/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9751438
Weren't these notorious for dying with no prior warning? Only person I ever knew who owned these is my cousin and I think he regretted it rather quicky.

I only know of one thing that used it and that was the Z64 copier.

>>9751438
A pack of zipdisks was like $100

>>9751445
The drives themselves are notorious for not reading disks. Anecdotal but I own three disks and three drives and only one of those drives works reliably. The other only works when you forcefully insert the disk and the last one just doesn't work at all. All the disks work fine though.

>>9751438
Because CDs already existed and had like 7 times the storage capacity.

>>9751474
Might've come out before rewritable CDs though.

>>9751476
why would you need a rewriteable CD for a game?

>click
>.
>.
>click click click click click click click click
Heh, nuthin personnel

>>9751438
By that time CD burners were becoming affordable.

>>9751438
Imagine Iomega commission 100-250mb zip-base media for Ultra 64, on Nintendo behalf.

i thought the 64dd was basically a proprietary clone of the zip disk technology

>>9751445
The drives broke frequently, yes.
The click of death.

>>9751438
Very few computers had built-in zip drives. Computers had floppy drives and then eventually CD-rom drives in addition to the floppy drive.

Because they were costlier than CDs and came out AFTER CDs WERE ALREADY COMMON.
That's why. Same with Jazz drives.

These worked through the floppy interface and were limited to the same r/w speeds. They were painfully slow.
t. early adopter

>>9751463
>A pack of zipdisks was like $100

This.Zip Disks were expensive media, and I also heard that the access times were much slower than a standard CD-ROM drive and the drives.

>>9751535
>Imagine Iomega commission 100-250mb zip-base media for Ultra 64, on Nintendo behalf.

there was a Zip Drive planned for the Dreamcast. But the Zip Drive was planned for downloadable storage. Sega had plans on expanding Sega.net with more DLC that could be larger than a DC VMU and even small downloadable games.

>>9752382
>there was a Zip Drive planned for the Dreamcast.

Pic related is what Sega showed off. But it was basically an empty shell. with no functional drive.

>>9751774
painfully wrong. have a (you)

>>9751548
>>9751482
surprised this isnt more known here

>>9751438
>*click*
>*click*
>*click*

Also, publishers tended to not want to deliver games on mediums that were not already very well established or pre-built systems generally didn't have the drives included for. It took forever for publishers to start releasing PC games on DVDs instead of CDs well into the era when DVD drives were standard in computers just to make sure they don't alienate people who still have an old computer with only a CD-ROM drive..... people who would not have the CPU/GPU to run such a game anyway.... and we NEVER got PC games on Blu-Ray since even to this day if you hunt down a new pre-built desktop or laptop that still includes an optical drive, it will be DVD-RW, not Blu-Ray. Even though Blu-Ray drives for both exist.

Even the very very few modern PC games that still get released physically, like Tokyo Ghostwire (Yes it has a physical PC release, that tends to be quite cheap compared to Steam even during sales), are on a DVD and not a Blu-Ray.

I remember when I picked up Psychonauts on PC, it came on five CDs despite the fact that it came out in 2005 and it was already common for PCs to come standard with a DVD drive in 2001... and yet my Pentium 3/Geforce3 system from the early 00 era that came with a DVD-ROM was not able to run the game at anything other than a slideshow.

And finally, the main advantage of ZIP disks was that they were re-writable but much much larger and faster than a floppy... yet a fraction of the capacity of a CD. Only the last-gen ones hit 750MB... and cost a lot more... while still being around the speed of an 8x CD DRIVE when CD-ROM drives had hit 48x speeds by then.

A game disk has little reason to be re-writable, in fact that's seen as a downside. Couple that with the much more expensive disks, much slower media, lower capacity, and the fact that almost no PCs came with ZIP drives while CD-ROMS has been standard since the early/mid 90s in PCs and there is your mountain of reasons why games never came on ZIP.

>>9752430
>even to this day if you hunt down a new pre-built desktop or laptop that still includes an optical drive, it will be DVD-RW, not Blu-Ray. Even though Blu-Ray drives for both exist.
That's because you need to pay for an expensive license to use Blu-Ray™ and nobody uses disc drives on computers anymore so why bother

>>9751438
It could not compete with CDs, which were cheaper, faster, had more storage capacity, and were more reliable.

>>9752409
>surprised this isnt more known here
zoomers don't know

>>9751459
and lots of musical gear for storage.

