Longest loading times in disc-based systems?

Much like the (awful) version of Street Fighter 2 on the Amiga. If I remember correctly it had two or three fighters per disk. I distinctly remember my brother and I purposefully selecting characters that were on the same disk to prevent from having to put two in for each fight. God it was so bad.

One of the few areas where console carts had an advantage. Total storage on Amiga could dwarf console, but Megadrive SSF2T was on a 40 Mb (5 MB) cart and was practically untouchable on a floppy powered machine.
 
It wasn't just that which made the version bad, it was the one button joysticks, or the poor graphics. No paralax scrolling on the Amiga version. Lol. Can't believe I remember that.

The SNES version was superior to all others (unless you had the six button Megadrive / Genesis pads).
 
Much like the (awful) version of Street Fighter 2 on the Amiga. If I remember correctly it had two or three fighters per disk. I distinctly remember my brother and I purposefully selecting characters that were on the same disk to prevent from having to put two in for each fight. God it was so bad.
WHAT?! That's insane!
 
880 kB floppies. 512 kB RAM. Just not enough room to load everything or to fit all fighters on one disk. However, the smart folk 1) Had a second (or third, or fourth) external disk drive chained together, and 2) Added extra RAM and installed a RAMDISK where you had a virtual copy of the main one. Memory is fuzzy but I'm pretty sure on the OS level you could mount a RAM disk and copy a game disk to it. The PC at this time had to fool about with it's crazy memory limits, and Windows didn't get a proper RAM drive for forever. Always working of that snoreful HDD pagefile.

If only Amiga had been the PC architecture to survive and thrive. Pretty sure we'd be living in a world without war and hunger by now. :cry:
 
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Consoles were for children. Lemmings, Worms, Populous, and a gazillion other game genres were only sane on mouse driven computers, that also did a great job with console-type games to boot. Amiga had the quality and 2D power and ease of use of a console, yet the flexibility of the PC regards full software support and mouse gaming. It would have laughed at all the lesser machines except it was above all that. Human beings weren't really good enough for and it deserved to be invented on another planet with higher lifeforms.
 
I owned all of them at some point or another, and I have to disagree. While I liked my Amiga 500 (+ memory upgrade), gaming was predominantly much better on console.

The only exception I can think of right now is Cannon Fodder. ;)
 
I owned all of them at some point or another, and I have to disagree. While I liked my Amiga 500 (+ memory upgrade), gaming was predominantly much better on console.
You should have bought a CD32 :nope:

cd32_system.jpg
 
Much like the (awful) version of Street Fighter 2 on the Amiga. If I remember correctly it had two or three fighters per disk. I distinctly remember my brother and I purposefully selecting characters that were on the same disk to prevent from having to put two in for each fight. God it was so bad.

Holy cow, I never had an Amiga so I had no idea it was that bad. Would take some serious dedication to play a version like that. Made me want to check it out on Youtube, apparently the Atari ST version is even worse.
 
Holy cow, I never had an Amiga so I had no idea it was that bad..

Some games were bad, other games were awesome and easily fit on one disc with no (or minimal) loading: Carrier Command, Damocles, F-18 Interceptor, Fairytale Adventure, Frontier, Hunter, Katakis / Denaris, Kickoff, North & Sound, Populous (1 & 2), PowerMonger, Space Quest, Starglider 2, Turrican and many more.

Some devs could fit vast worlds on a single 880k floppy disc (920k if you uses tacks 89-91), others.. could not.
 
Back in those days we all had a LOT of free time to waste. There was basically no internet, fewer number of television channels (especially outside the US), and any other kind of entertainment media would have required us to spend considerable effort and time, like going to the VHS rental shop. So we were perfectly willing to wait a few minutes for a video game to load its data, especially as it was already incomparable to any other kind of entertainment, mostly because it was interactive. Oh and back in those days of 8/16-bit graphics, no matter how good a game looked, it still required the player to use his/her imagination as well.

It's different nowadays, but I'm not even going to try to decide if it's for the better or worse ;) However, with the instant availability of practically anything, it's no longer realistic to expect anyone to spend even just 5 minutes waiting and doing nothing else. But then again that should be obvious...
 
Some devs could fit vast worlds on a single 880k floppy disc (920k if you uses tacks 89-91), others.. could not.

I think Lords of Midnight has to be the most extreme example of that. It was a sort of an RPG / strategy game hybrid, where you were directing a few select hero characters gathering armies through allying with the various lords of the realm. So there was a huge game map and dozens of various lords, each with allies and enemies, and of course you couldn't recruit enemies of lords already in your army.

Now the fun part is that the original game was written for the ZX Spectrum so the memory limits were incredibly hard; and yet the game had a huge map and dozens of lords and armies to manage, and even managed to draw "3D" views of any given cell of the map from 8 different directions and all. And it was supposedly pretty damn hard. Still it was a best seller in its time, and its sequel Doomdark's Revenge was a great hit too.

Not sure about the load times though, it probably wasn't that slow.

Then there's Elite...
 
Holy cow, I never had an Amiga so I had no idea it was that bad. Would take some serious dedication to play a version like that. Made me want to check it out on Youtube, apparently the Atari ST version is even worse.

It wasn't that bad as you had solution. You bought extra floppy drives and chained 'em together. Think of it as buying SSD for your PS4 or something like that. We didn't have piracy laws during Amiga days here in Finland so we basically played every single Amiga game available and while there were some huge multi disk monsters, having multiple drives made it somewhat easy. But of course moving to PC in 1990 and having HD made huge difference back then. I remember how Wing Commander was joy to play with my PC and my friends had to suffer inferior Amiga version of the game (and much later date too). And Amiga users didn't even get the sequel IIRC.

I think some of late Amiga games like DMA Design's Walker had massive loading times. Might be just my imagination as by that time I must have been getting used to everything being on HD.
 
It wasn't that bad as you had solution. You bought extra floppy drives and chained 'em together.
Haha, I'd forgotten that! :LOL: The first upgrade decision for 512k (kilobytes) Amiga owners was tough. Do you boost RAM from 512k with the 512k trapdoor expansion (which was slow 'fast' RAM on original Agnus Amigas) or buy an extra floppy?

I bought the RAM first because every floppy drive connected to the system took another 20k of RAM from the OS some games couldn't run on 512kb Amigas if you had two or more floppy drives attached. So many games ran better on one megabyte machine.

I also remember moving from an A500 to B2000 and buying an unpopulated 8 megabyte RAM expansion then buying RAM chips seperately which you pushed onto the bare board. Wow, how we lived back then! :cool:
 
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