CD Games on a 1982 Micro - Codemasters CD Games Pack
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- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
- Following on from last weeks adventure in early CD Gaming today we test out the Codemasters CD Games Pack. How does it work, what's on it and is it any good!? Let's take it for a test drive.
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Did anyone actually buy this thing? Let me know if you have any memories of seeing this in the shops or if you bought it, and what CD player did you hook it up to? As always if you love what we do in The Cave and would like to support the channel then head on over to patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support. Neil - RMC
Hi Neil.
Never heard about the CD 8bit home computer stuff until you put it in your other video.
Fortunately a TurboDuo console (PCE Duo USA version) - grey import - was my first CD based gaming gear - good times and many HuCards are still among my collection today :-)
That poor old CDRom Rom... fancy it being subjected to 'Spectrum' data lol
The only reason I didn't ever get this was because I couldn't afford a CD player. By the time I did own one, I had brought a disk drive and forgot about the concept
My best mate had a Speccy and his parents had a (very expensive) Pioneer stereo stack system too, and the 6 disc CD changer in it also had a single caddy cartridge so the Codemasters CD he got for his birthday in November went in there. He had to use a converter on the joystick jack lead, as that Pioneer system used the larger (older?) headphone jack standard. As you've identified in your video, it wasn't usual to have a CD player at that time- my parents certainly didn't, and I was therefore happy to spend time around his place with all his stuff, the lucky sod! But I remember we were around 13/14 years old at the time, and were more fascinated by the technology side of things, like faster loading and the fact that the loader stayed resident in memory, rather than the actual games themselves. We're both working in IT as adults, you'd never guess would you...!
Yep, I did, still got it as well in a box in the loft along with the rest of my Spectrum games! I had a ZX Spectrum +3 (which I still have and use with a Zaxon SD interface), I think I got the CD Games Pack for a birthday or Christmas, I can't remember now. The only place in the house I could use it was in the living room, as that's where we had a Sanyo DCX891 (just found that model number!) all in one CD stack system (still got that as well!) that my parents had bought not long before along with the Mitsubishi 21" Nicam Stereo Fastext TV. I used to get the old TV from the living room when it was replaced so I had the 20" colour TV (that the Mitsubishi had replaced) in my bedroom, which was great, especially when I later got a NES and later still a Megadrive - still got both and all the games as well, although I have SD interfaces for both! :)
You do know the Sinclair Spectrum 128k exists right? Before Alan Sugar took over...
I'm impressed they were able to make that tape loader resident with such a wide range of games. I would have thought no matter where they stored it in RAM, some of the games would have overwritten it. And how would the code for the QUIT key sequence continue to be executed while those games are running? Pretty much every game I've ever disassembled and examined (admittedly, mostly on the C64) overwrites the interrupt vectors and provides its own keyscan routine, which would disable a resident program like this. My only guess is that Codemasters went through and patched all these games to play nice with the loader. Quite a bit of work!
Remember seeing it previewed in Amstrad Action.. The problem is by 1990 those of us that were still using our 8-bit machines for gaming were probably not the ones able to afford CD players.
Very true!
Yes I remember seeing it advertised at the time but I didn't have a cd player so I never bought it for my spectrum+2
Not only that but we probably had most of those games already
CD players became very cheap, Amstrad Argos was 120 pound sterlings, after 1986 even cheaper, family set was 300 incl CD and all...
Only the PC was too fancy, some C64 too, Vic20 ??? mad times, Electron for 100 pound in 1984, with german book, lol !
We hated Amstrad and Argos here ! Sony, National, Yamaha !
This has blown my mind!
How did I never know about this?
I feel like someone has gone back in time, introduced this in 1989 and I’m the only one on the original timeline where it didn’t exist...
Excellent video btw, your enthusiasm was infectious!
I had to like this just cause the setup looks so awesome, and true for the period, how I wish I was 8 again
I thought I was watching and LGR oddware episode for a moment here!
I was just thinking that.
Came for the retro gaming, stayed for the CD-rom-rom🤘
... had to do the math on whether it was worth a purchase, based on the games you already had. So, it was the Humble Bundle of the 1980s.
Only ever had the temperamental tapes.
Still got my Spectrum with the official memory upgrade and a DKTronics keyboard.
