^ COMPUTER VIDEO GAME CONTROL PAD
^ Which reminds me of
Couldn’t play CDs, mind you.
Of course, lots of people will go on about various beloved sound chips in various pre-CD machines: Genesis, SNES, C64…
Model 1 Genesis had that headphone jack.
Personally I’d probably pick the NES/Famicom, maybe going so far as specifying something like the custom sound chip in Akumajou Densetsu but eh that’s probably mostly nostalgia (well for NES; didn’t have any imports back in the day).
Oh, back strictly on topic
COMPACT DIGITAL MEDIA PLAYER
mounts the
64-BIT INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA SYSTEM
~ ~ ~
Pushing things a bit:
Does the Nintendo PlayStation prototype have an audio CD player?
Not all of these can play CD audio though. The HyperScan for instance cannot, and a few others here may not be able to.
Okay changing my answer paying 2000 dollars for the dumbest reason imaginable.
No audio player is mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Audio CD support is only mentioned as an aside, as “presumed”:
“The drive would primarily operate at double speed (2x) for games, with the slower speed (1x) being presumably used only for audio CDs.”
Yeah the HyperScan’s manual makes no mention of playing audio CDs. ; )
I looked through others on there:
The PC-FX can, according to this article: PC-FX World - System Overview
The Playdia can, according to Bandai Playdia Game Console CD-ROM Drive Interactive system Super rare vintage | eBay and Bandai Playdia Quick Interactive System - retrostuff
The Tandy Video Information System and the V.Flash can, according to their Wikipedia articles.
The FM Towns Marty can, according to https://gamemedium.com/console/fm-towns-marty
There’s also the “Car Marty,” which according to Car Marty by Fujitsu Ten – The Video Game Kraken has “all the same features as the FM Town Marty,” so maybe it could too.
i’d be very aurprised if any of those pre-saturn cd consoles couldn’t play audio cds, with that era’s “multimedia” obsession.
the saturn and mega-cd could play cd+g, a format that i think was mainly used for karaoke discs, but i’m pretty sure the only references i’ve ever seen to it are in the interface and user manuals for those systems
i’d be rather surprised if a CD-capable console from the 90s could not handle a disc in Compact Disc - Digital Audio (CD-DA) format. now, whether or not the device has user interface handling for Red Book CD-DA could vary. the Super NES CD wasn’t actually released, so idk if there’s finished/working UI for playing audio CDs directly. but given they were implementing CD-ROM XA which incorporates CD-DA, the system hypothetically could do so and it almost certainly would have been able to had it released
The Marty apparently had a MIC jack pretty much specifically for karaoke
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKYusSGkx3Q&t=144s
The Wikipedia article on the Marty doesn’t mention the MIC jack, but the FM Towns (PC) article does mention the Towns computer systems having something that sounds pretty similar:
The system has ports in the front to accommodate karaoke
(Also the computers had “Towns Karaoke” software Towns Karaoke (FM Towns) - KryoFlux RAW dump : Fujitsu : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive .)
Another SFC curio:
The Voicer-kun (ボイサーくん, Boisā-kun) (sometimes erroneously called “Voice-kun”) from Koei is an infrared transmitter/receiver for the Super Famicom that connects to the second controller port. The IR-transmitter is used for controlling Audio CD players, and is able to “learn” IR-signals from different CD Player manufacturers.
– Voicer-kun | Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki | Fandom
2 Voicer-kun-compatible SFC games were released; one of them came out in 3 parts on the SFC, and also came out on other systems
Emit (エミット, Emitto) is an adventure sound novel video game released for the FM Towns, Macintosh, Windows, PC-9801, Sega Saturn, Super Famicom, 3DO, and PlayStation developed and published by Koei. It was designed to teach Japanese students more about English, and played the audio CD back at particular times using a peripheral called Voicer-kun, an IR emitter that could command the CD to change tracks and play them
–