Home Artists Posts Import Register

Content

This is a thing I've been meaning to make a video on for years. It always fascinated me how you could get games from CD to load onto the humble Spectrum (and C64 of course).

So here's a dive into the Codemasters CD Games Pack, along with a bit about it's production and failure.


Files

This 8 Bit era of CD Gaming was Freaky | Patreon | Nostalgia Nerd

8 Bit 8 Bit CD CD

Comments

BastetFurry

Not only the US market, we Germans almost all had a 1541 on our breadbins. If i remember correctly ALDI even sold a kit for under 300 DM back in 1987 with a C64 and GEOS bundled. No clue if the 1541 was sold seperately but i would bet that it was placed right next to it for roughly the same price, making that ~600 DM for a whole system without a screen. And i bet with some luck you could score some older small color TV from flea market or classifieds for under 50 DM. Point is, over here the whole system with disk drive was comparable cheap that no one with enough money for a CD player really bothered with games released on CD for the 8 bit micros. Now if they had cobbled together a cheap CD-ROM drive for the C64, even if just cheating with audio but having the cable being able to control the played track and position...

Doug DiRT Turner

Something that jumps out to me is when you talk about the US market and how we had disk drives, that's true. I was one of the rare few who had a tape drive, but mostly for loading the cassettes that came with the UK magazines that my local computer shop would get in. I don't know that I had more than one or two actual games on cassette. But of course, I had hundreds of cassettes full of music. Everyone did. Even when I got a CD player and CDs were everywhere, I was still holding onto cassettes (I still do to this day) for music. Has anyone ever done a deep dive into why the Euro market gravitated toward tape drives while the US stuck with floppies of various sizes until CDs took over everything?