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Originally Posted by oscar_ates
CD32 was missing the speed part indeed. I do not understand why they poured millions on the CDTV though, to me it was obvious that there was no market for it at homes with computer illiterates, there was no justifying point to buy it for the computer people as well.
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It wasn't obvious to Philips, Sony or Microsoft. At this time home computers were still a niche product. The industry was eying up those masses of 'computer illiterates' and wondering how to get them onboard. Turns out all they needed was a cheaper computer with a better user interface.
The other thing the 'illiterates' needed was a
reason to get a computer, which was
the internet. 1995 was when it all came together, with Windows 95 and Internet Explorer, and ISPs such as Compuserve and America Online. FMV then became a big deal too, only now called 'streaming media'.
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No games used more than few MBytes on both system, 600MB storage capacity was wasted. We see later big enough games on PS1, which could handle them. Only FMV addition would not save the day.
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No games used more than a few megabytes because the media didn't suit it. Even if you had a hard drive you still had to get the game onto it, which was a pain when it came (as it had to) on floppy disks.
Yesterday I attempted to get Doom onto my 386SX system. It doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, network card or USB so the only option was floppy disks. I would need to copy the images files onto 4 floppies. After the 2nd disk failed to verify I gave up. Looks like my only option will be to pull the hard drive and install it into a more modern machine that has an IDE interface.
CD-ROM broke down the barrier to larger games. If the game only took up 50MB the other 600MB wasn't 'wasted', it was just spare. It could be used for other stuff if you could be bothered creating it, eg. background music, instructions, demos of other games. But if it wasn't used it didn't matter - the CD had provided what was needed, a single disc that cost much less and was a lot more user-friendly than 30 floppy disks!