It is so weird that I remember having a 15" Samsung 570S TFT with a Torisan panel, the best colour reproduction I ever saw on an LCD, even tho the contrast ratio wasn't that good. I also own a handheld Gateway 486 laptop that came with an Areal drive.

Early CD drives used all sorts of odd interfaces, usually via your sound card. I guess there was not a standard for reading them at that point. ATAPI brought that in I guess.

This does not compute for retro macs, 8bitguy/keys for keyboards and commodores, etc.

Wat. They all do so many different things. That's like saying Pewdiepie is just a let's player 🤣

Some probably do start to run out of content for things they can easily get a hold of so I've seen some widen their scope over time. Which isn't a bad thing honestly. Sometimes it's neat to see someone's approach to different topics.

Adrian Black for late 70s-early 80s personal computers, Action Retro for seeing just how much you can mod older Macs, Cathode Ray Dude for cameras and various other A/V shenanigans, Technology Connections for deep dives into very specific old tech (eg. his quest for the perfect Christmas lights) and so many more.

@@AZUDAI96 For more Mac Stuff, I also watch Action Retro. He mainly focuses on PowerPC Architecture Macs but sometimes does other projects with older and newer Macs.

Er, no - the digital playback setting allows digital audio extraction (DAE) instead of audio playback commands. But that won’t automatically translate media control API calls from older software (like the games here) that doesn’t support DAE. Also, the digital audio connector is for old style media control playback, not DAE. It just uses SPDIF digital audio instead of analog audio for less noise. The reason the games didn’t have audio is because they didn’t have any awareness of multiple CD drives, and the audio tracks weren’t accessible from the first drive - which is probably the single disc internal drive.

@@nickwallette6201 he's just confused. It's an analog audio cable that drives needed for this generation, it goes between the drive and the sound card (sometimes built-in to the motherboard).

Ancient drives only had analog audio cables, which of course had to be connected to the sound card to play CD audio. Eventually they added SPDIF digital audio cables. Either of those used the sound card's volume controls.

Right, but the changer's audio output was obviously connected, since the Windows CD Player worked OK. The key difference is CD Player allows you to pick which drive to control. Games usually don't. They just go for the default -- the first one enumerated by the OS.

Let's just say...I'm very well aware of the Pioneer drives :wink: . That's part of why this being an internal caddy was so impressive to me!

I just got a throwback to my dad's old NIssan Maxima with it's pioneer 6 cd changer in the trunk

@@TechTangents the first time I saw one of these beast in person (both the 6 and 18 discs versions) was at an exhibition at Epcot center in December of 1993r they had a lot of multimedia stuff, DX2-66 were all around me and even some insanely expensive Pentiums 60! Years later I saw another 18 discs unit at a part time work in a computer shop.

These jukebox CD drives are some of my retrocomputing white whales, I've nearly got a NEC MultiSpin 4XC at some point (though that one is more of a slot-in drive) but alas, I got outbid on that one. Mind you, the 4XC is just as large as one of these Pioneer jukebox drives. I think these were made by Nakamichi? (unless they rebadged these from NEC, I don't know). Someday, I'll be able to get one, they're so odd, I'm a bit of a sucker for exotic storage medium or other strange and unusual disk drives.. I've already got a Exabyte DATA8 tape drive that I've been meaning to give a try, I just need an enclosure that can take a full height 5.25 drive.

@@TechTangents there's also internal 6 CD changer drives from the late 90s that barely worked when they were released. My aunt had 1 in her Windows 98 SE machine, and after a month of use she returned it because it almost never worked.

He specifically checked to see if it would detect multiple sessions so while what you said is probably true, this drive also doesn't seem to even support that in the first place.

@@Aeduo I think most game discs are mixed mode discs, where the game data track and audio tracks are in the same session.

@@TheMuso28 they are yeah but most have the data track as the first session, that I've seen. But yeah looks like some can have it after the audio.

