ATM machine and stuff like that. 😆
That’s absolutely fascinating. I had no idea that such a thing existed. When we got our +2 actually a +2A) we got a pack with several tapes containing about a hundred games in total. This was compilation tape hell on steroids, and we had to go through each tape and write down tape counter numbers for the start of each game, with about seven or eight titles per side. Running anything obviously involved a lot of rewinding and fast-forwarding, every single time. Beyond the loading time improvements, this would have been a godsend just from being able to jump straight to a given track. But like most, we didn’t have a CD player back then that we could have used, and the first one we did get was part of a hi fi system that wasn’t anywhere near the computer at that point. I forget where we got this speccy pack from - it was either from Currys, Dixons or possibly even Comet. I’m not even 100% sure if the tapes were even completely legal, to be honest. We were just so chuffed to have a machine that didn’t have a worn-out keyboard (our old 48k already had several flakey keys from too much QAOP action before the rubber started to tear) and to get a whole pile of new games to go with at the same time was just a dream.
I think I had the set of tapes you are talking about, but they came from some electrical components magazine my dad subscribed to in the mid 90s, who used to have loads of new-old stock (that's also where he got an Amstrad GX4000 from for about £20) The tapes all looked the same with just a basic white label on them but no mention of what games were actually on each one. I recall they were full of mostly pretty bad Mastertonic games.
This, I was sure Nerd was going to talk about the trash early cd-rom games and stuff like the cd-i. Simply as I had no idea somebody ever thought of using music cd as an tape replacement for 8 bit systems. Now it was an system who did this the opposite way I read about using VHS tape as an backup system. It was killed by cd writers pretty fast but I assumed this was an low cost system using video in on an standard vhs unit as it was tape backup systems back then.
Just get a floppy disk, instead of the stupid CD. I had thousands of games distributed on floppy in my collection. Typing DIRECTORY displayed all the games without wasting time writing the tape counter numbers
@@alexsutton85 Ah, Greenweld! At least I think so. Was reading an old electronics magazine as a PDF, you can get them all archived. Someone I babysat for, their (divorced) dad got them a GX4000. The mum asked me about it, and when I pointed out there weren't going to be any more games than the car one it came with, and that it was obsolete and being sold for chicken feed, she got VERY pissed off! The kids loved it, but eventually would have wanted to play more than Burnin' Rubber. Ironically Greenweld also had a load of GX4000 carts for sale for very cheap, but that was a good while after she'd shoved the console up her ex-husband's bum, so too late to mention.
@@magnemoe1 Danmere Backer. Although apparently other companies sold it with different names so maybe Danmere weren't the real manufacturer. The circuit board was very simple, just a couple of logic chips on an 8-bit ISA card, with a couple of RCA jacks to connect to the video. The video apparently had a tracking number embedded in it, that you could see on a connected TV. So it looked like a load of bars and chunks, with a number in the corner. If you wanted to load a particular file, the program would tell you where on the tape, what number, it was. I think it recorded a table of contents at the beginning or maybe the end, maybe both. It was clever how simple it was, most of the brains must have been in the software. Which, on something like an 8088 PC would be asking a lot.
No, as the c64 has no direct control over the cd itself unlike a disc drive, so it's more like your home c90 compilation tapes but super fast to select which track you want.
This CD Data device is not faster than a 1541 especially if you have fastloading software. (Like a basic program typed from a magazine to improve the 1541’s speed.)
I still remember the first time we got a CD drive for our family PC back in the early-mid 90s. It was super-duper exciting. The first CD we owned was demo/sampler disk of some kind, I don't remember what it was but it had a lot of crappy demos on it that I played to death for months (because it was all on a single CD and therefore awesome).
I remember back around 89, was the first time i tried microwave popcorn. I thought it was so good. But since then i can't stand that stuff. The old ways were so much better.
Must be buying the wrong stuff then. Orville Redenbacher’s microwave popcorn tastes just as good as the “pan” you hold over a stove & wait for it to start popping. The key with microwave is to not burn the popped corn. Take it out early
Wow, I never heard of this, but I live in Canada where where most people used disk drives with their C-64. The only time I ever saw software on tape for the C-64 was when a cassette came with a European magazine.
My dad's TSR-80 was all cassette based as was my TI-99/4a. But when I got my C128 I bought the disk drive too. Going through my late dad's stuff I found boxed up all his Radio Shack stuff. I found a tape of programs that I wrote and typed in from magazines. Gonna have to try them someday.
In many ways it tends to go in cycles, look at solid state storage today, in many ways an extension of ROM cartridges, other formats may re-emerge when materials change and they offer higher and cheaper storage. I have a 5TB hard drive still, because 5TB of SSD would have cost a lot more than £60.
NEVER understood why people stuck with cassettes. If a user has money to get a Computer CD Player? They’d spend that money on a floppy disk drive (which can also store user saves & documents)
@@electrictroy2010 Because floppy discs were an IBM PC thing, and as well as not being really baked into most micros operating systems to use, were really damn expensive. Plus the computer manufacturers often baked their own more compatible solutions. Same for compact discs later on. First person I knew who bought a CD drive for their PC, and just a reader, not a writer, spent £300 on it. Audio CD players weren't cheap either.
There were also those of us who had our eye on an Amiga or ST but whose families just couldn't afford one of those either, so our only option was to stick with our tape loading ☹️
The interface is quite nice in its simplicity! I wonder if the software used some kind of error correction codes, like Hamming or Reed-Solomon codes? CDs themselves have built-in error correction, but there can be enough noise over a 6' long unbalanced cable like that. It'd be interesting to see.
The video quotes the inventor of claiming so. But given the era, it may not have been the best possible implementation of that concept or the most accurate terminology.
Great video! Games on CD like these was a good idea and you hit the nail on the head with your conclusion! Most of the people who had a CD player or a CD player good enough to work properly with a system like this probably also weren't terribly interested in 8 bit machines but were instead using 16 bit machines. Also, up until around the mid 90's a "cheap" CD player was usually one that was also pretty crappy. I would know, I received one of those "cheap" CD players in 1990 as a birthday gift and it wasn't until I got a better player a couple of years later that I realized just how bad the "cheap" one I started with was! Also, in my experience in the US by the mid 80's loading from a cassette was something that an early 8 bit machine like a VIC 20 did. Any self respecting C64 owner loaded from a floppy disk, even if that meant the initial cost of the machine was higher. LOL
My only experience with tape loading in the US was on ancient Radio Shack TRS-80s at school. We had a disk drive for the C64 (and later two drives when we upgraded to a C128). I didn't get my first CD player until 1991. This would have been an even bigger flop in the US because it solved problems most of us never had since we didn't use tapes, and also because many of us didn't get CD players until years after Codemasters discontinued it.
Agreed- in the US, by 1984-85, most computer users - Commodore, Atari, TI, PC, etc, were using floppy discs. I was using 3.5" floppies in 1984 on a Mac in University computer labs and owned the ST by Fall '85 with dual 3.5" floppies, obtaining a SCSI hard disk for the ST in 88 or 89- only floppies until then
This would have been a non-starter in the US. By 1990 software on cassette was pretty much non-existent at retail and had been for years. Floppy drives were far more common among 8-bit users and the rule for anything16-bit or above, along with hard drives largely being a given for PCs. The cassette on Atari 8-bits was painfully slow because only one channel was used for data. The other was a dedicated audio track. This was intended for use educational software that would combine spoken instruction with interactive material. To keep the data loads brief the onscreen presentation was mainly done using the extended character set (ATASCII) and simple multiple choice inputs. There was a dedicated cartridge for developers to use as their control program for these packages. This also meant you could hear a lot of info from the way the data track sounded if there was no audio. This provide vital clues for home made data tapes regarding whether you started the load too early or too late. It also applied to floppy drive I/O, with single density and double density having distinctly different pitches. You could control the NOISYIO function by changing the value in location 65. Yes, I read the book 'Mapping the Atari' many times in my youth.
Truth. My first computer was a C64, and had an external floppy drive. And I got it used in the mid 80s. Cassettes were outdated even then. He then goes on to mention cassettes in the late 80s/early 90s. By that time, I had moved onto my Amiga 2000. And, as an E-3 in the Corps, I wasn't exactly made of money.
Umm no. The Atari had about an average bit tare on its cassette interface, about 600 baud. With very few exceptions the date was always stored in mono, so the Atari using the other track foe audio had nothing to do with the data speed. It was just average for tape witch means it was slow like most other tape formats.
