This era of CD Gaming was Bizarre | Nostalgia Nerd

[Applause] [Music] oh apologies you caught me off guard bopping to this new tune when i was younger i also used to spend a lot of time listening to copyright cleared royalty-free music on my brand new cd player after cassettes compact discs felt like a brand new world with its crisp 44 kilohertz audio clarity and instant track selection then when cd-rom came along yet another world opened up offering us a whopping 650 megabytes of storage heralding the multimedia era and changing games forever cd-roms became popular for pcs during the mid-90s the first cd-based console in the west the philips cdi was released in 1991 but before all of that deep in the murky world of 8-bit micros it was possible to buy games for your commodore 64 and zx spectrum on cd2 here's one of them the codemasters cd games pack and given that until this point most games came on cassette especially in europe this was an absolute revelation ah yes good old cassette much like dial up internet data is modulated into an audible sound wave which the computer can then interpret back into binary for the spectrum on average there are 1300 bits encoded into each second if we take a look at the audio itself we can see the frequency varying in length to represent each bit of data as standard visit x spectrum uses pretty simple frequency shift key decoding so it detects the edges of the modulated signal length to interpret the data from the user's perspective we hear this as a concatenation of tones blasting through our tv and our eyes are treated to a visual representation of this data in the form of these horizontal bars which is both a striking and programmatically simple way to convey that something is happening but what it really means is that if we want to play knight rider then we're going to have to wait five minutes for it to load in which time we can discuss the new kit knight rider subscription from sponsor fan home just like michael knight in one of the greatest 80s programs ever you can possess your very own four-wheeled partner month by month you can build this incredibly crafted and hefty beast up until you have a two foot long wheeled piece of joy complete with rotating number plate steering headlights brake illumination everything and of course the red swooshing strip you even get the kit remote control watch and a raft of subscription gifts how amazing is that plus with each piece of kit because it's a kit and it's called kit you get a complete guide to the car and the lore of the tv series itself and man that was a good show head on over to the link below and claim your subscription today sadly the zx spectrum version of knight rider is about as far removed from the epicness of the television experience as you can get so if we want to play a different game then we'll have to reset the machine insert a new cassette and wait another five minutes or even longer and that's if we don't get a loading error caused by either a weak signal a slipping rubber band in the deck or degradation of the audio on the cassette itself yes loading from cassette was never the ideal option the biggest revolution in the recording industry since the invention of the long-playing gramophone record but this is no ordinary disc so with the advent of compact disc in 1982 it didn't take that long for computer boppins to realize that this would be a much better way of transmitting data with a cd there is less signal variation less audio distortion and of course an increased sample frequency meaning that actually you can pack a lot more data into the same chunk of time in fact the humble speccy can actually accept data at a much higher board rate if you have the kit and tools to do so and combined with a speed loader or turbo loader a program developed specifically to interpret a bespoke faster loading encoding format multiple programs can then be packed onto this disk yes this isn't cd-rom as we know it the computer has no control over the medium at all this is essentially hacking your compact disc audio player to send data as an audio stream just like cassette the first company to attempt this was rainbow arts with their first cd edition consisting of 10 titles and released for the commodore 64 in 1989 the first release market was germany where both the commodore 64 and compact disc players were incredibly popular before following in the uk for 29 pounds 99 this little pack comes complete with an adapter that plugs into the cassette connector and you simply connect your cd player's audio out to that that dongle is basically acting as an analog to digital converter for the audio data which the c64 can then interpret just like the c64 data set does the first track of the cd contains a games menu held in the c64's standard loading format which you load directly from track one of the cd this not only allows you to choose your game but also acts as its own speed loader allowing the data on the other cd tracks to be encoded in a condensed format and giving you access to all these absolute gems [Music] so then the codemasters version was frantically produced to get it out of the door for christmas 1989. february 1990's edition of zap magazine reported we at zapp were the first non-cm people to see the system working the rush to get everything in the shops for christmas has been severe and there hasn't even been time to decide whether to license for loader software forcing other producers to come to codemasters if they want to produce their own cds for the system clearly there is huge potential for other software houses to bring out their own compilations clearly codemasters were hoping this would be an incredible success and why not here was a cd with 30 full games and some of them really good games with the promise of reduced loading times and all for 19 pounds 95. surely this would be on the christmas lists of every 8-bit owner in the land i mean look at this ultra-fast loading as little as 20 seconds instantaneous track game selection maximum reliability no load errors digitally mastered digitally reproduced and digitally recorded massive 12 megs capacity easy to use includes cable over six feet with adapter and comprehensive instruction book well i'm certainly sold this is the zx spectrum version although the contents for the c64 version are identical save for the software itself codemasters did promise an amstrad cpc version it was even advertised but it never made it to production and we'll come back to why in a bit so here's that six foot