| Leynos said: I'm pretty convinced even if N64 had a CD drive Nintendo would have went with a proprietary disc format with a smaller capacity than standard CD-R. My guess is 150MB to maybe 300MB. Vs the standard 650MB CD-R and FF7 took 3 discs. Still leading to Square leaving for PlayStation. Nintendo was so paranoid about piracy. Still are. We saw with Gamecube going miniDVD. Wii did use DVD9 but then Wii U used 25GB discs but no option for dual layer. When PS4 launched some of the larger launch games were 21 ish GB. Wii U's largest game came in 2015 with Xenoblade X at 22GB. I just don't see where FF7 and Square stick with Nintendo if we see the reality of who Nintendo was and still is. |
They probably would have used CDs encased in a caddy (this also would have prevented scratching of the disc too which would have been good for kids and teenagers).
The Super NES CD drive had this design already (again the Nintendo one, not the Sony variant).
It was a good design actually, most of the issues with CD were addressed right there. It even had basically a blank cartridge that could load data from the disc and once the data is on the cartridge you have basically cartridge like read speeds for your gameplay.
You can see right there (circa 1992/1993) that the discs were encased in a caddy. This also would have made piracy much more difficult as you couldn't just insert a naked CD disc, you'd have to have some kind of black market plastic casing and given this was the 90s, most people wouldn't have bothered ordering some black market device via mail order or something.
The caddy also contained a lock out chip for security and small amounts of storage for game saves so you wouldn't have needed a memory card. This design addressed virtually every problem that CDs had, they were stupid to ditch it. They could have used this design for the N64.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 24 January 2026