No, pressed multisession discs are relatively rare. I think I have like ... two? Usually the data track is just track 1, with audio tracks from 2 and onward. That’s all still a single session though. It _could_ be multisession. You could write a single session data track, and then a second session with audio tracks. But, a mixed mode disc doesn’t _imply_ multiple sessions, and there would be no good reason to do this on a mastered product. It’s really more of a CD-R thing, to allow adding stuff in later passes. One multisession disc I have is an early multimedia thing for Soundgarden’s Superunknown album. I guess they wanted the data track to be invisible to audio CD players, so it’s in a second session after the audio, and would never be seen unless the device supported multiple sessions. That makes sense on an audio CD with bonus multimedia content, vs. a game disc with audio tracks for the music, since that would be used primarily in a computer drive anyway - may as well just be a single session then. BTW - That Soundgarden disc even warns that it may not be compatible with all drives. And sure enough, my computer at the time had two drives, and only one of them would play that disc. That’s probably another reason why multisession discs weren’t very popular.

You could also boot into AIX from a compact disc. And this was back in the early '90s.

First time I saw one was in college in about 1991/1992. It was a caddy drive as well. Can't exactly remember what disc was in it, some sort of encyclopaedia I think. It was running in DOS.

Night Owl FTW.

Yeah yeah Nakamichi MJ-5.16 I have on my computer. Unfortunately, it can only be used on old computers. There are no drivers for the new systems.

Yes those were interesting, even though they had limited use, unless you used the IR as a remote control for the computer, which it was capable of doing. The drives worked well as stand alone units, I was using one as a CD player with just the drive and the remote for a while, mostly because as a CDROM drive it was only capable of IIRC 2x read speed, and I had gotten an obsolete external HP CD Writer to use, and had removed the drive from the case to both get better speed out of it, and to actually be able to use it at 2x write speed, without making lots of expensive coasters. The fun days of Nero coming with new drives, and early versions not being drive locked.

And yes this is confirmed : your unit comes from a Gateway 2000 computer : there is the typical sticker on the back (white sticker with customer number and production date printed with a dot matrix printer) !

The home units I have that use the same pioneer magazines only move the laser assembly. This was a feature because they released units that had multiple magazine slots in them and all they had to do was make the laser transport rails taller. I assumed the car units were the same, it could make sense if they aren't since they had to be more robust and the laser is fragile and precise.

Yes, the CD drive had a DAC internally, part of the Sony chipset included the ability to run as an audio player, with the headphone socket and audio output sharing the DAC, which was normally muted unless you were doing audio playback. The later drives also included a digital audio output, which was the same SPDIF data that was being sent to the DAC chip, and with the advent of faster drives, and the PC hardware becoming fast enough that audio decoding could be done with minimal overhead on the CPU, drives first stopped with the headphone socket, and then the entire audio chain on the drive, though the digital output did stay for a while, as the cost of including it was almost zero. When SATA drives appeared all that went away, only the power and digital data connectors were included on drives, though some might still have had the digital data on an unpopulated set of pads on the rear. Modern computers yes the CPU is responsible for the audio data, and for DVD playback the video as well, as the codecs to do that are now well capable of running on the hardware of the CPU, and updating to different formats of disk is a lot easier. The drive merely is a data interface, it provides the recovered data off the disk to the computer, which then can decide what to do with it.

@@SeanBZA is there a mechanism for a program to determine if the audio out is connected to the drive and then selecting if cd audio is decoded by the drive or the CPU?

@@wearwolf2500 No, the older audio players simply told the drive to play audio, selecting the track and playback position from the TOC of the disk, and then relied on the sound card to handle the analogue audio via the mixer, which they could control the volume of along with the mute. The digital outputs were fed into the sound system and converted by the sound system DSP with exactly the same set of commands to them. The sound driver merely was able to send data, and the model number and configuration allowed it to control the various inputs and outputs of the audio chain. No CD player I used ever would check the audio, if they had a level meter it was part of the audio driver that provided it, either by using the ADC to get a low resolution low sample rate result of the audio going out, or for the later ones, which no longer used the CD audio paths, from the digital data they read direct off the disk. To select which sound source was used you had to use the computer sound mixer settings to control the sources in use, and the volume of them.