@@massmike11 My experience of cassette loads on a variety of 8-bit systems almost always had the Atari coming in last at loading a comparably sized file. Though once you got into loads taking five or more minutes the difference became a bit nebulous as it was an endurance event across all platforms. Most platforms simply wouldn't offer a game requiring more than 16K on cassette as it was assumed anyone who had the greater RAM was also able to afford the floppy drive. I recall a handful of cassette games requiring 32K but no titles come to mind. The C64 in Europe created a different situation, where 64K RAM was a given but floppy drives were still too pricey for much of the market. So there were cassette games on C64 much larger than was common on systems in wide use in the US. And thus the accompanying awful wait to load that was beyond what early Apple and Atari adopters ever endured. There were also some weird variants like the 'Digital Data Pack' cassette system used in the Coleco Adam. It was much more sophisticated than audio cassette based systems but a major design error would allow a surge on the read/write heads at boot, which could erase data from the tape. Worse, the manuals contradicted each other as to whether the system should be booted with the drive empty or if it was safe to leave to tape in place.
I think the issue of cost re: disk drives is a philosophical one. If one were interested in a computer in the early 80s because.. we’ll just “because” (it’s the 80s! Home computers are in lots of tv shows and movies) THEN by the mid 80s you dip your toes in the computer water. By then a 64KB 8-bit computer was under $200? Certainly under $300 and under 200 did happen at some point from old advertisements I’d seen. No reason to go less than 64K. Disk drives prices improved but still a few hundred. BUT the TRUE cost was computer + disk drive. Just need to see it that way. And if you went to the shopping mall and there was an Electronics Boutique store then you’d only see floppy based software (or a few titles on cartridges for Commodore and Atari). Still cheaper than going 16bit (easily over $1000) and iirc a dot matrix printer was the most expensive item. They got cheaper too. But the printer legitimized your system. It’s educational. Do term papers on it. Print out budget and shopping list etc. Get “Print Shop” (it was on floppy not cassette) and make banners for parties. Parties you could afford to throw because even with the cost of a floppy drive you still saved over ST/Mac/Amiga/MSDOS. Then maybe by 1989 you thought what a great few years you had with your 8bit system but all the new good stuff is 16bit and prices are coming down and maybe you find a used system (like I did.. which lead to a new A2000 in about a year). But by 1990 or so a person might well have a better idea of what they want and need. It’s no longer getting a computer because “everybody’s doing it” in 83-84. That mentality would come back of course to a new wave of first time computer owners when the trifecta of Pentium-Win95-AOL hit. (Although I do remember hearing on the radio in 1994 that “everyone” [or at least a sizeable portion of America] was beside themselves that day because AOL was down .. so that’s 486/early-pentium Win3.1 time frame)
I bought the Spectrum cd games pack secondhand from an advert in Micro Mart when I was about 12 (around 1990) . I was delighted with it… it tripled the size of my games collection and loaded really quickly, all for one weeks’ paper round money!
Also Codemasters were the shit back in the day, they became crap later on but in 1989 you knew you were perousing something good if the tape you were looking at was published by Codemasters. Think the only publisher that gave me equal satisfaction for my 2.99 weekly purchase was FireBird.
Regardless of context of the video, I always get goosebumps whenever I see a Speccy running. While I never had an OG Spectrum, I only had Amstrad's +3 version, my late cousin had the rubber key 48K mini beast. The Spectrum line was such an underrated little micro for its day.
The TurboGrafx-CD was released in the United States in November 1989 (Just a year after it's Japanese counterpart.) The Philips CD-i didn't get a NA release until December 1991 and another 6 months until its European release in July 1992. And if you argue the NEC CD Rom Rom was only an add on and not an all in one console like the CD-i the "Duo" the PC Engine + CD all in one unit was released in September of 1991 (still predating the CD-i)
In the US sure, us in the UK didn't get the TurboGrafx-CD so we couldn't play splatterhouse or bonk's adventure until they were ported to other consoles
This channels name is spot on Nostalgia nerd for Nostalgia nerds. I have the nostalgia of the industry standard "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo burnt on my memory akin to burning files to a CD ROM from my first CD-ROM drive which had compatibility issues sometimes from my friends who had expensive CD Burners for my 486 DX266 I still remember as a kid installing Windows 95 for the first time on CD ROM and also remember Installing Linux Red Hat from CD ROM Discs later in the 90's. From the early 90's I remember my Grandad had a 2 CD Players one on his big Hi Fi system and a Portable Sony CD/Cassette player not dissimilar to the Sanyo in this video. Thanks for another walk down happy memory lane mate.
I agree on your reasoning for the poor reception, I doubt that many still rocking an 8-bit at that time had convenient (as in, next to their micro) access to a CD player at that point. Those that did likely already had a 16-bit system.
Well I love this video had no idea that there was pre CD-ROM CD game loading ( and the compression just makes it more impressive) . It reminds me of how I felt when I found out that audio cassettes used to be used for computers
I appreciate videos like this, the technology is before my time, and growing up in the US I didn’t know about video games that used cassettes or CDs. But I find older technology incredibly interesting. For me games were the NES, Atari 2600, and later SNES. We also had a Laser computer that used real floppy disks(the large floppy sort with the large center hole, not diskettes) to play about three games. Thanks for making cool videos! 👍
I'm in the US and had never heard of this! I also didn't realize the floppy disk was more a US thing than an "everywhere" thing. Very interesting bit of history here.
@@Kholaslittlespot1 It's not that floppy disks didn't exist in the Eurosphere... they just weren't the standard for data there, that they were in the USA. Cassette data was really dropped by an average user pretty early on, in the USA side of things. But, some of that is due to the fact that computers were more of business machines and less of gaming machines in the US side of things.
I was the first kid in school to have a CD burner. I made my money back in a month selling pirated music. Had a full time after school job. Great times
@@PaulaXism we had the radio & tape too. I was born in 1980. With portable tapes me & friends would break the plastic off and put our finger on the motor to slow it down, make it skip, and quickly bring it back to chop & screw the music ourselves. This might have only been a music trend here in Houston, but a lot of people did it because tape was a lot more affordable, and portable over records & expensive dj equipment
In the early 2000s stores started selling CD's with all the editions of magazines like Zzap64 and Crash, 1,000 Amiga games plus emulation, 10,000 C64 games plus emulation, etc. I know, because I bought them all. At the same time, there were unofficial campaign and mission disks for Starcraft (500 missions and campaigns), Flashpoint (100 missions and campaigns), Command and Conquer (1,000 missions and campaigns) and so on. The 2000s were the weirdest decade of the 21st century for gaming and peripherals!
So, in theory, you could make a cd that won't only load the game, but it could actually play and beat it if you programmed the right audio after the game data
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure because I think there could only be two directional signals because there are a maximum of two audio channels on standard audio CD. Unless it's possible to have some complex method of splitting the audio cable and sending the audio data to different pins on the computer port? I doubt that would be possible, but I'm not technically minded enough to say for certain.
Interesting. By 89, CD player purchases exploded in the US. As a high school student, I bought my first CD player in 89 (open box at Best Buy) for the equivalent of £58. Not cheap, but certainly obtainable. But then, as you point out, that was irrelevant, because we all had floppy disk drives.
CDs were still a boutique item in the US in the late 80s. People had them but they tended to be the home theater system types, the same kind that might have owned LaserDiscs.
Remember those days fondly and at the time was blown away by this technology on the Speccy and to be fair it was clever, although most of the games I either already had on tape or were poor. I'd moved onto the Amiga not long after. Great video 👍👍
Imagine revisiting this in the modern day with a Blu-Ray audio player, and a Blu-Ray audio disc full of 24-bit 96 kHz joint-stereo FLAC, with CLV encoding, and fancy lossless data compression prior to encoding that data into audio, plus data decompression as soon as the audio is decoded. And also, laser lens cleaner brushes, and much more consistent overall mastering. You could possibly even use this technology to make a single extremely big game for an 8-bit micro computer.
My family was late to the Compact Disc game, and so I think the first CD player I ever owned was either my 486 computer with CD-ROM, or my Playstation 1. Both of those could play a huge variety of games that younger me would have preferred even if I, an ignorant American, had heard of the greatness of Codemasters and the Oliver Twins. Plugging one of these advanced machines into a C64 or Spectrum to play Treasure Island Dizzy would have been absurd to me back then... although it would be pretty darn cool nowadays.
Imagine hooking up your PS1 into a Commodore 64 just to load a Compact Disc Game:-D It could become more nerdy only if you were arguing about nuclear physics with your friends during the loading process.