long cable to connect your cd player to the computer here's the cd itself with a nice codemasters logo printed on the base here's the cassette element for cd loader software and here's that comprehensive instruction book which oddly still has that plastic brand new smell it really is quite comprehensive as well not only do we have operating instructions for the setup we also get instructions for each game featured within of course there's also the obligatory registration card where was this software purchased boots smiths menzies a tobacconist no those were the days when you could get a game compilation with your 50 grams of drum shag pipe tobacco okay so that aside the adapter is clearly the most intriguing element one end plugs into your cd player of choice and the other end into the zx spectrum now this is quite interesting because unlike the rainbow arts version which plugged straight into the cassette port this one plugs into the joystick port and that's the same for the c64 version as well the left audio track goes to pin one which triggers up on this setup write audio to pin 6 which triggers fire and ground to the common pin 8. now the spectrum doesn't need to receive both left and right tracks because they're identical so here only pins six and eight matter within the time frame of a few weeks and alongside electronics wizard ted carron it was actually philip oliver of the prolific oliver twins who developed the handling software for this whilst the other half of this iconic duo andrew oliver was working on fantastic dizzy for the nes in a 2016 interview with retro gaming magazine philip stated that we saved the games using a very high baud rate 20 times the speed of the regular signal to a high quality audio dat tape the saver and loader had to be written with extreme accuracy and error checking it had to allow for slight variations in the high ones and low zeros initially the plan was to use the stereo output from the cd player to have one channel work as the timer channel and the other to act as the stream of faster data wait for the timer channel to switch from zero to one or one to zero and read the other channel for the data sadly we discovered through buying a load of cd players that some of the cheaper makes mixed the stereo to a mono output to save money we clearly had to be compatible with all cd players and reverted to a software solution relying only one input signal very similar to how a regular tape loaded however that didn't work out entirely as we'll discover later on it was though designed to be used across all platforms so this is the same cable you'll find in both the c64 and spectrum boxes the original cable itself contains a simple conversion circuit consisting of five resistors and two transistors allowing a digital signal to be passed through the joystick port inputs here's a simplified version of the circuit from spectrumforeveryone.com which makes it easier to understand and a good place to start if you want to build your own cable now that's great but unless you own the spectrum plus two or plus three you won't have a joystick port as standard you'd need an accessory such as this this is the zx interface 2 well actually it's a clone of it but it still adds a cartridge port and two joystick ports which was especially useful if you had a rubber keyed plus or a one to eight plus version of the machine here i'm using my trusty 128 plus the last model which sinclair themselves produced before selling the brand to amstrad and also the greatest model having six feet of cable is better than most cables it shows that codemasters understood that not many households actually had cd players at the time and if they did they were likely to be big hulking units owned by your parents and therefore sitting somewhere else in the lounge but even so six foot isn't going to get you far and so i'll be putting my sanyo base expander right next to the tv then we can pop the cd in return to the spectrum and load up the boot cassette as normal once loaded we need to pick whether we're using a kempston or sinclair interface such as found on a plus two the kempston interface follows the standard atari schema and that's what we're using here then it asks us to connect the cable to the joystick port which i've already done because it's best to do that when the spectrum is turned off and then we get this screen which asks us to press spacebar to set the cd volume track one of these cd is simply a test signal so play that and the software will let you know how strong the signal is by the amount of green on screen slowly increase the volume and when it's solid green we should be good to go now there's no menu here instead pressing the q u i and t keys together puts the software into listen mode allowing us to choose a track to load and then just press play if you want to know which track is which game then you'll have to look at the manual and work it out of course we still need to wait for the game to load but thanks to the superior encoding it only takes 50 seconds rather than 5 minutes we're still relying on an audio format remember this isn't cd-rom this is just a peasant's cd gaming setup but after a few seconds voila we are in [Music] [Applause] [Music] now if we were to extract the normal cassette waveform for this game vampire it's 5 minutes long this cd version is about 40 seconds and you can not only see how much more stretched out the signal is on the cassette you can hear it it sounds like the difference between doing up your flies normally and when you're in a packed room and you've just realized they're on done but it's also quite freaky the modulation is so packed together but actually it sounds like a voice coming at you from another dimension it's almost like the electronic voice phenomenon all over again i swear if lucas wayneman starts talking to me through this stereo i'm going to be pissed the boot program effectively remains in memory throughout this lurking in the background and so if we press the q u i and t keys in any game the screen should freeze and allow us to then load in another game without having to reset the spectrum in practice though it's not always the case you see this whole random cd player hooked up to a computer is actually a bit more janky in reality than you might hope and of course it is often pressing that key combination will just crash the system so then we have to reload the boot menu and start all over again we're also relying on unknown factors for example my sanyo system has base and tone