Same answer from a different perspective: When CD ROM drives first game out, they were being attached to old, slow computers that might not even have a sound card. Adding CD audio playback was a minimal cost burden to the complexity of an optical storage device, and it made it possible to write multimedia programs with sound on a computer that otherwise might only be able to beep. In the later Win 3.1 and Win 95 days, it was more common to have a CD drive, just as a matter of course, and so it would be nice to be able to use it to play audio discs while using the computer for other things. The audio playback mechanism was really simple: The CD API (either MSCDEX in DOS, or MCI in Windows) had commands for Play, Pause, Stop, Skip, and the CD drive did the heavy lifting, including digital to analog conversion. Early CD drives were external devices with RCA jacks for audio. Later internal drives had the headphone jack and rear panel analog audio pins, to allow connection to a sound card. It might seem like a small and granted thing to have that audio header and a sound card with a CD audio input, but there were actually computer speakers with TWO audio inputs on them just to account for multimedia PCs (or Macs) with a sound output, and external CD audio that needed to be mixed together. The internal cable made that whole issue easier to deal with, allowed software volume control, and made it possible to record audio from the CD drive. The digital audio connector wasn’t as prolific, and just allowed the audio to remain digital until the sound card converted it. It was still real-time audio played from CD, just like a TOSlink jack on a normal standalone CD player. The big advantage here is not carting analog audio through an electrically noisy computer. Depending on the quality of the CD audio cable, you could often hear hard drive activity and other buzzing and hissing noises on the CD audio input, so having that connection move to digital greatly improved the quality of audio playback. When hard drives got a little bigger, and especially when MP3s started to show up, it became more popular to use DAE - digital audio extraction - to read the data off the disc directly, rather than having the drive play it back as audio. This uses an entirely different command set - more like how the drive reads data discs, one sector at a time. Not all drives even support audio extraction, although anything 8x and higher it’s pretty safe to assume it does. The Creative / Matsushita 2x drives (CR-563) were the first ones I ever knew of that did, but IIRC, it required a special program. It later became ubiquitous and soon enough that’s just how you played audio discs in Windows. Windows Media Player (in Win ME / 2000 / XP) would use DAE, but the old CD Player app would use traditional CD audio playback, where the drive was doing the work. Hardly anyone used the older CD playback mechanism after the XP era, so that functionality just kind of silently went away on modern drives. Now if you want to listen to an audio disc, you rip it to your library in WMP or iTunes or whatever, and play it from the encoded audio files from that point on. This was, of course, a pipe dream back in the IBM XT days. :-)

Early CD-ROM drives used caddys. Presumably they were worried about the discs getting damaged. The same concern was raised when Blu-ray was being developed, until they managed to develop a hard coating to protect the discs.

There's two different ways of combining audio and data on the same disc: as separate sessions or as a single session with a data track followed by audio tracks. Two sessions has better compatibility with audio CD players, one session is more compatible with CD-ROM drives.

95-98 didn't do anything weird with it. I don't think new ones scan the cd's all the time either. very few games support the files being like that to avoid swapping though.

My experience with changers is that installing the driver will buffer the status of each disc and prevents excessive swapping that Windows likes to do every time it displays a File Open or Save box or drive contents (which is the same Control).

cost - those things were so much more expensive than single drive ones

And usually a little slower than contemporary drives. And frankly, this was from a time when 700MB was a ton of data. Who needed more than one disc for a single application? And who had the memory or screen real estate to have multiple data-hungry applications running at once? It was kind of a niche product, mostly for large databases or file archives. At least until multi-CD games got popular, and by then, the DVD was poised to take over.

These were read only, and within a year or so the CDRW dropped and became common. And these and the 5 disk units rapidly became obsolete. Especially as many games did not support these, so they could not play your multi-disk games like Baldur"s Gate.