this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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I wonder what the other disks were all for then.
I see one is an expansion disk.
There might be a few with CD Audio
As was the fashion at the time...
An uncompressed CD audio soundtrack, maybe?
(That doesn't appear to be the case for Baldur's Gate in particular since the discs pictured in the listing have "compact disc data storage" logos, but I do remember some '90s games being like that.)
You could do that with a lot of PS1 games. The first track was data, the rest were just regular CD audio tracks.
This got rarer later on, once they realised the could fill the discs with FMV sequences instead.
Speaking of PS1 games and disk-filling FMVs: Final Fantasy 7 on the PSX comes on 3 disks but the actual game itself is duplicated on all of them and you can swap them out during gameplay, and the only thing that happens is that it plays the wrong FMVs.
It all breaks down to the actual "game" taking 133MB, plus few hundred for the uncompressed pre-rendered backgrounds, out of the available ~1.8GB (according to this old post about how a Nintendo DS port could easily fit on a 256MB flash cart.)
In this case, the question was rhetorical - the original release of BG1 takes 5 CDs, and the sixth is the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. Installed the game takes around 2.8GB IIRC. They did eventually re-release it as only a 3 CD set because they could cram more data on a single CD by then.