adjustments that can interfere with the loading and some games need the volume a lot higher to register for some reason issue 100 of new computer express also details a problem from martin hayley in uxbridge i won a codemaster cd games pack and using the family midi system was able to load and run the programs on my 8-bit wonder for my birthday i received a portable cd player and for some reason or other it won't work it plays the music alright but it won't look at the game cd it isn't the disc because it still works on the midi system the problem here being that some cd players don't have two separate stereo channels instead swapping quickly between left and right so that the human ear can't detect the change this might fool us but to the spectrum it was missing half the data so although philip oliver had solved the issue caused by mono cd players this was a whole new problem fake stereo just wasn't picked up in the time limited testing another more comical issue is that if you leave the cd playing after a game loads it will likely end up controlling your character after all it's sending signals to the up and fire buttons of your kempston interface you can see that effect here in ghost hunters as my little dude does his own little dance to the sounds coming from the cable maybe this is lucas wayneman again maybe that is lucas weinman good god if you need to use a joystick you may have to unplug the cable completely which is fine on a plus two but originals can be a little temperamental if you start knocking the interface about while powered on well that's put an end to twin turbo but you know all that aside it's still an excellent and innovative little package and at 19 pounds 95 tremendous value for money especially when you consider it was about the same price as a disc based game rather than be advertised 30 games you actually get 32 as well plus a slideshow demo at track 34. tracks 35 to 66 contain backups of the 32 games which is handy if you scratch your cd it's also handy because it allowed codemasters to market the disk as containing a whopping 12 megs of data so each track is about 25 kilobytes each the games themselves are a little hit and miss but here are some of the best [Applause] and here are some which are not the best but then surely this was just a taste this technology was touted to provide 8-bit machines with full screen graphics huge animated sprites extra levels and digitized music and video right so what went wrong why weren't shops flooded with cd-based games from this point on and cassettes kicked to the curb well for you and me the answer might seem obvious today but back in 1989 apparently it was not in 2015 codemasters co-founder richard darling was interviewed for the story of the oliver twins let's go dizzy a great book which i have a lovely signed copy of and he stated we thought the cd games pack was going to be a great success 30 great games for 19 pound 99 pence much faster loading than cassette what is not to like i think we originally intended to launch it simultaneously on the 3 format but had some difficulties with the amstrad version so we launched with c64 and spectrum intending to follow on with amstrad however when we launched it for spectrum and commodore 64 the sales levels were very low so we decided not to roll out the idea to the amstrad in hindsight i think we made some mistakes for example by assuming that 30 games would have a very strong appeal 30 times that of a single game when in fact people are interested in specific games for specific reasons with some appealing to some people and others to others also the new hybrid technology which was a stepping stone between cassette loading and cd-rom drives was hard to communicate clearly and seem to have less appeal than we anticipated but i think there's another component here which is key in 1990 if you were still playing games on your zx spectrum or commodore 64 if you hadn't moved away to a snazzy game console or 16-bit computer like the amiga or atari st then i suspect there was very little chance but you'd even own a cd player i don't think i did until about 1992 and that's because they were expensive just look at the contents of this 1989 argos catalogue pages and pages of cassette players from as little as 10 pounds 95 but only two portable cd players with the cheapest model the philips d 6800 a whopping 129 pounds 99 and let's not even get into the midi system prices that's about the same price as a 14 inch color tv and it's not much cheaper than an entire commodore 64 bundle and i have a sneaky suspicion that most 8-bit owners would rather put that chunk of change towards a shiny new amiga or atari st than a cd player so might it have worked in the us where compact discs were more prominent well according to an interview with codemasters pr guy mike clark in the march 1990 issue of amstrad user the big hole in our distribution network is america we're working on at the moment but the american market is notoriously difficult to get into because they want to spend money the more expensive the product the better so it's difficult to sell 299 games over there the cd pack may change that though well probably not cassette loading might have been the norm here but in the us a lot of people owned disk drives for their c64s so you didn't need to be messing around with cd audio you had the beauty of floppy disks which were already fast enough and more than capable to hold enough data for a game or two and so what could have been an industry changing idea was simply a fleeting one one which appeared for christmas 1989 and swiftly disappeared soon after that's why the rainbow arts first cd edition and the codemasters cd games pack are incredibly rare these days and worth a good chunk of change there was though reportedly an even rarer release the cd top 20 solid gold pack by cosmi again this pack contained 20 titles instilled into cd audio including forbidden forest potty pigeon and grand master chess maybe not the most up-to-date selection but at 19 pounds 95 still decent value for money unfortunately all i can track down are disc based versions so if you've got the cd version you may want to hold on to it well yeah or sell it for a good price your choice anyway that wraps up this little tail into 8-bit cd gaming until next time i have been nostalgia nerd tootly [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 208,852

Keywords: codemasters cd games pack, 8 bit cd

Id: Ji00WTxoY7I

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021