Optical media may be dead for video games on the big corporate consoles, but not in [Emmet]’s heart– or on his DIY game console, that he built specifically to use optical media. Not fancy blu-ray or newfangled DVDs, either, but good old fashioned CDs from the Orange Book.
Yeah, he’s not fitting modern AAA flagship games on those disks, but the Intel N150 on the single board computer he’s using isn’t going to power through them, either. That’s fine, though, because there are literally decades of content this machine can handle. That’s why the board is running Batocera, which is a Linux distro tailor-made for retrogaming on x86– and also ARM, but that’s not important here.
He’s using ESP32-S3s to run custom wireless gamepads with BLE, which means he’s got more power in each of them than some of the retro consoles this machine is emulating, but it gets the job done. Unlike some cartridge projects we’ve seen that merely queue up the games, the CDs on this one actually do seem to store the ROM file, along with a shell script to put it in the correct emulator’s library. We might have gone with autorun, but it’s [Emmet]’s console and he’s got it working how he likes.
What really makes this project stand out, in our opinion, is the effort [Emmet] put into custom CD labels and art for the jewel cases. It really makes this feel like an actual game console and not just a PC hooked to a the TV. The 3D printed case doesn’t hurt in that respect, either.
Be it from a nostalgia, as in this project, a need for cheap storage, or the perverse desire to hook it to an NES, optical media seems to be having a bit of a moment. Speaking of moment, we’re going to have to take a moment to come to grips with the fact that CDs have become nostalgic. Didn’t they just replace vinyl?
Isn’t it discs instead of disks?
Disk is British English, and Disc is American English.
But in the current global market “Disk” is magnetic storage, and “Disc” is optical storage (including magneto-optical).
So I would say yes, you are totally right.
You both apparently have the right of it. In North America, discs are shaped like disks, but in the UK they’re shaped like discs. In neither are disks particularly round, at least outwardly.
… if there’s a sillier language than English, I don’t know it.
Actually that round thing with a hole mentioned here is a “right circular hollow cylinder”.
Optical media… BAD
Aside from memes, this project is fun. We miss that era when you truly own something. Turns out putting a disk is faster than waiting for pesky patches to download.
I happen to install ScummVM last night and dug up a laptop with a dvd to read my cds to load the assets from Riven.
I decided I really should complete that game.
There were issues with the network sharing so I needed to enable Remote login and scp the files from the old machine to the new.
Then scummVM demanded a file that wasn’t where it expected to be and didn’t tell me where to put it. I eventually figured out I could just copy it to the game root and it would work, but that was merely experimental step on my part.
So, Riven runs.
You know what I didn’t get? The nostalgic feel for the CDROM sound, or the slowness of the data transfer.
$10 would have saved me the trouble as they’ve put a version of the game in the Apple Store; but where’s the fun in that?
As someone who only beat Riven a few years ago, here’s some gameplay advice: ensure you have sound turned up. There are certain puzzles in Riven which are subtly sound-based.
And this is a minor spoiler but I recommend you read it anyway: after you open a door, you should close it again and inspect it. I was stuck for a long time because some game-critical content is obscured behind an opened door.
The funny thing is, it’s not. Just a few days ago i was backing up old family video CDs. The video files were being copied over at 4MB/s, meanwhile i regularly download games over the internet using steam at 12MB/s. I have a 150Mbps FTTH internet connection
I liked optical media for many reason, including cost, and convenient but speed was not one of them
Looks like you had a 32x CD drive. In the CD heyday there were 40, 48 and 52x drives (they were hot rodding them because it was all we had for mainstream distribution).
If your game fits on a CD and can be read at 32x it will take approximately 2 mins to read the whole thing. I have not had a 4GB update at 12MB/s complete (a quick online calculator shows 5 and a half minutes).
All that aside if the game is running off the media it would not load the entire game at once, it would stream in assets as needed. (In fact if you look into EG Crash Bandicoot on PlayStation you will note that the game continually streams the visible assets from the disk while in a level).
One could argue that faster distribution has led to things like multi-gigabyte ‘shader pre-caching updates’ becoming popular.