@Goliat eXperience 16k to 48k maybe? Sinclair sold the chips if you wanted to solder them in yourself or you could send it to them and they would upgrade it for a fee iirc.
They did release a black ROM ROM, it's the US TG16 CD drive! :)
Glad someone responded. I was about to mention the US version too.
2:25 Common practice to put 48k/128k to help indicate that the game was at least tested with the 128k. Early days, older 48k software sometimes had compatability issues with the 128k models, and some games were later fixed and reissued with the packaging updated to reflect that new compatability. And eventually it just kind of became the standard to list the all the models it worked with.
5:05 Should use the DivMMC to load an image of the CD loader tape
....well, until someone found out you just type USR 0 in 128K basic...
Similar to loading "tapes" from smartphones these days, but decades ago! Same principle! There is just something so cool about anachronisms, seeing older equipment working with newer technology for which it was not designed, like this, and like hooking up those WiFi32-style "modems" to put older machines on wireless networks, SD adapters, etc. Good show, as always, man!
Some say he was in a Spectrum game, all we know is he's called The Stig...
I was looking forward to seeing the loading screens appear incrementally and comparing that to the tape --- but they don't! Without that, loading seems like a very soulless experience. It looked really cool on the Microdrive.
absolutely mind blowing. I would have loved this on C64.
Honestly, they should have made the loader the first track and used a splitter for the audio cable.
The +2 Spectrum didn't have an audio input, so this was the only way to make it available to everyone
They could've included the loader on the CD as well, though, lazy people...
Never seen this boxset before. Got some really nice games and its nice to see other versions of them, as ive played most of them on C64. I will get a Spectrum one day. Nice video Neil.
Love you’re videos it’s like stepping back in gaming time
Thanks Allan
Interesting Video. I think Codemasters should have made a Spectrum expansion with 2 joystick ports, extended ROM for the fast loader and CD cable built in. That would have allowed them to use it for single games on CD too, and also license it out to companies who were making the big popular 128K games that took a long time to load.
On the box it says 48k with Kempston... Maybe the cable was made just for that and +2 Sinclair port (which obviously has different pinout from Interface 2)?
When buying these some don't work cause of how old they are, the adapter does not work, I have the Commodore 64 version and it does not load, it never has but I did paid £21 for it on eBay, its up on eBay at the moment and over £200, I am still glad I got it because its part of history of Codemasters and the C64, the ZX version was better, that because that was made by the Oliver twins, I would not mind a version for that, I do have a ZX Spectrum too, or a copy of its CD, you can download the Cassette as a tap, the loader.
In 1989 most users didn't have a CD player(I didn't), they were to expansive so the same kind of problem as buying a disk drive then, and the other problem is your not going to like all the games on it.
I have the Rainbow Arts 1st CD-Edition too on the C64, that came out at the same time, that works fine, but it came out a few months the Codemasters CD, they both say on them 1989.
Cause my Codemasters CD Adapter didn't work(I need to fix it) I took my adapter apart, it has epoxy that cover the amplifier board, this is my adapter... its on cpc site.. www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:Inside_the_adapter.jpg
I did post about it on Lemon64 years ago but the site has been attacked by hackers so its down at the moment, Its here... the webcache version, I sheared my version as a wav file because I couldn't copy its CD with CD copy software... webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0mgUuKEJ00oJ:www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D59620
Oh boy. I had Fruit Simulator on my +3 back in the day and I had great fun out of it. So much so I decided to write my own BASIC program of a fruit machine myself. However because I didn't know machine code or advanced user graphics usage, my "fruit" were limited to the initial letters of each fruit with different colours for different fruit, so you could distinguish between a yellow L representing a lemon, and a green L representing a lime. It had 4 reels to it and at first used RNG when rotating the reels, making a winning line a rare bit of random luck. Later I figured out how to use the DATA commend to program in 4 reels each with a preset 25 fruits in them. That allowed better working of the nudge and hold features in my game.
Personally though, my favourite games for the Speccy were Advanced Pinball Simulator. It was fairly good in it's ball physics, but in the 48K version of the game, once the game finished loading you could hear "Advanced Pinball Simulator" spoken from the built-in speaker. It wasn't read from the tape. The game had a tiny bit of speech synthesis in it. How they fit it into 48K of RAM still bewilders me today, but it was awesome. My other favourite game was Hard Drivin'. A 3D racing game using the Freescape engine to render the world. Totally silent on the 48K version but had sound on the 128K versions.
