this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
CDs could do 500 Mb
It was actually 700 MB
Oh, no. It was not.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB
I think I came along around 2 years after burners were commercially available, so I never saw that. And the 700 MB discs came along very shortly later. So I never had a concept of a 550 MB CD (btw you said 500 MB). This is the first I've heard of it.
Lol this is so stupid. All of these examples are interchangeable between "then" and "now".
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