This era of CD Gaming was Bizarre | Nostalgia Nerd

00:00 Introduction
02:27 Knight Rider Promo
03:25 The Concept
07:45 The CD Games Pack
19:22 Why did it fail?
24:03 Credits

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[nelsoncabrera]

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.

[rustymudbear]

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.

[BigCar]

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!

[arlasoft]

If LGR also comes out with a video on 8-bit CD games then something is definitely afoot....

[MrMortull]

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.

[misterkite]

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.

[Nezuji]

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. ;)

[grahamjones]

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.

[simplyhard]

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. 😆

[Smegheid]

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.

[VincentGroenewold]

Did you just watch an RMC video on exactly this? :)

[thebuccaneersden]

Wow blows my mind that they even tried to make CD games for those 8bit home computers. Those were wild times.

[nathanbinns]

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).

[watsoft]

Quite sad that the technologies that came together to make all of this work meant that it was pretty much redundant on release. If CD players had come to market sooner or the 16bit evolution had been delayed then you would be reminiscing on a fondly remembered breakthrough in micro computing instead of an amazing product that strikes no retro recollection for the majority.

Congratulations and Kudos to the teams that made it happen!

[SlyPearTree]

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.

[valley_robot]

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

[epobirs]

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.

[talideon]

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.

[alanrmurphy]

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 ☹️

[Choralone]

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