Viewing Thread:
"why are cd's so slow"

is there any chance in the near future that there would be cd's that don't take so long to load because i find it really anoying that it takes time to load. where as the n64 has cartrides so it doesn't take any time at all to load but the cartride games have so i prices like some games were up to £60. are you going to bring out a computer that has the game on it which is really fastand not a load of money

you'll find games on DVD load incredibly fast where as the cd's take a while and make quite some noice.

I remember having an old Atarri 800XL, with the amazing "Kick Off!" on it. This game took, and I am not exagerating, OVER 40 MINUTES to load, and the loading sequence had set of coloured screens in it to prevent the screen burning out!!

And, even then, 9 times out of 10 it crashed after about 30 minutes of loading.

And the game was crap too. Even then, I thought it was crap.

cds are not as fast as catridges because there is more game data on a cd

Beach Head 2, Bruce Lee...

Wookiee, I guess you could get an emulated version?

(Just remembered another one - Bruce Lee. That was US Gold I think??)

I had it on the Spectrum, and it was still a great game. Beach Head too. Spy Hunter, Tapper, er, now I'm running a bit dry of US Gold games.....

Any C64 owners remember when you first saw and heard the U.S. GOLD loader, using Novaload? A few fit-inducing flickers of the screen border, then the U.S. GOLD logo appeared, and we had that droning national anthem of theirs...

It was so cool at the time. Raid Over Moscow was my first U.S. GOLD game - still love it to this day, even though i no longer have it. :-(

18 minutes? Blimey, that's nearly as long as it takes to complete ZOE! ;-)

devo wrote:
> When I were a lad down pit, you had to load games from
> cassette. This could take up to 10 minutes, and then
> there were no guarantee it would work.


???

Before tape turbo-loaders were invented, I had a game called Arcadia on the C64. It took 18 minutes to load... and the games was crap anyway!

Needless to say loading times today don't bother me at all - they're rarely longer than a few seconds, even in the worst cases.

Chances are, if a softco hasn't worked to reduce loading times, they haven't put much effort into the game either - so it's not worth playing anyway! :-)

Console owners today don't know they're born. When I were a lad down pit, you had to load games from cassette. This could take up to 10 minutes, and then there were no guarantee it would work. Especially if whippet peed on t'cassette recorder.

CD/DVD drives are getting faster as peripherals for PCs, but once you've got one in a console, you're stuck with it. The problem with the PS2 currently is that it has very little RAM to store data in memory. Hence the between level loads. Though with the advent of the HDD, I would expect developers to use it for 'installations' (ie. data will stream faster from the HDD than the DVD drive), and also use it as virtual RAM. Loading times won't become a thing of the past, but the problem will certainly be reduced.