>>9752430
>A game disk has little reason to be re-writable, in fact that's seen as a downside
computers survived the previous two decades before CD or whatever using this magical thing called "write protect". it's not seen as a downside at all. what drugs are you on?

I didnt even know about their existence before this thread and, sadly, i'm not that young anymore. i suspect they had very little market in europe.

>>9752434
>That's because you need to pay for an expensive license to use Blu-Ray™

Only if you want to play movies, and it requires a specific application to do it the legal way too. The MPAA seriously fucked over PCs in that regard with their insane levels of mandatory DRM that were so asinine nobody bothered, especially for 4K.

>>9752436
>computers survived the previous two decades before CD or whatever using this magical thing called "write protect". it's not seen as a downside at all. what drugs are you on?

You mean that little notch that you can just put tape over or even shove a wad of paper into the hole to re-enable writing? This applied to both floppy disks and cassettes too.

Also, the first consumer CDs were in 1982. The first PC software to come on a CD was in 1987. The first consumer PC was in 1971, and it didn't even have any way to connect a drive or cassette to it, that's already barely a single decade much less two. The Commodore PET was released in 1977, that's barely half a decade before the first CD-ROM application.

>>9752454
>The first PC software to come on a CD was in 1987.
fuck all people had CD-ROMs until early 90s when the prices dropped.

>You mean that little notch
yes. if you're retarded to do what you suggested then there's something wrong with you. there were no downsides with media that you write to, no matter how many fantasy scenarios your schizo mind imagines
> also
> just schizo shit
shut the fuck up, dunning kruger.

>>9752462
>fuck all people had CD-ROMs until early 90s when the prices dropped.

The first PC's I ever saw with a CD Drive were ones made by Apple. It was a multi-media mac. But on the IBM-PC clones, CD drives didn't really become a necessity until Windows 95. Windows 95 basically required a disc drive to install. And yeah, there were floppy disk releases. CD burners became really popular around the controversy of Napster.

>>9752462
>fuck all people had CD-ROMs until early 90s when the prices dropped.

Except that's not what I nor you argued. You tried to claim media that had write protect (Floppies and tape in other words) existed for two decades before computers had CD ROMs.

>yes. if you're retarded to do what you suggested then there's something wrong with you.

So in other words, it's no more write protected than a CD and anyone can disable it easily. Thank you for admitting you had no argument to begin with and has to start resorting to insults to refuse to admit you was wrong.

>shut the fuck up, dunning kruger

Kiss my ass, zoomerfag

>>9752462
>fuck all people had CD-ROMs until early 90s when the prices dropped.

Except that's not what I nor you argued. You tried to claim media that had write protect (Floppies and tape in other words) existed for two decades before computers had CD ROMs.

>yes. if you're retarded to do what you suggested then there's something wrong with you.

So in other words, it's not more write protected than a CD and anyone can disable it easily. Thank you for admitting you had no argument to begin with and had to start resorting to insults to refuse to admit you was wrong.

>shut the fuck up, dunning kruger

Kiss my ass, zoomerfag

>>9751445
>Weren't these notorious for dying with no prior warning?
Main issue with them (a flaw shared by all Iomega products, IIRC) was that a busted disk could permanently damage/misalign the write head, rendering the drive unusable.

>>9751445
This is misinformation, the ZIP Drive was the finest piece of hardware ever manufactured, and anyone who says otherwise is a retarded zooCLICK
CLICK
CLICK
CLICK
CLICK
CLICK

As a kid I never understood the point of them when everything was on floppy, stilll don't really

>>9752634
>floppy 1.1 mb more or less
>zip 100+ mb

>>9752396
Shoulda put some random PC card in there.

>>9752637
>floppy 120mb
>zip 100mb
zoom zoom

>>9752637
1.2MB was only on the 5 inch double sided double density or high density disks, which IIRC were not popular.

Generally the commonly used capacities for IBM systems by the time systems were popular in homes were 360KB and 720KB for 5.25 inch, and 720KB and 1.44MB for 3.5 inch.

It would have been very uncommon for systems to have anything other than a 1.44MB 3.5 drive by the time ZIP disks were popular.