Based on the thumbnail, I thought this would be about those huge free/shareware DOS game compilation discs from the mid-90's. Turns out it's a lot weirder!
Basically it was very similar to the problem with the Mega CD, mixing hardware and confusing the consumer, and the consumer wasn't happy with upgrading and to just put a game in.
Well, I think the other big problem with the MegaCD was its price. $299 in the US made it one of the most expensive consoles on the market at that time. AND it required a Genesis/MegaDrive, pushing the price even higher for newcomers. Granted, it was still cheaper than the CDi, but no one bought the CDi except deluded parents. That was just too much money for a technology that many saw as being too experimental to invest in, especially when it only had a handful of standout games.
@@jasonblalock4429 the cd-I is a bad example as that wasn't a game console. The cd-i was very popular in my country and it was bought for its multi media purposes.
@@drunkensailor112 Yeah, FWIW, I went back and forth myself on whether to mention it. But I brought it up because on a superficial level, they were two CD-based systems theoretically competing in kinda-sorta the same retail space. Otherwise, in terms of price, the only other console to mention would be the Neo-Geo. Which was $600ish for literal arcade-quality hardware.
@@jasonblalock4429 the thing is. 300 dollars for a game console was heavy in 1992, but 700 dollars for a multi media device wasn't. Just add the cost of a vcr and cd player in early 90s. More expensive than a cd-i. Same as today people think 600 for a game console is too expensive, but not 1400 dollars for a phone.
As an American born in the mid 80s, i had no idea any of this existed. I had an nes at an early age, and my dad had up to date apple computers from the university he worked at, which was also involved in the development of multimedia CD-ROM formats but that was the early to mid 90s hypercard era. Games were either cartridge based consoles or on the computer from floppy disc. I kind of grew up enough to be really into things when CD-ROMs were peaking, my mom had a PC by then and it came with a 101 shareware DOS games CD. This was by 1996 though. I grew up with maxis sim games and hypercard games, and the odd demo for games like another would or the early 90s port of prince of persia, which I was awful at.
0:52 Great video with tons of super amazing and fascinating stuff, but I just wanted to add that I think the Turbo Grafx 16 CD beat the CDi to the punch on home console CD-ROM gaming in 89'.
Loved the video. I think I have a small fact thought. Rainbow Arts was not first up. This was done in 1988 by the dutch company Eurosoft for the MSX computers and it was called "The Games Collection". Of course not as well known, but MSX was kinda big in some European countries. The tape version of the collection is going for a few euros I just saw on the auction sites , but did not see the CD version for sale.
Here in the US, in the late 80s and early 90s, 5.25 inch and 3.25 inch floppies were king, so it would have been very rare to even think about loading a game from casset, I didnt even know it was a thing until I watched a few videos on it. (coming from someone born in the late 80s, so take it with a grain of salt, early childhood memories are never 100% accurate)
Yeah, same here. I grew up on an old IBM XT (later a PC Jr), and I remember being absolutely baffled to learn there was some strange foreign land where everyone bought software on cassette, and it only cost $5 for a game. Utter madness! ;-)
Development of the "Compact Disc-Interactive" format began in 1984 (two years after the launch of Compact Disc). First announcement 1986. So in 1989 it was not such a new idea if asked me but a nice idea to make it compatable for 8-bit systems. Still having my CD-I 910 player including piles of games on CD's and of course the controlers safely packed because it is probably never going to be used again but I do not want to throw it away. The player was released in 1990.
Not to forget two factors: - Better graphics and sound in CD games on the C64 is an impossibility because of audio format limitations. A game can only be as big as the RAM of the machine allows, since you cannot random access in an audio format. - Most people's first CD Players, and for a matter of fact DVD Players, were game consoles such as the CD-i, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2. So people that owned CD players in the late 80s and mid to late 90s did not need a C64 for gaming anymore.
If you can, back up this CD as soon as possible! It looks like it’s been pressed by PDO in their UK plant and has bronzed horribly. It’s essentially rotting from the edges. If it’s still fully readable, back it up now.
i noticed that, i have a soundtrack cd from the tv series 'lipstick on your collar' totally rotted, and pretty much impossible to find 'replacement' good ones 😢only real option obtain each track individually and put on a cdr myself..but...it seemed to use some form of compressed format as total track run time much more than a normal cdr
the early 90s were wild. In 1993 you had Myst and The 7Th Guest living in the same shelves as the last ZX Spectrum games. 2 years then were like 10 years from 2010 to 2020.
As someone from the US, I never saw a game on cassette growing up in the early/mid nineties. Even my Mom's Apple II (which I *bearly* remember) had a floppy drive. I did see them in thrift stores later, but never owned the machines the tapes where intended for. The first CD-based game I remember getting was for a game called Assault Rigs I think it was. and the audio of the game was on track 2 and beyond so I ended up just listening to the soundtrack a lot.
Interesting to see you and RMC would drop a video of the same topic on the same day, mere hours apart from each other. I see the PCB on your Rainbow Arts collection adapter is green while RMCs was orange. Interesting you both managed to grab a copy nearly at the same time... Could this be a collector or a computer shop owner selling out a bunch of old copies of the compilations on eBay? Interesting video though, very informative. Not implying any fishy stuff going on btw, just thought I'd point out this interesting coincidence.
5:05 "the first company to attempt this was Rainbow Arts" well ackshually.. 🤓 Eurosoft released a similar CD-ROM compilation with 33 games for the MSX in 1988, a year earlier
that's the most sneakiest and unexpected ad attack ever seen till now! :D (also an enjoyable one, like the 80s ads that were often better than the actual tv shows).
Ha! I had no idea until he retweeted my tweet! I would say it's coincidental but then this kind of thing seems to happen a freaky amount in the retrosphere.
Interesting idea…. In the United States, we we on to hard drives by this point, much less floppy disks. My 1984 Apple IIe used dual 5.25” floppy drives, never had a cassette drive. It’s also worth noting that 8-bit machines were rare by this point, outside of holdouts who owned them a long time. 286 PCs were common, along with Amiga. By 1991, 32-bit was the rage, a 386 was it and it didn’t take long for everything else to just go away.
The fake stereo could've been easily fixed by feeding both channels to the same pin, or making the software read both pins. And I guess one could buy an audio cable adapter to do the "mixing" as well.
Yeah, since the CD format already had two channels, why not just feed both channels with the same data stream? That would have fixed both issues - the CD players that mixed down to mono, and the CD players that "switched" back-and-forth between channels, and would also obviously still work on CD players that had neither cost-cutting measure in place.
I borrowed a friend's CD-i so I could play a rented copy of Night Trap (with Dana Plato) and a cartoon based "laserdisc" game that was similar to Cliffhanger or Cobra Command from the arcade. I can't remember the name though.
@@billkeithchannel I knew no one that owned a CD-i in those days and only a few with a TG16. Toys R Us was the only dept. store who carried TG16 and after I bought it it was not long and no longer carried at Toy-R-Us and I was pissed. A used game store finally opened up in the mall had the CD rom add on was real cheap and got it there and no CD games to be found in 1995 in my area. That sucked allot but had fun with about 8 games they had on hand. Playing Wanders from Ys on CD was my Legend Of Zelda experience over again. Great time in video games we got to experience!
@@billkeithchannel That's weird TG16 was not popular in my area of the south and don't remember Kmart selling them. I bought it in 1992 when the price went down to 99 bucks with Keith Courage pack in with Bonk's revenge loose. It was a good deal with SNES and Sega being so expensive and look back to realize Toys R Us was giving them away with overstock of no one buying them. Babbages games in the mall was the only place to buy used but was rare to find used Hu card TG16 games and forget the CD games. The used game store opened in the mid 90's and sold me the CD rom used for 85 bucks and was surprised with the 600 dollar price tag but a few years went by and guess with Sega CD and CD-i the price bottomed out. I really liked TG16 and wish I was a little older at launch to afford the games but SNES and PS1 made up for it going away then.
@@thaddeusmcgrath They got a limited shipment in for some promotion. I am up by Lake Erie. I remember Kmart was also the official retailer for the TMNT toys when the first movie came out and we got to see the movie at a special screening the night before the general release.
Seems like it was a neat concept. Those sped up load times were huge. But yeah, CD players were *not* cheap back then and I could definitely see that being a major roadblock for potential consumers.
The trouble with this (and most other innovations of the 80's) was the fact it just came out too late. This could have been a cool project for a Spectrum magazine to pick up, releasing a bumper issue with a CD containing loads of games.