If you could afford all that at the time, you could probably afford an Amiga.
Good point!
speccy/zx81 users who were into electronics too were building "crash loaders" in fact there was a niche fanzine, mine was based on a reel to reel deck, basically you record at one speed and load in at a faster one.
and it works(sometimes), its not the same as this but mine would load the128k version of kwik snax in 2mins, which was great and about a 3rd the time the cassette took.
Brilliant solution that using CD tracks
I wonder why they didn’t just put the boot loader onto the CD and an extra cable. The boot loader wouldn’t be compressed like the games, but it could still be loaded directly from the CD to the audio jack.
Seeing those Codemasters games sure brought back some memories!
🔥Great tunes at 4.18 and 14.35. Tough to go from seeing you nearly everyday back to just once in a while. 😭
I come for the retro tech. I stay for the 303 bubbling away in the background
Here you can find out how to make your own cable:
spectrumforeveryone.com/2017/06/inside-codemasters-cd-games-pack/
I'm curious why the loader wasn't also included on the CD in the regular Speccy cassette format, to avoid booting from cassette. It would require the user to swap audio cables on the CD player, a bit of a hassle, but not really worse than the hassle of loading from tape. They could even provide a single cable with both the 9-pin connector and the typical "ear" connector, with a switch if necessary to easily switch between the two outputs. But that would probably be more costly to make than just including the cassette. And perhaps that would also be more error prone, as the user would have to guess at the CD volume settings for the loader, without the benefit of the volume test. So maybe I answered my own question :)
I just took a break from playing Road Rash on my 3DO Blaster to watch this video only for you to mention Road Rash.
Had a mate who had this Codemasters CD. Always wondered why they didn't put the loader on track 1 as a convenient alternative to the tape. Wasn't it just the +2 that was missing the audio input socket?
The biggest oversight with this release was the fact they didn’t include the loader on the CD itself. They obviously shot for the lowest common denominator. The +2 machines didn’t have an audio input port, so loading from an external audio source was out of the question. At the same time, most 48K/128K owners probably had a third-party joystick interface of some sort, and so could take advantage of the new loading format.
Ironically, if Code Masters had put a slightly modified version of the loader on the CD (it only needs to read from the Spectrum’s standard audio port instead of a joystick port), all games could have been loaded from a CD using a standard audio cable-no need for a cassette at all. It really wouldn’t have cost Code Masters a single penny more to do that. Oh, well.
Yes, you're right, though the loader can be the same as the tape version, no need for modifications, I think they were just lazy...
PPS. Kempston ALWAYS worked better than Sinclair ... infract the Word on the street was Sinclair secretly outsourced to Kempston. Word.!
Word!
The CD waveform had an interesting wobble to it. Kind of like an AM carrier signal. I couldn't see that in the tape version.You mentioned you asked A. Oliver about the loader. Could he shed a bit more light on how the encoding works?
‘ I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still, cd rom rom rom, cd rom rom’
I am in eternal awe of the Speccy visual charm, it aged uniquely and I sat and smiled watching the clips of the games. What a beaut.
Loading speed was tied to how long I played (play) games. When I had to wait 5+ minutes for a game to load I would usually give it a good go and play for quite a while. Now if I load something in seconds if I’m not hooked in a couple of minutes I usually try something else.
Fascinating! I have a 48K, but I've never heard of this. You didn't mention one thing though: _why_ does it use the joystick port? It's still audio, why wouldn't the audio-in port be the best way to receive audio from a CD?
Pair it with a Sony D50 Discman from 1984 😍
It's a shame the boxart looks more like a CD cleaning set.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the raw data transfer speed between this method, the cassette tape and a regular CD-ROM (which is 150 kB/s at single-speed)...
Needs a US ROM-ROM (which came in black) and a black CRT for a cleaner look.
I had atv simulator back in the day
I bought my Amiga 500 in 1989 and the games for that blew away anything the spectrum could do. People that were into computers had either moved to Atari ST or Amiga by 1990. It helped that I had an income to be able to afford it as my parents probably wouldn't have been willing to pay out the £425 for it (400 for the Amiga and £25 for the TV modulator).
