When I was getting into PC gaming, I bought Wolfenstein the new Order as a DVD. What it turned out to be was Wolfenstein the new order… on steam, with several DVDs (4-8) that had the games data. I installed it this way once and never again.
Comment on Didn't realize how hard MGS4's Disc Swap joke hit until I backed it up
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
The original Baldur’s Gate was 5 cds and an additional cd for Tales from the Sword Coast.
The most obnoxious bit about all that was that you had 6 cds to potentially scratch that might prevent you from playing the whole game.
the16bitgamer@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
My half life 2 was a bunch of discs, and then once you installed it you had to wait forever for the files to decrypt. Steam has really gotten a lot better since then.
Botzo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Final fantasy 7 for pc was also 4 cds in 1998.
I scratched one of them and had to beg a friend to lend me their disc so I could get through the story.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
I had those. I am pretty sure they were huge because everything was mostly uncompressed.
I remember using a program to extract game data. Every environment was a literal bitmap image the size of the area, and there were additional bitmaps of the same size for each, where pixel colours were used by the engine to check where characters could walk, what part of the scenery is overhead, etc.
It was cool looking into the adaptive music though. Every track was split in multiple bits of like a dozen seconds, so for example if the battle theme needed to end it could branch into a specific ending variation seamlessly. I don’t think a lot of games did that back then.
Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
When I built a pc with a 20gb HDD, one of the first things I did was the full install of Baldur’s Gate so I could play without disc swapping.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Japanese games primarily designed for use with NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers that came on floppy disks had an even worse problem:
In order to save your game, you have to write to the floppy disk, usually wash disk needed to write somesort of data. Unfortunately, this means that the disk cannot be read-only protected. You probably see where this is going, but this sadly led to some players having uncompletable copies of games because they wrote to the wrong disk and accidentally ended up overwriting game data with save data.
Some games came with manuals that warned of this, and some games spent the cost of disk space to store actual in-game warning screens to try to prevent this.
ICastFist@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Basement Brothers’ videos on Youtube shows the amount of different floppy disks that some PC88/98 would come in. 5+ was common. Some games would also ask the player to create a user disk, which was essentially a personal copy of some stuff from the main disk plus space for save data, which lowered the risk of messing one of them