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> PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them.

It's really highlighted with some of the NES/SNES RPGs that were ported to PS1 - Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 1-6 come to mind. As one particularly egregious example, there's a significantly long pause when entering combat in Chrono Trigger.

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At least some of that is down to the port. Chrono Trigger fit on a 4MB ROM and the SNES had 128k of main RAM (256k total), while the Playstation had 2MB of main RAM, so there could have been smarter usage of resources. You could hear the massive seeking going on when it was delayed and this happened at different points in basically all the games in the Final Fantasy Chronicles release.

The CD-ROM is slow though; in an alternative world where there was sufficient RAM to load the entire original Chrono Trigger into RAM, it would take about 12 seconds to read all 4MB of it.

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