[aidenn0]

Absolutely; Square considered targeting the 64DD; but those were like 10% the size of a CD, so it was still a lot more expensive than targeting a CD.

Nintendo considered the load-times of a 2X or 4X CD drive to be far too slow, and 8X drives to be too expensive. PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them. For an existing RPG it was still worth it, and with the prerendered cut-scenes that were planned for FFVII it was a no-brainer.

[sotix]

To add to your point, here’s the producer of FFVII, Hironobu Sakaguchi:

“It was starting to become clear to us what the memory capacity for the different next-gen consoles would be. Our games were going to need a huge amount of memory. The Final Fantasy VI CG demo we made for the Siggraph exhibition took 20 megs all by itself. We thought that demo had a lot of visual impact, so there really wasn’t much question about which hardware we would use; if we were going to realize the promise of the demo we had shown at Siggraph, nothing but the CD-ROM format would suffice.

Another reason for choosing the CD-ROM was related to price. I think one of the big reasons the first Final Fantasy was favorably received by players, and the later games in the series gained so many fans, was that you could buy those games for around 5000 to 6000 yen. We tried to have the same pricing for Bahamut Lagoon, Gun Hazard, and our other later Super Famicom games, but using cartridge ROM meant those games had to be sold for over 10000 yen. New players did not flock to those games like they had before. If we used CD-ROM for Final Fantasy VII, we’d be able to have a 2-disc game at a price of 5800 yen. I was hoping it would be possible to make a game that could sell several hundred thousand copies.“

https://shmuplations.com/ff7/

[actionfromafar]

It would have been cool if someone had made a NES and/or SNES cartridge which had a built in CD reader.

[mschaef]

The Sony Playstation was originally conceived as exactly that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM

Part of the issue with these sorts of console add ons is that they just split the addressable market further. ISV's either have to address only console owners with the add on, or they can address everybody with the console if they can manage without the extra hardware. Commercially, this can be a hard sell, which makes it difficult to sell the add on, making it even more difficult to write software requiring the add on.

[philistine]

You're being too positive. Only two add-ons in the history of console games have been successful: the Famicom Disk System and the PC Engine CD. All other add-ons have failed to sell enough to warrant vibrant development. Note that both add-ons were japanese successes.

No add-on has been able to survive more than one year outside Japan. Not even PS VR, whose sales are too low.

[lelandfe]

The Kinect did alright, selling tens of millions

[philistine]

Despite its success, it still had a lower attach rate than the Famicom Disk System. In terms of software, after the first year no one could make any good money selling Kinect titles.

[jpsouth]

Was that not because it was bundled into nearly every Xbox 360 sold at the time?

[mikepurvis]

The Genesis had a peripheral like this in the Sega CD; it didn't sell well— mid gen console hardware changes of any kind are risky, but none more so than changing the distribution medium, where you risk bifurcating the audience and alienating those who only have the base system.

[wincy]

I really loved my Sega CD though. Shining Force CD and Corpse Killer (a FMV shooter) seemed revolutionary at the time.

I also had some turn based Dracula adventure game where you chose how to spend your time that was terrifying to me so I once hit the “rest” button in my Victorian era London apartment until it was 1994, which I thought was pretty hilarious ( Dracula would just immediately kill you when you ventured outside but 10 year old me didn’t quite realize how video games worked).

The PS1 didn’t really have those weird experimental FMV games but wow demo disks were my bread and butter for a poor kid.

[inversetelecine]

I had tried the Sega CD, model 2 I think that attached on the side instead of under. They always failed and we ended up returning them. I don't think it was the optical parts if I remember right, something about a poor connection between the two hardware devices.

Sega 32X worked at least, sadly it wasn't very popular either.

[actionfromafar]

The Sega CD / 32X branding was completely confused and ill-timed, too.

[mikepurvis]

Wild how Nintendo managed to mess that up so badly with the Wii U as well.

[thiagotomei]

If I recall correctly, one of the first iterations of the prototype Playstation was exactly this. The original Playstation started as a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony.

[a1o]

Wasn't this the usage of the bottom SNES port?

[actionfromafar]

Maybe, but in that case the hardware was never released.

[NeoTar]

There was the Famicom disk-system released in Japan which (I assume) used the lower port: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famicom_Disk_System - although that was based on floppy disks rather than CDs.

[stonemetal12]

Not to be to nerdy about it but Famicom is the NES, not the SNES. The only thing released that used the bottom slot on the SNES is a Japan only satellite modem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview

[aidenn0]

Yeah, the TG16 and Genesis both had CD options.

[plagiarist]

Was it the first Resident Evil that had the little staircase and door opening animations between rooms? I remember not realizing they were masking disk reads. One of the best subtle UX of all time IMO.

Nowadays it takes regular websites like a full minute to load all the javascript so I've always made it partially into the article when ads start moving content around or I get inexplicably jumped back to the top. A pretty stark contrast.

[chrisco255]

Yeah Resident Evil would play thematic music and creepy sound effects with a door loading animation. The way they did it almost added to the suspense of the game, so it worked fairly well. You would definitely hear the PSX grinding the CD motor overtime in loading screens though.

It's not JS taking a minute to load, it's just that ads are typically loaded async and from many different origins than the server hosting the site itself. Def worth using an ad blocker or something like Brave which does it by default.

[mcronce]

> PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them.

It's really highlighted with some of the NES/SNES RPGs that were ported to PS1 - Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 1-6 come to mind. As one particularly egregious example, there's a significantly long pause when entering combat in Chrono Trigger.

[aidenn0]

At least some of that is down to the port. Chrono Trigger fit on a 4MB ROM and the SNES had 128k of main RAM (256k total), while the Playstation had 2MB of main RAM, so there could have been smarter usage of resources. You could hear the massive seeking going on when it was delayed and this happened at different points in basically all the games in the Final Fantasy Chronicles release.

The CD-ROM is slow though; in an alternative world where there was sufficient RAM to load the entire original Chrono Trigger into RAM, it would take about 12 seconds to read all 4MB of it.