Maybe you should try and get a TurboGrafx 16 cd rom drive, I seen that they are black
Don't usually watch your videos after the whole "you sound like Nostalgia Nerd" "No I don't, you must be in North America" "Yes you do, and I'm in the UK too" thing, and I didn't really watch this one either. Skimmed through it.
An 8-bit computer with a tape drive AND a CD-ROM. Is that even legal? Hehehe...
Wow I'd never seen this before. What a great idea, and in a way does put the spectrum/c64 as an early computer that would work with a CDROM drive.
I do get the fast load idea. But was the cost worth it? Having a joystick adapter, having to run a loader program on cassette, and then swapping loader out with an actual joystick. I cant help but wonder if this would have done better if it had just been a straight load via the casette input. Maybe even with that they could get away with some faster loading. (i know i can increase the bitrate of a wav file on audacity to an extent and pump it into the speccy and it'll load it). The pack could have been cheaper without needing the adapter or cost of the loader.
Also Im curious to know what the cd sounded like through speakers. Was it a similar sound to the tape?
This looks like a great idea but seams weird that they didn't add the loader as the first track of the CD. I guess it was more aimed at the +2 owners who didn't have a sound in port for the loader.
Local craftsmen and global delivery makes NO SENSE!?? I can't let this go any longer @RetroManCave, what the heck!? Everything is made locally somewhere, and most stuff can be delivered globally these days, Covid notwithstanding. Sense makes none.
Fun video, as usual, great content, big fan, blah blah :P
I had Spectrum cassetes with alternate "compressed" games on the tape - looks like, its used similar way to load games (with built-in loader) - way faster than normal. Its was made by local Russian coders here, in Russia. Each cassete had more games on it, but requires good tape player to load without errors.
I still have such cassetes somewhere, but I not sure about their current state - aside from not having any cassete player to check them anyway.
It was released in 1989, not 1982, some people misread the title
That's correct, the micro was released in 1982
Of all the games to pick you pick a controversial one and on top of that you use an arch-enemies clock! ;) Never knew this speedy fast device existed! How many games packs existed, was it just the one?
That's a blast from the past :) I was working at Codemasters when this thing was released and at the time I thought it was a nifty technical achievement (mainly the speed of the loading) but a bit late to the party to make any real impact - I'd already had an Amiga for about a year, and the 8-bits were already looking "retro."
I certainly gave it a spin, out of sheer curiosity, but I suspect I wouldn't have been curious enough to hand over 20 notes for it!
As you say, it was an odd pitch: you needed a CD player, which was still an expensive and aspirational item for most people back then, but the pack was for a cheapjack computer that was already past its best-before date, and the included games were a pretty uninspiring bunch of old-ish budget titles. A curious mixture of luxury and slumming it. Anyone who was flash enough to have a CD player in 1989 would probably already have gone 16-bit by then, so it was never clear to me who this thing was actually supposed to be for.
What it really needed was a killer USP to make it desirable - either the Codies' entire back-catalogue on a single CD ("Wow! Amazing!" - David Darling) or some epic new multi-load Dizzy game with the fast loading making the CD version clearly the optimal way to play.
My mate at school had a Spectrum 48k and I was always around his house playing games such as: Knightlore, Jet Set Willy and Airwolf. It's crazy how far technology has advanced over the years. I still game to this day using my Gtx 1070Ti. I do like watching these kind of videos however and appreciate you making this one, thanks for the nostalgia trip.
I have just realised something. In 1990 I was 37, had never used a computer (not until 1994) and, not being a teenage boy, thought computer games were a silly waste of time. You guys would have simply been annoying teenagers to me but I can now see the world you experienced :-) Isn't it funny what 30 years can do? Now I am thinking of playing some of them just for kicks. Never too late I say. Cheers!
Nice presentation, but I have two questions:
-Why didn' t they include the normal-speed program on the CD, along with the cassette, so you could use that instead, when you have found the correct volume.
-Is there a TZX image of the tape and a CUE/BIN of the actual CD, for us to download them?
Some discs are prone to degrading which means that the foil flakes away and renders the disc unusable, Would have been nice if they had gone for the ZILOG Z800 chip that is backwards compatible with the Z80A or go all out with the ZILOG Z8000.
I learn something new about SPeccy in 2020, it could support CD. Funny how it couldn't load 40kb game in 3 seconds though.