This is the first time I've ever seen this. When I was a kid, my introduction was the arcades at Wal-mart and later I saw games being rented at the movie rental place in town. Friends had consoles and that eventually led to me getting an NES. So I think the market was in consoles at the time and cartridges were king. Also CD players were still rather new and computers were not in everyone's home. We still had a record player and with an 8-track player. I didn't get a CD player until maybe the early 90's.
I still remember when Blockbuster Video began renting CD games. Sadly it only lasted a few months, either there wasn't much demand or they caught on that everyone easily pirated the discs. I only rented The 7th Guest from them but had wanted to rent Phantasmagoria as well but it was gone before I could.
I started coding on my ZX Spectrum +2 128k. The model didn't have the timer so you had to find the 'silent part' before the game by listening to the sounds and rewinding or forwarding the tape with quick skilled fingers. I was damn good at it too. Still coding 30 odd years later...
Also with some games which incorporated speech into the game, it was a lot easier to hear the speech when loading from CD because the sample rate was closer to real time.
This is bizarre to me. In 1989 I was playing Rampage, Double Dragon, Empire and games like that from 5 1/4 disks on a 286. Commodore 64's and cassettes were already obsolete to me back then. Still had an Atari 2600 with all the classic games, PacMan, Defender, Asteroids etc. But they felt old and the graphics on PC were so much better.
I have never heard of this either! Me & my friends were in college during this era, so there were loads of Spectrums (Spectra?) BBC-A/B's, C64's etc etc, but I only recall either cassette loading or microdrive & 5¼ floppy drives. My friend worked at Nimbus discs who had the Microsoft CD-ROM pressing contract for the EU! happy days!
I think another big reason it never took off in the US was that by 1989 the C64 was not nearly as popular and the Spectrum was barely released here at all. By that time DOS and Mac were the largest computer systems by a pretty sizable margin, and both had floppy drives typically included in the computer. So at best the whole installer program would have to be completely rewritten, and it would probably need to be bundled with a SCSI or parallel cable instead.
I remember my whole family was obsessed with Impossible Mission on our C64 back in the 80s, so much so that the evil dudes catch cry of "stay a while, stay forever!" became a running family joke for years.. We also had a disc drive for our C64 and mostly played games on either disc or cartridges
Wow, that Sanyo CD player brings back memories. I was given the exact model as a sympathy present when my parents got divorced, lol. I was quite good and I used it for atleast 8 years.
Like you said at the end, by the time this was released, anyone with the cash for a CD player would have an Amiga or game console by then. Hell, I had a game console by then, and I'm pretty sure I didn't yet have a CD player.
I did the math and it works out to speed comparable to a 19.2 kbps modem. With a more advanced modulation scheme the could probably bump that 2-4 times higher, but the systems probably didn’t have the CPU for it.
@@pokepress Considering we were able to transfer at 56 kbps over the 3 Khz bandwidth (I'm not sure if you need to sample at double that if you're starting with a digital signal) of the old, god awful, landlines, then taking full advantage of 16bit 44.1 Khz I imagine 192 Kbps would be easy enough, but not without dedicated hardware to process it, and probably even 300 Kbps would be doable.I also suspect there are ways to utilise the doubling you'd get from encoding separate L & R signals without sacrificing compatibility with players that mixed down to mono. Like what if you recorded the Left data channel at 4 times the volume of the Right data channel? You could then easily filter the right out of the left on a mono mix, and with the inclusion of a baseline signal level test you ought to be able to extract the Right channel from the Left. That's just off the top of my head of course, there are certainly much better and more advanced forms of multiplexing than simple amplitude biasing.
In my family we got our first CD-player in 1990. It was of course a part of the expensive, non portable, stereo equipment in the living room. If I'd ever had come across one of these CDs I probably would have sorted it out with an extension cord of some sort but I never did. This was all new to me. Thanks!
In the 80s you quickly learned to master the art of load time management. I remember getting home from school and immediately heading for my C64c and start loading whatever game I was currently playing. Then go wash my hands, change out of school clothes, have snack or bathroom break and THEN head to the computer to play. That is unless the load failed, in which case it was time to engage in uttering a colorful stream of curses hoping my mother wouldn't hear me.
A bathroom break 🤣🤣🤣 soooo either a piss or a shit lol.
See, if you were British, that'd be "have a cup of tea", but so would anything involving 2 minutes spare, or not doing. We mark out our lives with cuppas.
There wasn't an N64 in the 80s when the C64 and Speccy were king.
Bruh….Tape was brutal…Especially the more you used a tape game the more chances of errors etc from tape stretching and wear 😭
It's ad time management these days. So many ads = so much free time to do other things.
I have all the ad breaks for UKTV timed. Maybe the skill stems from the old days waiting for tapes to load on the spectrum.
In non-Soviet Russia we've had to use VHS tapes for that, using video stream as data. It was called ArVid and it could store around 2gb per 180min tape which was very good. But this was later in the DOS PC era.
That’s a lot
Makes me think of ZIP disks as high capacity rewritable media using magnetic tape, which rather caught on in America until cd-rw technology became consumer grade.
I've also heard of abandoned vhs data storage technology in the US, it's fascinating to see how tech evolves differently in different countries. I had no idea any of the tech in this video existed, lol.
@@0v_x0 Ubiquitous CD-ROMs and CD-RW drives ushered a whole new era of piracy for sure 😅
@@0v_x0 Zip disks had a competitor in the LS120 which was a super high density floppy drive with 120MB disks. I bought a drive and 5 disks, it was a great novelty storage device that always baffled my friends when they saw it because Iomega outsold it with the Zip drive and the company vanished.
If LGR also comes out with a video on 8-bit CD games then something is definitely afoot....
I bet he's going to release a video about the MiSTer FPGA multisystem add-on
This would be the trifecta.
I thought RMC came out with the episode about the CD games for 8bit computers.
@@SupaPhly0 yes its already on patreon
The Christmas sweaters are a giveaway that something is afoot !
Seems to me that history has tried to teach us this lesson several times and never gets through; compromise/hybrid storage and playback technology struggles to find its market. Either be low-budget and prolific "cheap and cheerful", or go high and risk it all on commitment to your format "quality uber alles". The middle ground is where entrepeneurs and technically clever ideas go to die.
True for a lot of tech. Hybrid car, anyone?
yeah, basically like: "I just want the basic functionality and don't want to pay for bells and whistles" or "if I'm going to fork out for extra features, I want ALL the extra features"
Sadly most have short memory
I think this was someone's first try at putting data on CD. Later competing music companies forced the 650mb later 700mb standard like the blu-ray wars.
There is always some pioneer to break the trail through the wilderness of "impossibility" followed by the pavement trucks and mall builders.
I wouldn’t call hybrid cars a failure. It’s almost 25 years since Toyota released the first Prius and its technology has been extended to every model the company sells. (With other companies also copying the hybrid tech to their cars.)
This video reminded me of something I had totally forgotten about. In the early 90s, over in PC-land, shareware disks were all the rage. However, one of my shareware CDs was something I had never seen before. It was a snapshot of the comp.unix newsgroup alongside a copy of Minix. There were thousands of random utilities and games posted, all in the "shar" format. So you would save the message as a .sh file and execute it to unpack it. Those were truly different times.
When I read about this in an imported C64 magazine, I desperately wanted it. But unfortunately I never saw it for sale anywhere. Then 4-6 years later I saw a dusty but sealed copy for sale at a stand at a computer show... as my group were hurrying out to catch our bus and I didn't have enough money with me to buy it.
I'm still a little bit upset that I couldn't get it, but seeing videos like this ease the pain. ;)
I remember the Amiga had a zxspectrum emulator. You could play a spectrum tape on a Walkman into a sound capture device plugged into the parallel port. Then you could snapshot the memory like a save state to disk and reload without original tape/loading times.
Wow blows my mind that they even tried to make CD games for those 8bit home computers. Those were wild times.
Man, this is so late-80's-early-90's. That Boombox and this CD hackjob gives me the vibes of young Mr. John Connor Hacking the ATM machine and stuff like that. 😆
fun fact: the thing he used to hack it was an Atari Portfolio
T:tscc was so good, surprised to see a reference here
That’s absolutely fascinating. I had no idea that such a thing existed.
When we got our +2 actually a +2A) we got a pack with several tapes containing about a hundred games in total. This was compilation tape hell on steroids, and we had to go through each tape and write down tape counter numbers for the start of each game, with about seven or eight titles per side. Running anything obviously involved a lot of rewinding and fast-forwarding, every single time. Beyond the loading time improvements, this would have been a godsend just from being able to jump straight to a given track. But like most, we didn’t have a CD player back then that we could have used, and the first one we did get was part of a hi fi system that wasn’t anywhere near the computer at that point.
