Great work!

We found some technical manuals for the CM153 and CM100 drive. It's very hard to reach, but we're going to make a full scan of the documentation and share it. I assume you're interested to read this ;). Good job on the clone! We actually own an earlier version of the CM153 card, which is massive (full length of an IBM 5150/5160).

Dude, thank you. I’m 66 years old and have been involved in tech going back to the mid 70s. I started out as a PCB designer on a ComputerVision CADDS1 system. I’m not an engineer but a tinkerer. Your reaction when the CD worked nearly made me cry as I’ve been there. I have reversed engineer (legally) PCBs in the early 80s and I know how it feels to spend an inordinate amount of time on what seems to be an impossible project with little to no documentation. I was part of a “clean room” design group to prove a company had stolen intellectual property. We succeeded in proving it could be done and, yes, a more than a few tears appeared. Since then I have designed many many circuit boards including some in IBM PS/2 computers. I retired now and that was a long time ago but as you told your story it brought back memories and the emotion at the end washed over me. I’m there man. I know how you feel. Subbed and soon Patreon.

I started my computer hobby around 1979. At that time, among us computer freaks, the following rule applied: Information must be free for all. This is the only way that great projects can develop quickly. And everyone benefits from it. I'm glad there are still people who share this idea. :)

Your reaction to getting the cm100 working put a huge smile on my face, and a huge amount of admiration goes towards everyone who helped you on this, you're all awesome.

Many years ago I bought a Philips CM100 drive for $20 at a computer show, although I think it may have been a later SCSI version of the drive. Either way, I was never able to get it working.

The fact that you literally cloned the ISA Card and actually made it work is... wow. Hats off to you, Sir! We need more people like you, seriously!

Man oh man, literally cloning your own board trace-for-trace and having it work perfectly, would be one of the crowning achievements in anyone's life. Bravo dude. Hell yes.

These past few weeks have been the wildest ride I've had in a long time. I've really enjoyed working with you on this project and I'm so glad we got it working first time. It gives you the warm fuzzies all over....

Lol, the shot at "Prototype game collector", i just imagine the owner of the rare "Marble Madness 2" arcade board getting very strong whistles in his hears

Just an FYI in case it ever becomes necessary in the future: You can import a DXF file onto a layer in KiCAD and draw your traces over it. I do something similar at work when adapting some old designs into our new PCB layout software and it frequently shaves days off the process. I just turn off or delete those layers afterwards.

You're lucky that the card you cloned had all its traces visible on the front and back surfaces. As a PCB engineer in the disk drive industry, I regularly dealt with 4-, 6- and 8-layer boards where many traces were on inner layers. We normally designed boards with power and ground planes on the inner layers, but some traces still needed to go on inner layers when dealing with high-density, LSI custom ICs.

Wow! This is seriously impressive dedication to your hobby. Reverse engineering hardware cards and circuits based on photos is one jaw drop, but for it to work first time after the correct drivers were found makes my jaw hit the ground. I am in awe...

A technique I have used is to shine a bright flashlight at an angle under big chips, thus providing illumination through the board and revealing traces as shadows.

Your expression when it all started to work is priceless! Congratulations! About 30 years ago, my father and I developed a dual sided S-100 bus PC board for the Signetics 2650 8-bit microprocessor. It was one of the first Processor/Coprocessor configurations with the main processor on one card and the coprocessor on another. We laid out the dual sided board using self-adhesive black pads and tracing tape on an opaque piece of glass and then took it to a photography studio to produce negatives. Unlike current multi-level tracing on PC boards, we had to have a number of hardwired jumpers. We took the negatives to a company called Conductive Circuits in Houston and had 100 boards made and sold them under the Slavemaster 2650 name through Byte Magazine. Our company, Victoria Micro Digital sold them as kits or fully assembled, less chip insertion into sockets. Unfortunately, the 8080 microprocessor won out over other 8-bit processors. Good times. The Wild West of early PC development.

The best part about this video for me was watching your face light up when it finally worked. I can only imagine the joy you felt and how accomplished you felt in that moment. Awesome video, thanks for sharing! I can only imagine how ecstatic those who helped you were too.

