Random Gaming Thoughts

[RCBH928]

Everyone remembers PSX with nostalgia and while the games were very different in gameplay and graphics compared to the previous generation I clearly remember how horrific the loading times were. Going in and out of a room in Resident Evil was scarier than meeting yet another zombie. It really takes out the fun of gameplay and made it uneasy but that might have actually helped with the whole experience in RE's case specifically.

[Anapan]

It's so true. Some of those crazy loading times wrecked the gameplay. We looked over them because of the graphical prowess, but a vast majority of them traded detailed 3D environments for low framerates and unacceptable loading times. It was very rare to see a 2D game have any framerate drop or loading screens that defined the game. I know so many RPG's loading screens well enough that I could paint it on canvas to miniscule details.

[Ziggy]

Yet at the time everyone rolled their eyes when Nintendo announced that the N64 would still use cartridges and the main reason for this was loading times.

[RCBH928]

I think most people who rolled their eyes were looking at the CD quality music and the 700MB storage of CDs compared to N64's cartridge at aronud 10-64MBs I believe+smaller physical dimension for storage and lower price. Also CD was the new cool futuristic medium and cartridge was the old one from Atari 2600 days. I really can see their POV. One thing they didn't realise how bad loading times were going to be in practice. They might not think its bad to wait a half a minute for the game to load, what they didn't realise its going to load for a half minute on every screen change.

[isiolia]

People knew the tradeoffs as we'd already seen the earlier CD based consoles, and fairly expensive cartridges. I think it's just easy to gloss over just how big a CD-ROM was, at the time. When the "multimedia" craze starting hitting PCs, a single disc held as much (or more) as a lot of hard drives. By the time of the PS1/etc, a HDD still only held maybe 2-3 discs worth. They were enabling programs to have a LOT more data than would otherwise be reasonable. It gave developers freedom to do new things...even if a lot of earlier efforts simply involved FMV or digital audio.

[RCBH928]

I probably didn't understand MBs and storage size but all I knew that these "glass" razor thin CDs read by "lasers" translated to "FUTURE SCIFI" in my head. Meanwhile I treated cartridges as the "VHS" of consoles. Meh. With that simplistic mind, I did and still find that its mind boggling that a cartridge can run 3D games. That translated to "IMPOSSIBLE POWER TECH. MARVEL" in my head. I thought this was impossible just as much as its impossible to play a games from a VHS tape....or can it?!

[isiolia]

Tape has been used as a low-cost (for the space) storage medium for a long time. The main problem, of course, being seek time. Cassettes were used to distribute programs on computers prior to floppy drives becoming affordable. Since then, you've usually seen tape storage more for backup use, given the very low cost for the storage, and there were some budget systems that adapted VHS for that purpose.

There were also VHS based TV games that were more just shooting a light gun at the TV while a cartoon played.

It's probably something that technically could have been done, but by the time it would have really been feasible there were better options.


I can certainly see a public perception towards CDs being the future though, especially with respect to consoles - the large scale shift to 3D and CD storage happened around the same time.

[marurun]

The biggest problem with early CD-ROM tech was, oddly, storage. Sure, you could stream some kinds of data off a disc, like audio, but not game data. Unlike with ROM cartridges, systems had to pull all the data they needed into RAM, just as early computers had to do with floppies and tapes. See, ROM could be accessed at relatively high speed, so consoles could pull extra data when they needed it. CDs? You have to wait. The earliest CD games on the PC Engine, for example, had to fit all the data from each CD load into the space of a .5 mib cartridge. Your game could be larger overall, but each level or playable chunk between loads was actually pretty small. That’s why the PC Engine CD had so many minor upgrades with new system cards. Each upgrade provided more memory to store loaded game data in to keep up with the increasing ROM sizes in other consoles. This wrestling match between total data and available data between loads continued all the way up until hard drives became the standard for consoles.

[isiolia]

That's not something that's ever really gone away, or likely to. Most of it is just relative. The more data that has to get pulled into memory, the faster the storage needs to be. Even with strategies to minimize or mask loading, plenty of HDD based games have long loading screens at times. SSDs have improved on that significantly now, but they're still ultimately pulling data into RAM.

Obviously though, it'll vary. Even the PS1 had the occasional title that fit entirely in RAM (Ridge Racer, offhand), and if all developers were trying to make were SNES games with Redbook audio, load times would rarely have been a thing.

[MrPopo]

Yeah, you can see the impact of "we only have so much memory" with games like Deus Ex: Invisible War. The levels are noticeably smaller than the previous game because they needed to fit it within what the Xbox could store. On the flip side, I discovered that the way the OoT/Master Quest GC disc works is it loads the entire game plus emulator into memory, and then you can pop the top and it won't notice (which I discovered when I wanted to reset and hit open instead). Metroid Prime you'll notice that sometimes doors open rapidly and sometimes they don't; it all depends on whether or not the game correctly guessed you were going to go through that door and has sufficient time to load the next room. And even in the days of cartridges you still have to deal with the underlying hardware capabilities. On the NES you only had so much time per v-blank to write new background tiles to memory, so various tricks were used to hide this loading process when they couldn't just have everything in the other page of the nametable. For example, with Final Fantasy 1 you hit the menu button and it flashes the screen a couple times before pulling up the menu. This is the game writing the menu tiles to the other page; when it's done it "scrolls" to the other page and now you're on the menu. But closing the menu is instant because you're just returning to the map screen you were on, so it's still in the original page; they just "scroll" back to it.