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Ah Phantasmagoria, that was an interesting case with my CDROM drive at the time, I think it was a Mitsumi one and there was a compatibility issue with specific discs from the 7disc bundle, so I buy the game, going home and start playing with some friends - that was common practice back then - we finish day 1 and I enter the 2nd disc and the FMV is choppy as hell! Try again and again and again and I assume the disc is problematic, so we go back to the shop and they ask what CDROM drive I have, I say Mitsumi and they tell me that it is a known issue with some drives and there is no workaround, so they offer to exchange the game for a different one, oh this "Harvester" game looks intriguing :) Fun times!

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

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

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "

To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - just drop a game CD into an audio player and enjoy emblematic OST's like Daytona USA, Sonic R and many others in full 44100Hz 16bit audio.

I recall a few PC games did that too: Total Annihilation comes to mind: I also still own the physical media and still can listen to the OST that way.

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

> not sure if all

A fair amount, but far from all of them. AFAIR it was largely a technical decision with trade-offs; games that did it could offer CD-quality music, but wouldn't be able to read data from the disk and play music simultaneously.

IIRC, the Quake 1 CD also had its OST as standard audio tracks

Quake 2 had it for sure, that CD spent as much time in my car as in my PC

Myst was the CD-ROM killer game for me.

And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride.

Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall having to play it at something like 15fps. That wasn't great.

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

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

I think they were just excited to share that a newer game exists, given OC was posting how they liked it.

For very small values of newer. There have been two remakes of Myst since then.

I too was in the Cyrix camp when Quake came out. My first video card was a Permedia 2. It ran GLQuake when that came down the pipe but not very well. The Christmas when I got my 3dfx Voodoo1 card was magical.

When I was in university living in some crappy room at a friend of my parents, it was freezing and there were some transportation issues because of it, so I didn't go to classes and was bored around programming (I wrote Pascal those days for fun and profit), so a struggled to the closest shop to ask what's interesting; Phantasmagoria it was.

Good memories playing that one on that massively heavy monitor that was normal back then, under the blankets with ice on the inside of the windows and on top of the blanket.

I find it so funny that there are new games that are are smaller than Wing Commander 3 despite the 32 year gap. To be fair, they obviously pack their data very differently.

Meh, in the early days of DVDs I recall a game that came with uncompressed 48kHz audio. Compress it to mp3 (which the game naively accepted if you had the correct Windows filters) and it fits in a CD.

Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game.

Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.

Yeah, I remember an mp3 rating >50% CPU time on one of those early pentiums we had

Yeah. Seeing that made me very happy, being the proud owner of a dual CPU (no, not dual core!) AMD K6. :-)

I never noticed any problems, but I did have the mmx version. It wasn't fast but never did the playback stutter , even with dreamweaver and several browser windows

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

The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best to reboot? I sort of hate whatever marketing genius figured out to label it "Turbo" instead of "Slow" But they definitely earned their bonus.

The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, our first family PC was a 386 that we could slow down from 33 to 16 MHz with the Turbo button. It even had the segment display to show the current clock rate.

I knew what it was for and had some old games that ran too fast, but from what I remember, in most cases 16 MHz was still much too fast, so I didn't use the button much.

I think it was no problem to switch Turbo mode on and off in the middle of running software.

For reference: I had a 486 DX2 66 MHz, and I played MP3s by decoding them in batch to PCM and then playing that as it couldn't really do that in real time. Perhaps only if you didn't do anything else and the MP3 was low bitrate enough and ideally mono.

MP3 decoders have, thankfully, gotten faster since the 90s. But yes, a 66MHz is pushing it indeed.

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

CDROM and 386 would have been an odd combination though?

My 486 had a single speed CDROM but it only had a 500mb and a 100mb hard drive, so still wasn't playing mp3s

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

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

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

Nope, just a late 90s pentium running linux.

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

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

Well, I looked it up and the game shipped in the early 2000s, and listed Pentium 266 as minimum requirements (Pentium 500 recommended).

I don't recall the 386 era and the DVD era overlapping that much…

When Metal Gear Solid 4 released on Ps3, they used uncompressed audio. I think part of it was just to show off how much storage Blu Ray had.

The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running.

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

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

I think you misunderstood his question.

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

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

With hard disks, I could see reading the compressed version from disk and decompressing giving you the bytes faster than reading the uncompressed version. With SSDs that advantage likely went away.

Yep. If you had the CPU overhead available, you could speed up your entire computer by enabling full-disk compression and then defragmenting. It's difficult to accurately describe just how slow it was to move data to and from a spinning platter over a PATA interface.

I would guess to save on installed size?

It's not about size or file count or disk space consumed. The question is about why would you require the extra overhead of playing the compressed version which involves decompressing it on the fly in some way, versus just playing the already decompressed version.

In this case it was stated that both the compressed and decompressed versions live side by side. So there is no install size saved.

The OP stated

"The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed."

'has it twice' could just be on the install media, and compressed/ uncompressed chosen as a trade off between install size and performance.

Anyway searching around the OP seems to be misrembering. Titanfall seems to be well-known for 35gb out of the 48gb install being uncompressed audio. I couldn't find a reference to it also having compressed audio also.

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

> Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game

Maybe, but there could be other reasons.

In a former life I briefly worked at a game developer, and the PC port of a game we shipped did the same thing. The reason I got was that the assets were just barely too big for the game to ship on one CD-ROM and going to a second disc was going to cost too much. The solution was to encode all the sound assets into .ogg (because it was free and unencumbered) to put on the disc and then convert them all to .wav post-install because the in-house engine couldn't play .ogg files and there was no time to add support before publishing.

They're doing that with Blueray games now, writing gigabytes of uncompressed audio for no particular reason other than to use up space and sucker the occasional audiophile.

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

> “In the age before … ubiquitous internet access”

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

Obviously I didn’t play enough games.

Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale - not a good game, but an impressive number of CDs at 5

Thank you for playing Wing Commander!

The most polite error message ever

> like Mark Hamill

I just wanted to add, it also had John Rhys-Davies and Malcom McDowell! Crazy cast for a video game, especially back then. And these were not „just“ voice roles.

I hated Malcom McDowell for years because of the game. Probably one of the first celebrities I had a strong opinion about.

Remember the Commodore CDTV, which came out at the height of the "multimedia" hype: https://obsoletemedia.org/commodore-cdtv/.

I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.

Chris Roberts is still doing his thing. Elite:Dangerous is still getting updates and there's also Star Citizen/Squadron 42, both of which could either turn out to be epoch-defining or fusterclucks of truly epic proportions.

The latter.

For me the music on the Monkey Island CD-ROM remaster was a real jaw dropper.

> Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!

SNES games aged a lot less than those silly DOS games.

(I mean that SNES games look more sleek and "modern" today.)

Good art lasts.

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

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

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