I forget where we got this speccy pack from - it was either from Currys, Dixons or possibly even Comet. I’m not even 100% sure if the tapes were even completely legal, to be honest. We were just so chuffed to have a machine that didn’t have a worn-out keyboard (our old 48k already had several flakey keys from too much QAOP action before the rubber started to tear) and to get a whole pile of new games to go with at the same time was just a dream.
I think I had the set of tapes you are talking about, but they came from some electrical components magazine my dad subscribed to in the mid 90s, who used to have loads of new-old stock (that's also where he got an Amstrad GX4000 from for about £20) The tapes all looked the same with just a basic white label on them but no mention of what games were actually on each one. I recall they were full of mostly pretty bad Mastertonic games.
This, I was sure Nerd was going to talk about the trash early cd-rom games and stuff like the cd-i.
Simply as I had no idea somebody ever thought of using music cd as an tape replacement for 8 bit systems.
Now it was an system who did this the opposite way I read about using VHS tape as an backup system. It was killed by cd writers pretty fast but I assumed this was an low cost system using video in on an standard vhs unit as it was tape backup systems back then.
Just get a floppy disk, instead of the stupid CD. I had thousands of games distributed on floppy in my collection. Typing DIRECTORY displayed all the games without wasting time writing the tape counter numbers
@@alexsutton85 Ah, Greenweld! At least I think so. Was reading an old electronics magazine as a PDF, you can get them all archived. Someone I babysat for, their (divorced) dad got them a GX4000. The mum asked me about it, and when I pointed out there weren't going to be any more games than the car one it came with, and that it was obsolete and being sold for chicken feed, she got VERY pissed off! The kids loved it, but eventually would have wanted to play more than Burnin' Rubber.
Ironically Greenweld also had a load of GX4000 carts for sale for very cheap, but that was a good while after she'd shoved the console up her ex-husband's bum, so too late to mention.
@@magnemoe1 Danmere Backer. Although apparently other companies sold it with different names so maybe Danmere weren't the real manufacturer. The circuit board was very simple, just a couple of logic chips on an 8-bit ISA card, with a couple of RCA jacks to connect to the video. The video apparently had a tracking number embedded in it, that you could see on a connected TV. So it looked like a load of bars and chunks, with a number in the corner. If you wanted to load a particular file, the program would tell you where on the tape, what number, it was. I think it recorded a table of contents at the beginning or maybe the end, maybe both.
It was clever how simple it was, most of the brains must have been in the software. Which, on something like an 8088 PC would be asking a lot.
I’m an 8 bit nerd and I do not remember this being a thing at all , it’s basically like having a disk drive for your c64 , incredible
No, as the c64 has no direct control over the cd itself unlike a disc drive, so it's more like your home c90 compilation tapes but super fast to select which track you want.
@@hazy33 but but also but it's still faster than a stock 1541 tho
@@bootmii98 I think a decent typist is faster than a 1541 🙂
This CD Data device is not faster than a 1541 especially if you have fastloading software. (Like a basic program typed from a magazine to improve the 1541’s speed.)
I still remember the first time we got a CD drive for our family PC back in the early-mid 90s. It was super-duper exciting. The first CD we owned was demo/sampler disk of some kind, I don't remember what it was but it had a lot of crappy demos on it that I played to death for months (because it was all on a single CD and therefore awesome).
I remember back around 89, was the first time i tried microwave popcorn. I thought it was so good. But since then i can't stand that stuff. The old ways were so much better.
Must be buying the wrong stuff then. Orville Redenbacher’s microwave popcorn tastes just as good as the “pan” you hold over a stove & wait for it to start popping.
The key with microwave is to not burn the popped corn. Take it out early
3D dinosaur adventure, yo.
Wow, I never heard of this, but I live in Canada where where most people used disk drives with their C-64. The only time I ever saw software on tape for the C-64 was when a cassette came with a European magazine.
My dad's TSR-80 was all cassette based as was my TI-99/4a. But when I got my C128 I bought the disk drive too.
Going through my late dad's stuff I found boxed up all his Radio Shack stuff. I found a tape of programs that I wrote and typed in from magazines. Gonna have to try them someday.
I had the Ti-94a as well. I used to write programs for it and get so mad when the tapes would get corrupted and I would lose all of my hard work. Lol
In many ways it tends to go in cycles, look at solid state storage today, in many ways an extension of ROM cartridges, other formats may re-emerge when materials change and they offer higher and cheaper storage. I have a 5TB hard drive still, because 5TB of SSD would have cost a lot more than £60.
NEVER understood why people stuck with cassettes. If a user has money to get a Computer CD Player? They’d spend that money on a floppy disk drive (which can also store user saves & documents)
@@electrictroy2010 Because floppy discs were an IBM PC thing, and as well as not being really baked into most micros operating systems to use, were really damn expensive. Plus the computer manufacturers often baked their own more compatible solutions. Same for compact discs later on. First person I knew who bought a CD drive for their PC, and just a reader, not a writer, spent £300 on it. Audio CD players weren't cheap either.
Just like buses. Wait 30 years to hear more about CD games, then two videos show up at once! Thanks Nostalgia Nerd & RMC - great videos!
Hey you!
Any chance of a Dedicated Rover K-Series video... apologies for the channel Hijack... but it is very Nostaglic at this point ;)
Good bus analogy by a profile named Big Car.
30 years for a bus? I'd have started walking after 15.
who is this RMC ?
There were also those of us who had our eye on an Amiga or ST but whose families just couldn't afford one of those either, so our only option was to stick with our tape loading ☹️
The interface is quite nice in its simplicity! I wonder if the software used some kind of error correction codes, like Hamming or Reed-Solomon codes? CDs themselves have built-in error correction, but there can be enough noise over a 6' long unbalanced cable like that. It'd be interesting to see.
The video quotes the inventor of claiming so. But given the era, it may not have been the best possible implementation of that concept or the most accurate terminology.
Great video! Games on CD like these was a good idea and you hit the nail on the head with your conclusion!
Most of the people who had a CD player or a CD player good enough to work properly with a system like this probably also weren't terribly interested in 8 bit machines but were instead using 16 bit machines. Also, up until around the mid 90's a "cheap" CD player was usually one that was also pretty crappy. I would know, I received one of those "cheap" CD players in 1990 as a birthday gift and it wasn't until I got a better player a couple of years later that I realized just how bad the "cheap" one I started with was!
Also, in my experience in the US by the mid 80's loading from a cassette was something that an early 8 bit machine like a VIC 20 did. Any self respecting C64 owner loaded from a floppy disk, even if that meant the initial cost of the machine was higher. LOL
My only experience with tape loading in the US was on ancient Radio Shack TRS-80s at school. We had a disk drive for the C64 (and later two drives when we upgraded to a C128). I didn't get my first CD player until 1991. This would have been an even bigger flop in the US because it solved problems most of us never had since we didn't use tapes, and also because many of us didn't get CD players until years after Codemasters discontinued it.
Agreed- in the US, by 1984-85, most computer users - Commodore, Atari, TI, PC, etc, were using floppy discs. I was using 3.5" floppies in 1984 on a Mac in University computer labs and owned the ST by Fall '85 with dual 3.5" floppies, obtaining a SCSI hard disk for the ST in 88 or 89- only floppies until then
This would have been a non-starter in the US. By 1990 software on cassette was pretty much non-existent at retail and had been for years. Floppy drives were far more common among 8-bit users and the rule for anything16-bit or above, along with hard drives largely being a given for PCs.
The cassette on Atari 8-bits was painfully slow because only one channel was used for data. The other was a dedicated audio track. This was intended for use educational software that would combine spoken instruction with interactive material. To keep the data loads brief the onscreen presentation was mainly done using the extended character set (ATASCII) and simple multiple choice inputs. There was a dedicated cartridge for developers to use as their control program for these packages.
This also meant you could hear a lot of info from the way the data track sounded if there was no audio. This provide vital clues for home made data tapes regarding whether you started the load too early or too late. It also applied to floppy drive I/O, with single density and double density having distinctly different pitches. You could control the NOISYIO function by changing the value in location 65. Yes, I read the book 'Mapping the Atari' many times in my youth.
Truth. My first computer was a C64, and had an external floppy drive. And I got it used in the mid 80s. Cassettes were outdated even then.