But yeah, they were an answer to having an easily re-writable medium like that of a floppy in larger capacities that make it actually useful around that time and with much faster access. 1.44MB (a little less when formatted) was a pathetic amount around the time ZIP disks came out and the 2.88MB format never took off.... which still would have been pathetic by then. CD burners were very expensive back then, and even if you had one they were not randomly re-writable like a floppy or ZIP disk was. CD-RW did not come out until a few years after the first ZIP disks and on top of them still being very expensive while they could be re-written if you wanted to change anything you basically had to wipe them and re-write them again in one shot. Compatibility could also be iffy. (And any proprietary software that let you treat them like a randomly re-writable drive in the same way a floppy could generally took a massive hit on the available space on the disk as well as it's speed, on top of now making the disk formatted in a proprietary way that only computers with that same program can now read)

Some of the first USB flashdrives would not exist until around 2000 (zip drives launched in 94), and back then in the Windows 95/98 era you needed to install drivers for EACH one, having a generic USB mass storage driver was not a thing until Windows 2000/XP. Plus they were expensive and started out at capacities laughably smaller than the first zip disks while costing considerably more (IIRC the first one was 8MB). I remember paying about $100 for a 128MB one around 2004

>>9752685
Maybe you should read better retard

>>9752685
>>floppy 120mb
>>zip 100mb
>zoom zoom

120MB "floppies" only existed in the "Super Disk" format that was trying to compete with ZIP disks. It's main advantage was that the drive could also read regular floppies.

But since the drive was external and just about all systems would have included a floppy drive that was pretty pointless, unless you had one of the latest iMACs as that was around the time Apple started removing floppy drives from their systems.

But since they came out a few years after ZIP disks, were far less common and well known than ZIP by then, launched at a capacity that ZIP already was doubling by that point (and then later tripled even THAT), and it's main advantage was pointless unless you had the latest floppy-less Mac or a PC with a busted floppy drive, they failed pretty spectacularly. I think they also were slightly faster than a ZIP disk but that's not much of a benefit either.

Anyway, the 1.44MB floppy drive was introduced in 1986, became essentially the standard floppy format by the early 90s, and was pretty much the main format everyone other than Apple users knew floppies by until the later 00s when floppies completely started dying out. Not 120MB or 1.2MB.

>>9752692
>m-m-maybe
kek
>>9752708
SD were floppies. They were available as internal drives and most major companies offered them as an option. They were absolutely ubiquitous throughout most of Asia. zoom zoom

>>9752708
The last version of SuperDisk was 240 MB, which was pretty competitive for the period (especially since the later high-capacity Zip versions were pretty expensive and, at least anecdotally, even less reliable than the older versions). That revision could also "superformat" a regular 3.5 disk to 32 MB (though it imposed some restrictions, like single-volume write).

>>9752382
>>9752396
>add on
Deadcast live up there.

>>9752932
>They were absolutely ubiquitous throughout most of Asia

And utterly unused anywhere else in the world, these things might have well only existed in magazines in the US because nobody used them over ZIP disks. Besides, Asia went nuts with it's floppy formats so that's hardly a defense. Are you seriously trying to argue that when most people thought "floppy" they thought of the SuperDisk instead of the standard 1.44MB floppy? Now who is the zoomie?

Expensive as fuck, less reliable than regular 3 1/4 floppies, and got btfo'd by CDs.

Wasn't the death click caused by Iomega trying to save fractions of a cent on each drive by omitting a little rubber thing that cushioned the heads when they moved back and forth?

>>9753559
>And utterly unused anywhere else in the world
Yes, that's why they were available from most of the major companies in the US, Gateway, Compaq, etc.
>Are you seriously trying to strawman
Nope. That's all you. You can stop projecting now little zoom zoom. You're not fooling anyone.

>>9751438
ZIP disks seemed cool at the time (you ever had to move something massive [at the time] like Quake to a different computer using regular floppies - you know what a pain in the ass it was), however by the time they got cheaper the majority of my friends had hard drive bays (as did I), so it was easier to just transfer shit straight to the HDD. I feel like there was a very, very short timeframe where ZIP drives made any sense. Missed it personally, but your mileage may vary.

>>9751480
why would you need a rewritable CD?

>>9752436
>zoomers don't know
It's not even a zoomer thing, I'm 36 and even then floppies were mostly on their way out by the time I was old enough for videogames and C&C1 came out on CD in 95.

>>9753737
You realize pulling the "You can stop (insult) you are not fooling anyone" just shows that you argued yourself into a corner and refuse to admit that you was wrong? Do you have any idea how many times I have seen that exact same line when someone has no argument left and just thinks calling someone zoomer or fag or retard or whatever to try to mask that they were wrong and refuse to admit it?

Nobody used this shit, if you was actually there around this time like I was you would know this instead of going "Y-y-y-you're the zoomie!"

>>9753868
>I don't realize coping and straw manning just shows that I argued myself into a corner and refuse to admit that I was wrong