I'm so glad I disc-overed this channel. It's had it's pits and not every video lands. Videos like this are impressive and sheer witchcraft to us laser mortals.

Watching this was a bit of nostalgia for me. I worked for one of the first CD-ROM drive sellers in Canada, and traveled all across Ontario demonstrating the NEC CDR-35 with a number of applications like hazardous materials handling guides and the like...all heavily targeted towards industrial uses. It needed an expensive SCSI interface card on a PC, or a SCSI PCMICA card. When sound cards started coming out with the CD-ROM interfaces on the is when the price of drives really started to drop, and become part of the standard load-out for PC systems.

Hands down one of the most amazing computer / electrical videos ive ever seen in my life, could not imagine how satisfying it was to sit there and look at that self-made fully functioning card, truly awesome

It's people like you and Roland who keep the scene alive. I look back on many times I threw stuff out and later regretting it. Unless we keep the old days and legacy computing alive, we will lose our access to the best tech we ever got our hands on. The future is proprietary unless we can stop it. So thank you for all the effort you put in to share it with the world. 💯点。PS awesome shirt!

Absolutely frigging fantastic job, Shelby. As a collector of vintage CD players, I love the way the CM100 upper case is recycled from a CD101, but finished in a suitable Beige rather than the standard hi-fi silver. It was great to see it working. Should you ever need to replace it, that laser mechanism appears to be a standard CDM1, just repurposed for data instead of audio.

The sheer joy that I see on your face when you got it working was great.

I wonder how many people know just how impossible what you did was! This is amazing!

One of those videos where the host may be specialized and interested in completely different things, but their passion makes you excited and cheer for them. Really was fun and inspirational

This is an *outstanding* milestone for all preservationists. You're part of this glorious history. Well done friend!

The sheer glee on your face when the drive starts working is absolutely adorable; thank you for sharing this with us all.

This vid showed up in my recommended. So glad I tapped on it. Your tenacity was compelling but the sheer raw reaction when it started working was worth every minute of viewing! Congrats and now you have the experience and clones to potentially help someone else!

That's fricken amazing, How did you not cry?? I would have. So much hard work, so many hours, so much research, so many disappointments and heart ache and the mental stress of it all. Wow..YOU DID IT MAN!!!!..Well done. Philips need to flick you some sign of appreciation for your dedication to one of their rare legacy items.. Lets make this thing viral and get some acknowledgment for your dedication.

What an incredible story! I preserve old film so I share your frustration with collectors who don’t also preserve. And as a fellow KiCAD user I’m super impressed with what you did to reverse-engineer the board. Congratulations!

The whole "I have something cool and I'm not gonna share! Neener neener!" attitude really grinds my gears. I was watching another channel recently (Necroware) where they wanted to clone the custom IC that is needed to add Creative Music System (CMS) support to SoundBlaster 2.0 cards. Someone in the community reverse engineered the logic and came up with a set of equations that could be programmed into a GAL chip which takes the place of the Creative Labs chip that switches between OPL and CMS. Unfortunately the reverse engineered logic turned out to have some bugs, and only worked on a subset of Sound Blaster cards. The project stalled for a while until one guy claimed that they solved the problem.... but wouldn't release it to the public, except by way of selling their own chips that they made. Anyways, Necroware said "screw you!" and reverse engineered it themselves, releasing it as Open Source. This stuff is getting harder to find by the day, and is threatening to disappear into history, and absolutely should be preserved. People who get in the way of that have their own special circle in Hell as far as I'm concerned. They are the equivalent of those rich old farts who own priceless paintings or manuscripts or whatever and refuse to let them out of their private collections.

I just discovered this, so I wasn't along for the entire ride but... What an amazing journey! I absolutely love your tenacity and it put a huge smile on my face when that first directory listing slowly scrolled up the screen. Well done!!

This is an amazing project! Thank you for pushing through and making the design open source. I've been watching almost all of the stream VODs here on KZfaq in the background while working and seeing this video to conclude it all was just pure fun! Well done to everyone involved in this!

I am *really* impressed! I worked on contract at Philips in Eindhoven in 1987, using a CM100 with it's controller card in a Philips XT clone machine (the PMS 3100). I'm not sure this was the card I used as I remember it being a full-length 8-bit ISA - don't quote me, though. The project was to assess the stamper wear on a CD production line. I have a vague memory that the same control interface was used on early LaserDisc players, which later went over to SCSI interfaces. Well done - I admire your persistence.