He then goes on to mention cassettes in the late 80s/early 90s. By that time, I had moved onto my Amiga 2000. And, as an E-3 in the Corps, I wasn't exactly made of money.
Umm no. The Atari had about an average bit tare on its cassette interface, about 600 baud. With very few exceptions the date was always stored in mono, so the Atari using the other track foe audio had nothing to do with the data speed. It was just average for tape witch means it was slow like most other tape formats.
@@massmike11 My experience of cassette loads on a variety of 8-bit systems almost always had the Atari coming in last at loading a comparably sized file. Though once you got into loads taking five or more minutes the difference became a bit nebulous as it was an endurance event across all platforms. Most platforms simply wouldn't offer a game requiring more than 16K on cassette as it was assumed anyone who had the greater RAM was also able to afford the floppy drive. I recall a handful of cassette games requiring 32K but no titles come to mind.
The C64 in Europe created a different situation, where 64K RAM was a given but floppy drives were still too pricey for much of the market. So there were cassette games on C64 much larger than was common on systems in wide use in the US. And thus the accompanying awful wait to load that was beyond what early Apple and Atari adopters ever endured.
There were also some weird variants like the 'Digital Data Pack' cassette system used in the Coleco Adam. It was much more sophisticated than audio cassette based systems but a major design error would allow a surge on the read/write heads at boot, which could erase data from the tape. Worse, the manuals contradicted each other as to whether the system should be booted with the drive empty or if it was safe to leave to tape in place.
I think the issue of cost re: disk drives is a philosophical one. If one were interested in a computer in the early 80s because.. we’ll just “because” (it’s the 80s! Home computers are in lots of tv shows and movies) THEN by the mid 80s you dip your toes in the computer water.
By then a 64KB 8-bit computer was under $200? Certainly under $300 and under 200 did happen at some point from old advertisements I’d seen. No reason to go less than 64K. Disk drives prices improved but still a few hundred. BUT the TRUE cost was computer + disk drive. Just need to see it that way. And if you went to the shopping mall and there was an Electronics Boutique store then you’d only see floppy based software (or a few titles on cartridges for Commodore and Atari).
Still cheaper than going 16bit (easily over $1000) and iirc a dot matrix printer was the most expensive item. They got cheaper too. But the printer legitimized your system. It’s educational. Do term papers on it. Print out budget and shopping list etc. Get “Print Shop” (it was on floppy not cassette) and make banners for parties. Parties you could afford to throw because even with the cost of a floppy drive you still saved over ST/Mac/Amiga/MSDOS.
Then maybe by 1989 you thought what a great few years you had with your 8bit system but all the new good stuff is 16bit and prices are coming down and maybe you find a used system (like I did.. which lead to a new A2000 in about a year). But by 1990 or so a person might well have a better idea of what they want and need. It’s no longer getting a computer because “everybody’s doing it” in 83-84.
That mentality would come back of course to a new wave of first time computer owners when the trifecta of Pentium-Win95-AOL hit. (Although I do remember hearing on the radio in 1994 that “everyone” [or at least a sizeable portion of America] was beside themselves that day because AOL was down .. so that’s 486/early-pentium Win3.1 time frame)
I bought the Spectrum cd games pack secondhand from an advert in Micro Mart when I was about 12 (around 1990) . I was delighted with it… it tripled the size of my games collection and loaded really quickly, all for one weeks’ paper round money!
Also Codemasters were the shit back in the day, they became crap later on but in 1989 you knew you were perousing something good if the tape you were looking at was published by Codemasters. Think the only publisher that gave me equal satisfaction for my 2.99 weekly purchase was FireBird.
Regardless of context of the video, I always get goosebumps whenever I see a Speccy running. While I never had an OG Spectrum, I only had Amstrad's +3 version, my late cousin had the rubber key 48K mini beast. The Spectrum line was such an underrated little micro for its day.
The TurboGrafx-CD was released in the United States in November 1989 (Just a year after it's Japanese counterpart.) The Philips CD-i didn't get a NA release until December 1991 and another 6 months until its European release in July 1992. And if you argue the NEC CD Rom Rom was only an add on and not an all in one console like the CD-i the "Duo" the PC Engine + CD all in one unit was released in September of 1991 (still predating the CD-i)
In the US sure, us in the UK didn't get the TurboGrafx-CD so we couldn't play splatterhouse or bonk's adventure until they were ported to other consoles
@@gincairn8763 He said "the west" 0:52
@@gincairn8763 And? The 'west' isn't just the UK and Europe.
This channels name is spot on Nostalgia nerd for Nostalgia nerds. I have the nostalgia of the industry standard "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo burnt on my memory akin to burning files to a CD ROM from my first CD-ROM drive which had compatibility issues sometimes from my friends who had expensive CD Burners for my 486 DX266 I still remember as a kid installing Windows 95 for the first time on CD ROM and also remember Installing Linux Red Hat from CD ROM Discs later in the 90's. From the early 90's I remember my Grandad had a 2 CD Players one on his big Hi Fi system and a Portable Sony CD/Cassette player not dissimilar to the Sanyo in this video. Thanks for another walk down happy memory lane mate.
I agree on your reasoning for the poor reception, I doubt that many still rocking an 8-bit at that time had convenient (as in, next to their micro) access to a CD player at that point. Those that did likely already had a 16-bit system.
Well I love this video had no idea that there was pre CD-ROM CD game loading ( and the compression just makes it more impressive) . It reminds me of how I felt when I found out that audio cassettes used to be used for computers
Watching this video is how I learned audio cadets were used in computers 🤣
I appreciate videos like this, the technology is before my time, and growing up in the US I didn’t know about video games that used cassettes or CDs. But I find older technology incredibly interesting. For me games were the NES, Atari 2600, and later SNES. We also had a Laser computer that used real floppy disks(the large floppy sort with the large center hole, not diskettes) to play about three games. Thanks for making cool videos! 👍
Cds that was big as a vinyl record, laser disks that would have a documentary on it? I remember those from the early 90s.
I assume you mean 5 inch floppy disks. That’s what most 8 bit computers used (Atari 800, Commodore 64, Apple 2)
I'm in the US and had never heard of this! I also didn't realize the floppy disk was more a US thing than an "everywhere" thing. Very interesting bit of history here.
Eh? Floppies were everywhere here
@@Kholaslittlespot1 It's not that floppy disks didn't exist in the Eurosphere... they just weren't the standard for data there, that they were in the USA. Cassette data was really dropped by an average user pretty early on, in the USA side of things. But, some of that is due to the fact that computers were more of business machines and less of gaming machines in the US side of things.
It took me forever to finally subscribe to this channel.
Now I have, I'm kicking myself I didn't do it sooner.
The audio signal interfering with movement control is actually a self dancing ai feature. Amazing stuff.
How is that AI?
Awesome jumper, great bit of KITT! Wishing you a Merry Christmas
I remember when a friend on the bus had a portable CD player that had anti skip and we'd spend the 30 min ride listening to punk.
I was the first kid in school to have a CD burner. I made my money back in a month selling pirated music. Had a full time after school job. Great times
@@drowningin I remember them little tape machines coming out.. my generation had the radio
@@PaulaXism we had the radio & tape too. I was born in 1980.
With portable tapes me & friends would break the plastic off and put our finger on the motor to slow it down, make it skip, and quickly bring it back to chop & screw the music ourselves. This might have only been a music trend here in Houston, but a lot of people did it because tape was a lot more affordable, and portable over records & expensive dj equipment
These videos are on a roll recently. Didn't know his existed but as soon as I saw the title I was hooked. Great research and presentation as ever.
In the early 2000s stores started selling CD's with all the editions of magazines like Zzap64 and Crash, 1,000 Amiga games plus emulation, 10,000 C64 games plus emulation, etc. I know, because I bought them all. At the same time, there were unofficial campaign and mission disks for Starcraft (500 missions and campaigns), Flashpoint (100 missions and campaigns), Command and Conquer (1,000 missions and campaigns) and so on. The 2000s were the weirdest decade of the 21st century for gaming and peripherals!
I forgot how troublesome those Computer days were.
So, in theory, you could make a cd that won't only load the game, but it could actually play and beat it if you programmed the right audio after the game data
Machine asisted speedrun, 8bit era
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure because I think there could only be two directional signals because there are a maximum of two audio channels on standard audio CD. Unless it's possible to have some complex method of splitting the audio cable and sending the audio data to different pins on the computer port?
I doubt that would be possible, but I'm not technically minded enough to say for certain.
