Quote:
Though, many early PS1 games would load most of the game into RAM, and then just use the CD for audio. You could take out the CD after starting your game, and put in your own audio CD to change the soundtrack in some games (until it needs to load a new level).
Using CD-DA instead of ADPCM (either VAG or XA) would be a pretty bad design choice (even if several games did it) :
- You can't loop a song without having it stop then restart
- Takes 4 times more space on the CD
The only pro is that you can listen to the music with a regular CD player.
Quote:
And CDs and DVDs are not like rom banks at all.
I just wanted to add that this is totally true. It's in fact the
opposite of ROM banks : Instead of switching the data in several clock cycles or so, you need to load it off the disc which is much, MUCH slower, and can't be done many times a frame like bank switching does.
Quote:
and on the SNES it is quite similar to the NES.
Some opcodes allows you to use 24-bit addressing, removing the overhead of bankswitching.
Quote:
In volume, CD ROMs are much cheaper to manufacture than cartridges, which was the biggest reason for switching to optical media like that.
Yes, this should be especially interesting for homebrew. Distributing burned CDs is like 100 times easier (and cheper, which is important if you don't make profit, as the end product will also be cheaper) than manufacturing cartridges.
The TurboGrafix-16 / PC-Engine indeed looks like an interesting platform for homebrew as it can support CDs. Unfortunatly it wasn't released in Europe, so almost nobody has this console except collectors.