Hey man. I felt that joy right there with you at the 23:00 mark. Congratulations on your persistence.

That's an amazing video! Really impressed by the commitment of yourself and everyone who helped. I would never have thought it was possible to do that!

This is an awesome video! Thanks for all the hard work you and the community have done. Great to see some of this old great still functioning

This channel is just a pleasure to watch, I really admire that you had enough patience to work this through !

My first CD ROM drive was a Mitsumi 1.5x speed that IIRC came with its own card and drivers. It had a plastic caddy that you would place the CD in so it became a square disk and then you inserted it into the drive. It was in a home brew 386DX50 PC. No affordable internet (I did have a 1200bps modem and ludicrous British Telecom per minute charges for BBS). So getting magazine cover disks packed with shareware and game demos was great.

you're always great about providing shout outs and sources. your effort isn't to be discounted but the interconnectedness of the internet makes things like this work and you honestly never know where this sort of information is going to lead other people, i've taken some weird things from people for projects haha

Job well done! This video greatly underestimates the challenges you went through. Great job on pulling through till the end, you managed to handle execution of a product all by yourself.

It was truly awesome to see your reaction and payoff to all that hard work. There's few of us that make it through the gauntlet when it comes to challenges like this. This is an experience to cherish. I am a proud supporter of all your retro adventures!

The amount of commitment this guy has is immesurable. Seeing your reaction when it worked was priceless. You sir, definitely deserve a medal. You and all those people who helped make it happen are legends in my book.

My family had a Magnavox CDD 461 back in the day. We were the coolest kids in the trailer park (for real). Very few people in our poor Louisiana town even had a CD audio drive, and here we were playing games off of a CD. This video brought back some fantastic memories. Thanks man. And great work.

Great job! Can really see the joy and relief you expressed when showing it was working. Was really nice to see the satisfaction of getting itmto work. Awesome job!

Absolutely incredible. I am always blown away by the amount of knowledge you and the community have. Nicely done!!

That's so awesome! I love how happy you are when you finally see your design working! Way to go!

Bloody hell! I used to work in PCB production and can say this is one hell of an achievement. My boss used to do something similar except he reverse engineered an old CNC controller from 1973 and made it work in an XT PC running DOS 2.X something. Absolutely amazing and congratulations on your achievement.

This is such a heartwarming story. Congratulations on this feat of engineering, perseverance and community! 👍🏼

This has been one of the most inspirational videos (about persistence and resolution) I've seen in a long while! The amount of effort put into this project is just unreal!!

Seriously, well done! Not only for taking on the challenge to recreate the card but also document the entire process. Really sets a precedent and inspiration for the feasibility of reverse engineering lost tech in the community. Also really jealous now of all the fun I missed out on in the streams, I should have stayed awake for at least one.

Great story! Well done to you and your members and friends for getting this to work - seriously impressive stuff!

Man, seeing the raw, unfiltered joy as you finally got it to work was awesome. I can tell this really weighed on you and I'm glad it resolved alright.

Dude, I missed the whole stream about this. But from one person who's attempted this kind of work, I am so happy for you!

Impressive work and dedication. I don't know anything about electronics but I really enjoyed the video and your happy face to discover that after so much work you achieved your goal. Congratulations!

Cheers to you man! I could tell you were almost holding back tears when you got it working. Your hard work paid off. Great job!

Truly epic, congratulations to yourself and all those that contributed. The reaction when it worked was priceless.

These days we dont even use CD drives anymore. It was however very interesting following your huge work back-engineering this very rare ISA CD i/o card. I still have some multi i/o (and other type) ISA cards laying around simply because I've been too lazy over the years to clear out my workshop. It's been more than 20y's I last fooled around with my old IBM 286's. Thanks for the video - you almost got me hooked on retro computing 😉

This was one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. Sensational to carry out a cloning project of this size. Congratulations to you and everyone who helped you.

Great job! There is nothing like a project working after hours put into it. Especially if it is a long shot. Thanks for giving back to the community!