I just love watching these videos of ZX spectrum to hear the euro guys say "ZED HEX" spectrum. Or the really heavier accent in choice lands "ZED HEX" Spectwum. The r's in some words become W sounds.
In British English R sounds are either made by rounding off the W phoneme, or rounding off the L phoneme, depending on your local accent. Of course the W is more pronounced in some people than others, but everyone with particular regional accents does it.
Ah, the good old Philips CM8833. Best "bang for the buck" retrogaming RGB monitor out there, in my opinion.
Can you try use audacity to convert standard tape games into the compressed format and burn them on a CD? I wonder how many games would fit on a 700MB CD without duplications. How many CDs to have entire ZX Spectrum library on CDs?
Too bad I never heard of it back then, I would love it. I used VHS and some interface to write computer data to VHS tapes so yea this stuff was made for me.
God, I had that. I worked in a computer shop so got it at a big discount given it was £20. It was relatively reliable attached to my Laskys own brand CD player. I remember being impressed by the ability to load relatively quickly from CD, but less impressed with some of the CodeMasters filler. I think I still have the thing somewhere!
It’s a shame nobody bothered to make a good rip of this disc while they could. This disc is a part of gaming history and should be preserved as such. Even worse, it looks like a badly bronzed UK PDO CD, so by this point they’re probably all varying degrees of unplayable.
Only tapes... and the dodgiest tape player that (thinking back on it must have had a dirty volume Pot. I was a child a knew not these things) used to jump volume mid load and I'd have to start all over again. How I envied my friends with commodore 64's with volumeless tape drives!
In fact, most of my allotted 'computer time', was spent loading and not actually playing. 🤬🤬
I wanted it but never owned it. The interface itself is interesting, and clever how the loader routine has the volume test built-in to help reliability. But as the video says, it's just a compilation of budget games and doesn't really represent good value.
Found an interview with Philip Oliver on making this on the lemon64 forum: www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=59620
I'm actually impressed by this and surprised it didn't have more success. 30 games for under a quid each, plus they load in seconds? Even with the iffy quality of some of the games and the limited install base of CD players at the time I can't see why this wasn't a no-brainer for a lot of people. The only thing I can think of is that, as someone said in another comment, by 1989 families rich enough to own a CD player had probably already upgraded to a games console or a 16-bit computer and therefore had no need of a Spectrum compilation.
I remember seeing this advertised in Crash when it was first released, but it wasn't for me, as I didn't get a CD player until 1996, long after I got rid of my Spectrum.
When it came out I briefly flirted with the idea of buying it but three problems stopped me:
I wasn't convinced any other software would come out on it.
The only software on it was Codemasters budget games.
I had a +3, so not much advantage.
I never owned any of this stuff, so it is fascinating to see it in action.
That CD looks like it's going through what is known as disc bronzing, only happened on discs made by PDO...
I'm not clicking 'like' on a Codemasters-related video until they release Advanced Simulator Simulator 2.
Can't help think that if a personal CD-player with a true line-level audio output--like Panasonic later made--was used, the results would've been better... or, at least the cassette deck wouldn't be necessary.
Didn't waste any time on cassette. I always made a coffee and then the game would be loaded. If it was a 128K game I could make the coffee, and drink said coffee and I am ready for the game LOL. PS you won't believe how many games I got onto a 90 minute cassette heh heh
Considering how notoriously slow the C64 floppy drive was, I wonder how that version of the CD compared to loading off floppies? While the floppy was faster than tape, there's a good reason "fast load" apps were all the rage on the C64.
I am curious as to exactly why loading via the joystick port was faster? It seems like the optimized loader could have been the first track on the CD and subsequent tracks would still be able to take advantage of the audio compression used. It would be cool to dig into whether the same audio compression could have been used over the audio port and skip the extra cable.
They could have included a 3.5 jack in the cable and put the loader on the cd rather than a separate tape and disabled (or told people to pull the jack out) it after it had loaded. They could have also put the normal slow loading game files in a block of tracks after the fastload ones for people who only had a single joystick port. Thinking about it, I recall seeing this in magazines and being more interested in the amount of games you got rather than how fast they loaded so maybe just having normal loading speed and ditching the cable would have been a better idea as im thinking most of the cost was that cable. If they sold this at 9.95 and you just loaded it through the 3.5 jack it might have been a bit more successful than it was. I guess it didnt help that most of the games were dreadful though.