What are you even talking about? There’s no such thing as a “shader pre-caching update”. Shader pre-caching is something that’s done at runtime. You clearly don’t know the first thing about game development, or what shader pre-caching even does.
I’ll give you a hint beforehand: It doesn’t involve transferring data over a network connection or even from a storage device at all.
With certain hardware configurations as well as certain asset configurations in a given engine, not all shaders can be compiled down to a finalized format at build time. When you start a game up for the first time and it sits for roughly 5-minutes (hopefully less) and it sits there building shaders, what it’s doing is finalizing certain combinations of shader parameters into optimized paths for your specific GPU or driver version.
The alternative would be something that gamers would complain about even harder, which is shipping finalized shaders for all combinations of GPUs and driver versions, bloating games even moreso than they already are now.
If you’re going to complain about something, at least have the first clue what you’re complaining about.
I don’t care if Sony or Microsoft makes their consoles Internet-only. Looking back, it seems that since late 2000s video games turned into ever more addicting crap anyway. If the “industry” crashes and burns it might a good thing for everyone.
Fortunately, in my country internet-enabled game consoles (that is X360 and PS3) never really became popular because at the time their live services were not officialy supported and credit/debit cards needed for online purchases only got popular in early 2010s – around the time when I grew up and mostly stopped being a prime target for their marketing. On top of that, at the time of their release I couldn’t afford a console when a viable alternative was spending that money on upgrading my PC. Therefore I skipped the entire “gamer lifestyle” mania with its communities, profiles, achievements, collecting boxes and whatever.
Don’t get me wrong. I like video games, I still enjoy occasionally playing stuff like Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dark Messiah, Gothic 2, Airfix Dogfighter, BeamNG, Sub Culture or Hitman: Blood Money but those things are like Clippy in Microsoft Word 97. They’re not there to make you buy more stuff or pay subscription fee. They don’t want you to spend an entire weekend grinding highscores to outcompete some kid from the other side of the world. They just offer a not-really-realistic world for you to screw around in and have fun. They were made by computer nerds who wanted to make money while toying with hardware available at the time to see what’s possible.
Looking back at the last 20 years of video games from the position of an observer who skipped all those “major franchises”, it’s both incredible what modern hardware is capable of and very sad that it’s mostly used for products, which under a thin layer of yet another ｄｅｅｐ ｓｔｏｒｙ are merely glorified electronic slot machines.
If you think that games have turned into “ever more addicting crap anyway,” you clearly haven’t looked very hard, and have turned most of your focus into being the sort of bitter online misanthrope that nobody likes.
There’s a whole heap of vibrant games, many of which are developed by a tiny team (or even a single person), if you can find the wherewithal to sort the wheat from the chaff. It seems you’d rather just complain about games and wear a set of rose-tinted glasses while pretending that things were better “back in the day,” when the simple reality is that you’re a victim of survivorship bias. There was just as much forgettable shovelware back in the 80’s, 90’s, and early aughts as there is today, but that’s the key thing: They were forgettable.
So many of today’s franchises, too, will be forgotten in 30-40 years’ time. That doesn’t mean a damn thing about whether or not the game market today is chock full of gems just under the surface.
I dare say an N150 is more performant than you might expect (especially so if a minimal OS using Proton were running on it). It is probably capable of playing more than a few AAA titles from 5 years ago at low settings, and a majority of the ones from 10 years ago.
Also a lot of Indie games could fit on a CD, probably most of them with a little attention to compression.
Also there is no technical reason a DVD couldn’t be used. I imagine his drive is probably either a DVD Reader or Burner, as the drives and media are roughly the same cost whether CD or DVD these days.
The cheapskate in me doesn’t like the dedication of an entire CD to, e.g., a few megabytes of GBA ROM, but I like the idea in general. If I did it, I would have, perhaps, a “Pokemon Collection” CD, with all of the GB/GBA/DS PM games on it, and a menu screen from which to pick the specific game, and likewise for other game franchises. The shelf to hold the jewel case is a nice touch.