Awesome vid bud! Posting to support you. I have no idea about this older tech, but I have a LOT of respect for your way to work with it. Keep up the good work!

The executive function you have to tackle this all-encompassing project while still taking on other projects AND producing videos on them is astonishing. Congratulations

Wow, that is awesome. It was such a professional way of recreating the adapter. Far, far beyond my level of patience. Great video and excellent contributors to this project.

Awesome!🎉 All this work and finally Tje drive runs. Must have been an awesome feeling

That's incredible! What a wild ride that must have been!!! Good job my dude.

I'm honestly very glad that you managed to get this working, some computer museum might be able to get a CM100 they have in their archives working now (or at least be able to display a replica of the correct card for it next to the drive), thanks to you reverse-engineering it. But the thing that really surprised me was the outro with the dot-matrix printer. I remember when I was a kindergartner, I'd walk past the school's office or computer lab and more often than not you'd hear the tell-tale buzz of the dot matrix printer (that may or may not have been connected to some form of network connecting all those computers, or maybe terminals at the time, I guess it depends). In any case, that's not what surprised me, because you putting your credits on the dot-matrix printer is very much in agreement with the rest of this video. The thing that surprised me was how FAST the dot-matrix printer was going. Either I never saw one going that fast, or I forgot that they COULD go that fast. It surprised me that it is keeping up quite nicely with modern commercially available inkjet printers, such as the mechanism at the core of the print/scan/copy/fax multipurpose machine I have at my house (I don't need the fax machine part, and the scanner part doesn't get used often, but these kind of machines are all you can get these days at the big box stores). And that's with the modern printer set up to "speed and ink savings over print quality" mode, a setting that I don't think exists for the dot matrix printers. Is there some way to modify how fast a dot matrix printer prints other than things that the manufacturer of the printer could have done during the design phase? I guess another way of putting my question is this: Is there a link between the rate of data being transferred to the dot-matrix printer and the speed at which the dot-matrix printer outputs text? Or is it like modern printers where they have a relatively large data buffer that allows them to accept print jobs of some number of pages as fast as the computer can send the data, and then the printer will output that data on paper at a speed that can potentially be configured (but is likely to be fixed at a set speed)? Because I can see that if someone wanted to save money on print supplies, or just preferred an overall darker print, they might somehow tell the printer to strike each dot multiple times, therefore transferring more ink overall (or transferring the same amount of ink but using a print ribbon that has been used one or more times already). I'm totally spit-balling that, I have no idea if any commercially available dot matrix printers were ever made that had such features as either part of the printer or printer driver.

Holy cow, congratulations! I don't know anything about that drive, but I can definitely sympathize with your excitement - I can remember all the times I've tried getting a project to work, and actually jumping up and down when it suddenly powers up. 😂 It's great when everyone helps each other like this and now another piece of computer history is being documented and preserved. Amazing work!

I don't know how I stumbled onto this video, but I'm sure glad I did. This was fascinating and compelling! Thank you.

Awesome stuff! A labour of love indeed. That joy was contagious. I didn't know about the CM100, but I DO have a working CD100, and found this fascinating. Well done!

This is really awesome, putting in so much effort to make it not just work for you, but to preserve the knowledge and share it with everyone. Really the internet at its best.

What I have just watched is nothing short of heroic! Yes, a bunch of people did help which I want to appreciate, and yes in the end there was luck with that oddball driver but you worked so hard and so well. The fact that your card worked from the start once a proper driver was available, no later rework/bodges, is mindblowing. Props to you, Sir.

Wow, you and your team are heroes. I imagine the shivers you must have had. Thanks , I enjoyed watching it.

I love seeing things like this! Congrats, very happy to see this project completed successfully! Lots of hard work paid off 🙌 👏 💪

Congratulations on all of your hard work paying off. During the early 80’s to 1992 I worked at an early PC / clone shop that was also an electronic engineering shop. Seeing this video makes me wish I’d have kept all of the I/O boards we had for misc scanners, plotters, cd roms, external HD’s etc. we had boxes full along with manuals, dongles and such. Who knew just how valuable some would be someday. On the engineering side I got to lay out pcb, and program EPROMs too. Those were interesting days.