1989, meh, kinda a little too late; if this thing had come out, say 3-5 years earlier, it would have been an utter game changer.
what format was the games in the cd? (cdda,cd-da,mp3,mpeg)
If it was a true audio cd, the tracks were just audio, you would've seen them as cdda in a computer, but it's just a convention, they are PCM encoded tracks
Surely you could sample the fast tape loader and burn it as a standard CD audio track and load it from CD, or if you make a backup put it as the first track, or back up your tapes to normal speed CD audio and load directly from cd
I do wonder why they didn't include the loader as audio track 1. It would mean swapping cables, but would be a nice backup.
This feels a bit like putting in a really impressive hood scoop on a 1980s dodge colt.
My kid will ask me what happened if his game take 10 seconds to load if it took 50 seconds its broken ! Kids today will never know!
Too bad having a table of devices hanging off the computer today is because you need dongles hanging off dongles as the laptop only have a usb-c...
A CD compilation has already been done for the MSX but CD readers where rare at the time and expensive. No tape inside the CD was used in audio mode directly as was the tape.
Quite an interesting idea if there were a better selection of games but by the time it came out I was moving on to the Amiga. I recon that multi load games would have benefited from something like this.
Using a console from 1988 to load games for a microcomputer from 1982 is a special kind of retro madness, and I dig it.
I'm glad someone got it working well. We gave up back in the day, it never worked for us.
I think my first CD Player was a Boom Box Type --- so too late for this.
Why isn't it loading the loader or the games directly from a cdda track? Why you need a cassette player at all. Did I miss something?
The +2 Spectrum lacked an audio input, the tape was necessary, but yes, they could've put the loader on the CD as well, I guess they were just lazy...
I guess you'd generally have a cassette deck hooked up permanently anyway, and as the CD uses a custom cable you'd need to unplug/plug cables for a loader and then the fast loading interface. So it was simpler to use a tape. The tape loader is pretty quick to load as it's very simple
You're right Neil, but I still think they should've included it on the CD as well anyway, at least as a backup, if you'd lost the cassette or it would fail, you would've in your hands a nice coaster!
I had it. Half the games didn’t load. Yes, they’re on there twice.. but still loads didn’t work
For those interested in a bit more technical detail on how this worked, I wrote an article for the Spectrum For Everyone website a few years ago that goes into more detail:
spectrumforeveryone.com/2017/06/inside-codemasters-cd-games-pack/
Thumbs up for obscurity.
Ha ha, your curved monitor is curved in the wrong direction! Curved outward and not inward... ;-) have a nice day
i remember the packs, on hobby computer fairs, 1982 style !
just Compact Cassette tape interface, modulating, on Audio Red book CD
Nec did a black cdrom , its the turbografx cdrom exactly the same as the white one but black
i like it quicker then tape loading right now can you make your own CDs can you try be mad if you can.
I never see on youtube the speccy I had which was the ZX Spectrum+ 48k
Why did it need the special cable? Couldn't the loader of been on the CD as well and each games starts at normal baud and then goes to a turbo loader, i.e. 1500 baud then perhaps 15000 baud? Maybe I'm missing something but the special cable just seems like a copy protection system.
I seem to remember there was an issue that some portable cd players didn't have geniune stereo output, they had mono output that would switch channels rapidly to create stereo sound and those cheapo cd players were not compatible with these game discs.
Also while I'm writing does anyone remember the video recorder backup system for the Amiga. You could archive all your discs to video tape? I had that.
Yeah I was about to comment the same regarding certain CD players not having stereo output as such. Well remembered 👍
A mono output would have worked perfectly, I don't see any problem with that
Besides, I don't think they ever made a cd player with a mono output, some early players had just one DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) as a cost saving measure, but it switched back and forth between channels to create a stereo output, not mono
@@pablorai769 It didn't have mono output but could only generate 1 channel at a time and rapidly switched between each channel to create stereo. For some reason this effected these CD game discs which perhaps relied on a consistent audio track.
bonzobanana1 Ok, but just some of the first gen CD players had a single DAC, they could've put the loader on the CD as well for the vast majority of users, it wouldn't have cost them a penny, I'm starting to think they just forgot to do so and had to put the loader on tape! But no, I had forgot that the +2 didn't have an audio input, so the tape was necessary, sure they could've put it on the CD as well, I guess they were just lazy...