Interesting. By 89, CD player purchases exploded in the US. As a high school student, I bought my first CD player in 89 (open box at Best Buy) for the equivalent of £58. Not cheap, but certainly obtainable. But then, as you point out, that was irrelevant, because we all had floppy disk drives.
Why did you have floppies? Why did Europe use tapes if they were so much worse? That's what I always wondered.
@@bland9876 blame American sensibilities
When your vids pop in my feed, I know the next 10-30 min on youtube will be time well spent. Thanks for making this content so often!
CDs were still a boutique item in the US in the late 80s. People had them but they tended to be the home theater system types, the same kind that might have owned LaserDiscs.
Incredibly fast loading compared to tape , absolutely fascinating stuff
Remember those days fondly and at the time was blown away by this technology on the Speccy and to be fair it was clever, although most of the games I either already had on tape or were poor. I'd moved onto the Amiga not long after. Great video 👍👍
Imagine revisiting this in the modern day with a Blu-Ray audio player, and a Blu-Ray audio disc full of 24-bit 96 kHz joint-stereo FLAC, with CLV encoding, and fancy lossless data compression prior to encoding that data into audio, plus data decompression as soon as the audio is decoded.
And also, laser lens cleaner brushes, and much more consistent overall mastering.
You could possibly even use this technology to make a single extremely big game for an 8-bit micro computer.
A kit of KITT? that is actually really cool.
A kit of KITT, full of kit!
My family was late to the Compact Disc game, and so I think the first CD player I ever owned was either my 486 computer with CD-ROM, or my Playstation 1. Both of those could play a huge variety of games that younger me would have preferred even if I, an ignorant American, had heard of the greatness of Codemasters and the Oliver Twins. Plugging one of these advanced machines into a C64 or Spectrum to play Treasure Island Dizzy would have been absurd to me back then... although it would be pretty darn cool nowadays.
Imagine hooking up your PS1 into a Commodore 64 just to load a Compact Disc Game:-D It could become more nerdy only if you were arguing about nuclear physics with your friends during the loading process.
I never new these existed. Such a creative way of using CD's.
Based on the thumbnail, I thought this would be about those huge free/shareware DOS game compilation discs from the mid-90's. Turns out it's a lot weirder!
💿Respect to the CD! I cling to my music CDs and stubbornly refuse to download music where possible 😉💿
i've never rewatched an ad before, also props on the "sweater".
This episode gave me a great appreciation of your set design.
Basically it was very similar to the problem with the Mega CD, mixing hardware and confusing the consumer, and the consumer wasn't happy with upgrading and to just put a game in.
Well, I think the other big problem with the MegaCD was its price. $299 in the US made it one of the most expensive consoles on the market at that time. AND it required a Genesis/MegaDrive, pushing the price even higher for newcomers. Granted, it was still cheaper than the CDi, but no one bought the CDi except deluded parents. That was just too much money for a technology that many saw as being too experimental to invest in, especially when it only had a handful of standout games.
@@jasonblalock4429 the cd-I is a bad example as that wasn't a game console. The cd-i was very popular in my country and it was bought for its multi media purposes.
@@drunkensailor112 Yeah, FWIW, I went back and forth myself on whether to mention it. But I brought it up because on a superficial level, they were two CD-based systems theoretically competing in kinda-sorta the same retail space. Otherwise, in terms of price, the only other console to mention would be the Neo-Geo. Which was $600ish for literal arcade-quality hardware.
@@jasonblalock4429 the thing is. 300 dollars for a game console was heavy in 1992, but 700 dollars for a multi media device wasn't. Just add the cost of a vcr and cd player in early 90s. More expensive than a cd-i.
Same as today people think 600 for a game console is too expensive, but not 1400 dollars for a phone.
@@drunkensailor112 Yeah, fair enough. I honestly had no idea that it had been successful in any region! Out of curiosity, where was this?
As an American born in the mid 80s, i had no idea any of this existed. I had an nes at an early age, and my dad had up to date apple computers from the university he worked at, which was also involved in the development of multimedia CD-ROM formats but that was the early to mid 90s hypercard era. Games were either cartridge based consoles or on the computer from floppy disc. I kind of grew up enough to be really into things when CD-ROMs were peaking, my mom had a PC by then and it came with a 101 shareware DOS games CD. This was by 1996 though. I grew up with maxis sim games and hypercard games, and the odd demo for games like another would or the early 90s port of prince of persia, which I was awful at.
0:52 Great video with tons of super amazing and fascinating stuff, but I just wanted to add that I think the Turbo Grafx 16 CD beat the CDi to the punch on home console CD-ROM gaming in 89'.
Ah yes the CD-ROM²/Turbo Duo. The European release of the PCE/TG16 is a lot of question marks though
Loved the video. I think I have a small fact thought. Rainbow Arts was not first up. This was done in 1988 by the dutch company Eurosoft for the MSX computers and it was called "The Games Collection". Of course not as well known, but MSX was kinda big in some European countries. The tape version of the collection is going for a few euros I just saw on the auction sites , but did not see the CD version for sale.
Thank you Peter, you are amazing at these documentary style videos!
Here in the US, in the late 80s and early 90s, 5.25 inch and 3.25 inch floppies were king, so it would have been very rare to even think about loading a game from casset, I didnt even know it was a thing until I watched a few videos on it. (coming from someone born in the late 80s, so take it with a grain of salt, early childhood memories are never 100% accurate)
Yeah, same here. I grew up on an old IBM XT (later a PC Jr), and I remember being absolutely baffled to learn there was some strange foreign land where everyone bought software on cassette, and it only cost $5 for a game. Utter madness! ;-)
Development of the "Compact Disc-Interactive" format began in 1984 (two years after the launch of Compact Disc).
First announcement 1986.
So in 1989 it was not such a new idea if asked me but a nice idea to make it compatable for 8-bit systems.
Still having my CD-I 910 player including piles of games on CD's and of course the controlers safely packed because it is probably never going to be used again but I do not want to throw it away.
The player was released in 1990.
Always fun learning about this stuff. Living in the Midwest USA we had Apple 2 by the late 80s and I don't think I knew anyone who had a Commodore 64.
I’ve literally never seen this before, what a bizarre setup. Thanks for teaching me something new today!
Not to forget two factors:
- Better graphics and sound in CD games on the C64 is an impossibility because of audio format limitations. A game can only be as big as the RAM of the machine allows, since you cannot random access in an audio format.
- Most people's first CD Players, and for a matter of fact DVD Players, were game consoles such as the CD-i, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2. So people that owned CD players in the late 80s and mid to late 90s did not need a C64 for gaming anymore.
Never heard about this. Very very interesting. Thank you
If you can, back up this CD as soon as possible! It looks like it’s been pressed by PDO in their UK plant and has bronzed horribly. It’s essentially rotting from the edges. If it’s still fully readable, back it up now.
i noticed that, i have a soundtrack cd from the tv series 'lipstick on your collar' totally rotted, and pretty much impossible to find 'replacement' good ones 😢only real option obtain each track individually and put on a cdr myself..but...it seemed to use some form of compressed format as total track run time much more than a normal cdr
the early 90s were wild. In 1993 you had Myst and The 7Th Guest living in the same shelves as the last ZX Spectrum games. 2 years then were like 10 years from 2010 to 2020.
As someone from the US, I never saw a game on cassette growing up in the early/mid nineties. Even my Mom's Apple II (which I *bearly* remember) had a floppy drive. I did see them in thrift stores later, but never owned the machines the tapes where intended for.
The first CD-based game I remember getting was for a game called Assault Rigs I think it was. and the audio of the game was on track 2 and beyond so I ended up just listening to the soundtrack a lot.
Interesting to see you and RMC would drop a video of the same topic on the same day, mere hours apart from each other. I see the PCB on your Rainbow Arts collection adapter is green while RMCs was orange. Interesting you both managed to grab a copy nearly at the same time... Could this be a collector or a computer shop owner selling out a bunch of old copies of the compilations on eBay? Interesting video though, very informative.
Not implying any fishy stuff going on btw, just thought I'd point out this interesting coincidence.
Drop a video? Nobody dropped anything.
The similarities don’t end there. RMC wears a Back to the Future sweater, Nostalgia Nerd a Knight Rider one.
@@jaycool428 Oh the craziness!
Thanks for the money shot of the 6X Hex Inverter @ 5:36
5:05 "the first company to attempt this was Rainbow Arts" well ackshually.. 🤓 Eurosoft released a similar CD-ROM compilation with 33 games for the MSX in 1988, a year earlier
That's really cool how you can use any CD player because the audio output is where the data comes from.
loving the Sanyo ghetto blaster, great vid as always
that's the most sneakiest and unexpected ad attack ever seen till now! :D (also an enjoyable one, like the 80s ads that were often better than the actual tv shows).