There are truly no words to describe the joy and happiness that I feel for you. You are incredibly talented and a wonderful humanbeing

Wow. Love tech stuff, didn't expect to watch all of this, but man that was a Rollercoaster of emotion. So glad you got it working and great job at portraying your story.

Wow dude. That's incredible. Well done for seeing it through to the end.

As a senior mechanical engineering student who works at Geek Squad, loves tinkering with modding consoles, RP and building PCs, I really enjoyed following along this process and you are really quite a unique individual for perusing such a niche and rare project! Very impressive that you persisted and how much information you were able to get on literally the first CD drive from the 80s. Really inspires me to keep learning more about electrical engineering and to stay patient while trouble shooting and investigating rare tech issues I am trying to better understand and solve myself!

Very impressive. Some might say why, but I can imagine how great it felt when the CD reveled its directory. A real accomplishment.

This was an insanely wild ride. Congrats on everything and as many hats as I could possibly muster off to you for documenting everything and open sourcing this. *looking at you prototype game collectors*

Incredible project and story, massive props for putting in all that time and effort and getting it working.

Very very well done sir! I had one of the original 19-inch rack-mountable re-writeable SCSI Philips drives. it would only work successfully with adapted SCSI DOS drivers, and it was only a single-speed drive! The CDROM blanks were the old-style gold sputtered polycarbonate discs, that cost around $50 dollars apiece... Sadly I made a few very expensive coffee coasters several times... The drive was very expensive and cost around $5000 dollars back in the early 90s!

I'm a big fan of disassembling code to find out how drivers and such work, and there needs to be more people looking into the driver code to see what things are hiding in there, just like you did with tracing pictures of circuit boards. But I have never been a fan of the 8086 instruction set and its segmented memory mapping. I suppose that at least stuff this old will be on a small model and only have one code segment, so maybe I will see what I can do when I get caught up on a dozen other retro projects. Anyhow, congratulations on the amazing detail work on that board, and the amazing luck of stumbling on the right driver!

That was an incredibly satisfying video to watch. Congratulations on getting that working after all those long hours of hard work!

This brings me back to the time I used DOS. Its so good seeeing videos of the past! That is so Awesome that you were able to create the card. Major Cool. Thank you for posting this video!!

As someone that is doing this on the regular: I salute you. That's some impressive work! :)

I just stumbled on to you're video.. If only I did earlier.. I am from Holland and actually own one of these cards...🙈

Congratulations bro! Always keep that investigative spirit that will take you anywhere!

Seeing your passion and your absolute elation when you got things working was incredible........Kudos to you for all your work and succeeding in your goal......If everyone had passion for things the way you do, I dont know if we would have any issues with depression and sadness!! Way to go!

on windows, you can do a similar transparent overlay thing using the "ontopreplica" software.

How did you solve the 8251 problem?

That's friggin awesome dude. This is the first video of yours I've ever seen, and I had 0 clue about your work on this at all; but I was literally cheering with you when it worked. That's totally cool!!

Fantastic story telling. I've never seen your channel and had no context for the project, but I was hooked. Your excitement when it worked was worthy of an Oscar. Congrats!!

This is impressive. Interesting that the card didn't have a ROM chip on it, I would think that would make it even harder to clone.

It could be actually interesting to disassemble/debug the 2.2 driver in order to see what the error 17 means.

omg, I'mma about to cry with you at the part where it's working. That's so awesome!

Man, that is SO cool! I love your use of on-screen transparency to do the layout! That's some da Vinci level thinking.

I think I might have missed something. Where did you source the AMD 8251A? Was it NOS or did you find a work-alike? Was the programming for it in the driver code or did it need to be flashed? Pardon my lack of knowledge, just a n00b trying to follow along.

Fantastic job! Thank you for the time spent and the open source approach! That's amazing

Congratulations mate! Really well done 👍😁 You absolutely deserve this outcome after all your hard work, dedication, determination and patience on this project. Perhaps you should make up one of your spare boards and send it to Roland to keep as a spare in case his dies as a thank you for all his help. Also may be a good idea to make and distribute full file/disk sets of your DOS/driver/config files in case of failure and so others potentially have a known working set.

Awesome journey, so glad you decided to take us along with it!