You sharing stuff with RMC?
certainly related - atleast I would like to hope so.
Ha! I had no idea until he retweeted my tweet! I would say it's coincidental but then this kind of thing seems to happen a freaky amount in the retrosphere.
That "brand new smell" is actually the ink used to print the manual, and other documentation.
Interesting idea…. In the United States, we we on to hard drives by this point, much less floppy disks. My 1984 Apple IIe used dual 5.25” floppy drives, never had a cassette drive. It’s also worth noting that 8-bit machines were rare by this point, outside of holdouts who owned them a long time. 286 PCs were common, along with Amiga. By 1991, 32-bit was the rage, a 386 was it and it didn’t take long for everything else to just go away.
I owned the Codemasters version on the c64.. good set from and great company.
The fake stereo could've been easily fixed by feeding both channels to the same pin, or making the software read both pins.
And I guess one could buy an audio cable adapter to do the "mixing" as well.
Yeah, since the CD format already had two channels, why not just feed both channels with the same data stream? That would have fixed both issues - the CD players that mixed down to mono, and the CD players that "switched" back-and-forth between channels, and would also obviously still work on CD players that had neither cost-cutting measure in place.
The possibilities... Hundreds if not thousands of games and demos on 1 disc. Our collection of hundreds of cassettes we still have all simplified.
TG16 beat Phillips with CD Rom games by almost two years.TG16 CD dropped in 1989 and was an add on but technically a CD based console.
I borrowed a friend's CD-i so I could play a rented copy of Night Trap (with Dana Plato) and a cartoon based "laserdisc" game that was similar to Cliffhanger or Cobra Command from the arcade. I can't remember the name though.
@@billkeithchannel I knew no one that owned a CD-i in those days and only a few with a TG16. Toys R Us was the only dept. store who carried TG16 and after I bought it it was not long and no longer carried at Toy-R-Us and I was pissed. A used game store finally opened up in the mall had the CD rom add on was real cheap and got it there and no CD games to be found in 1995 in my area. That sucked allot but had fun with about 8 games they had on hand. Playing Wanders from Ys on CD was my Legend Of Zelda experience over again. Great time in video games we got to experience!
@@thaddeusmcgrath I was working at Kmart at the time and they had the TG16. Toys-r-Us was not in my area yet back then.
@@billkeithchannel That's weird TG16 was not popular in my area of the south and don't remember Kmart selling them. I bought it in 1992 when the price went down to 99 bucks with Keith Courage pack in with Bonk's revenge loose. It was a good deal with SNES and Sega being so expensive and look back to realize Toys R Us was giving them away with overstock of no one buying them. Babbages games in the mall was the only place to buy used but was rare to find used Hu card TG16 games and forget the CD games. The used game store opened in the mid 90's and sold me the CD rom used for 85 bucks and was surprised with the 600 dollar price tag but a few years went by and guess with Sega CD and CD-i the price bottomed out. I really liked TG16 and wish I was a little older at launch to afford the games but SNES and PS1 made up for it going away then.
@@thaddeusmcgrath They got a limited shipment in for some promotion. I am up by Lake Erie. I remember Kmart was also the official retailer for the TMNT toys when the first movie came out and we got to see the movie at a special screening the night before the general release.
Seems like it was a neat concept. Those sped up load times were huge. But yeah, CD players were *not* cheap back then and I could definitely see that being a major roadblock for potential consumers.
If a user has money to get a Computer CD Player? They’d spend that money on a floppy disk drive instead (which can also store user saves & documents)
New tuen sounds like "Won't you take me to... Funky Town..."
mmm those white arrows on white background at 09:20 lol 🧐🧐🧐
The trouble with this (and most other innovations of the 80's) was the fact it just came out too late. This could have been a cool project for a Spectrum magazine to pick up, releasing a bumper issue with a CD containing loads of games.
what an obscure bit of history, thanks for that.
This is the first time I've ever seen this. When I was a kid, my introduction was the arcades at Wal-mart and later I saw games being rented at the movie rental place in town. Friends had consoles and that eventually led to me getting an NES. So I think the market was in consoles at the time and cartridges were king. Also CD players were still rather new and computers were not in everyone's home. We still had a record player and with an 8-track player. I didn't get a CD player until maybe the early 90's.
What a great video! Thanks for sharing this wierd product.
Thanks for another fine video of fascinating 8 bit hardware. I never knew that such hardware existed.
That KITT model is sick!! That’s a piece of pop culture worth displaying!
I still remember when Blockbuster Video began renting CD games. Sadly it only lasted a few months, either there wasn't much demand or they caught on that everyone easily pirated the discs. I only rented The 7th Guest from them but had wanted to rent Phantasmagoria as well but it was gone before I could.
They rented out PC games?
I started coding on my ZX Spectrum +2 128k. The model didn't have the timer so you had to find the 'silent part' before the game by listening to the sounds and rewinding or forwarding the tape with quick skilled fingers. I was damn good at it too. Still coding 30 odd years later...
9:20 epic "black hole" pointer
May I just say that your knight rider jumper is superb 👌
Also with some games which incorporated speech into the game, it was a lot easier to hear the speech when loading from CD because the sample rate was closer to real time.
This is bizarre to me. In 1989 I was playing Rampage, Double Dragon, Empire and games like that from 5 1/4 disks on a 286. Commodore 64's and cassettes were already obsolete to me back then. Still had an Atari 2600 with all the classic games, PacMan, Defender, Asteroids etc. But they felt old and the graphics on PC were so much better.
I have never heard of this either! Me & my friends were in college during this era, so there were loads of Spectrums (Spectra?) BBC-A/B's, C64's etc etc, but I only recall either cassette loading or microdrive & 5¼ floppy drives. My friend worked at Nimbus discs who had the Microsoft CD-ROM pressing contract for the EU! happy days!
I think another big reason it never took off in the US was that by 1989 the C64 was not nearly as popular and the Spectrum was barely released here at all. By that time DOS and Mac were the largest computer systems by a pretty sizable margin, and both had floppy drives typically included in the computer. So at best the whole installer program would have to be completely rewritten, and it would probably need to be bundled with a SCSI or parallel cable instead.
I remember my whole family was obsessed with Impossible Mission on our C64 back in the 80s, so much so that the evil dudes catch cry of "stay a while, stay forever!" became a running family joke for years..
We also had a disc drive for our C64 and mostly played games on either disc or cartridges
What a fascinating historical footnote! Thanks for exploring it :)
Wow, that Sanyo CD player brings back memories. I was given the exact model as a sympathy present when my parents got divorced, lol. I was quite good and I used it for atleast 8 years.
Like you said at the end, by the time this was released, anyone with the cash for a CD player would have an Amiga or game console by then. Hell, I had a game console by then, and I'm pretty sure I didn't yet have a CD player.
"when I was younger" I've been following you for a long time and you look like you have aged in reverse. Fucking amazing job dude
Great colorful intro!! Catching
Wow 12 whole megabytes on a single 74 min CD?! That's some impressive encoding there.
Audio CDs need to follow the lossless uncompressed spec, which means all the audio depth information is wasted.
I did the math and it works out to speed comparable to a 19.2 kbps modem. With a more advanced modulation scheme the could probably bump that 2-4 times higher, but the systems probably didn’t have the CPU for it.
@@pokepress Considering we were able to transfer at 56 kbps over the 3 Khz bandwidth (I'm not sure if you need to sample at double that if you're starting with a digital signal) of the old, god awful, landlines, then taking full advantage of 16bit 44.1 Khz I imagine 192 Kbps would be easy enough, but not without dedicated hardware to process it, and probably even 300 Kbps would be doable.I also suspect there are ways to utilise the doubling you'd get from encoding separate L & R signals without sacrificing compatibility with players that mixed down to mono. Like what if you recorded the Left data channel at 4 times the volume of the Right data channel? You could then easily filter the right out of the left on a mono mix, and with the inclusion of a baseline signal level test you ought to be able to extract the Right channel from the Left.
That's just off the top of my head of course, there are certainly much better and more advanced forms of multiplexing than simple amplitude biasing.
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf
In my family we got our first CD-player in 1990. It was of course a part of the expensive, non portable, stereo equipment in the living room. If I'd ever had come across one of these CDs I probably would have sorted it out with an extension cord of some sort but I never did. This was all new to me. Thanks!