The CD-ROM: An LGR Retrospective
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- Опубликовано: 1 ноя 2024
- Taking a nostalgic look back at the 'compact disc read only memory' experience! Especially in regards to computer gaming and software in the 1990s. Redbook audio, full motion video, a vast 650+ megabytes of storage, ahh good times.
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Music used in order of appearance:
Particle Emission 2, Real Synth Music 6, Bunsen Burner 2
www.epidemicso...
● Retro video sources:
• Tomorrow's World - Com...
• The Computer Chronicle...
• episode 1130 512kb - C...
• The Computer Chronicle...
• Oregon Trail (Macintos...
• 1985 News Story on Deb...
#LGR #CDs #Retrospective
Holy shit, CD-ROM is now deserving of a restrospective!?!? And why do my joints hurt these days?
It's rainy outside.
LOL. And why does the inside of my ears need a haircut?
I would say something here but I completely forgot what I wanted to say.
Michael Jepsen huh? Why can't I hear well?
CD for games does. CD in general? Not so much
Really feeling old now. My first computer job was dominated by punch cards and punch tape. 'The Machine Room' used this high tech magnetic tape. We mortals in Data Control weren't allowed in there. Shame. It was air conditioned.
Neil Harris Still using half inch tape in a colder than comfortable machine room these days. Of cause with more modern parts and capacities, including CD drives as a very low capacity option in some machines.
Neil Harris the the
"Clint Basinger"
That's a rockstar name if I ever saw one
True, I mean how do we know LGR doesn't really stand for "Lead GuitarR"
Lazy Guitar Riffs
Yeah, that's either the name of a rockstar or a TV historian. Seems we've got the latter, with a twist of gaming.
Needs to play bass though, obvi.
Or would it be the singer?
>CD's are old now
Brb checking into the retirement home.
CD are still used to release music physically.
And also Vinyl and Cassettes.
So it ain't obselete.
@@retrocysper3709 Sure, but it is still old.
Years ago, I came for a Sims 3 review. I stayed for the voice. I came back for more reviews. I subscribed for Tech Tales and Oddware. I watched reviews of DOS games and edutainment that I knew I'd never play. Then, I found myself watching you building computers or discussing in-depth tech stuff that I had no idea I was interested in.
So, thank you, Clint. I never knew I was your target audience, but I'm so glad that I am. And I'm so glad that wonderful, high quality content like this is on youtube. Massive congratulations on eight years of LGR. Thank you for all your hard work. Long may it continue!
Haven't we all xD
You forgot the Thrifts, those are pretty entertaining too
Hell I still prefer to buy my music on CD's. There is nothing like really owning something and not having to worry about losing a account or having someone steal your account and not be able to listen to your music.
That's why you buy digital from places that let you download.
@@Benrob0329 that's why you buy a cd then rip it
DRM free is best. No worries at format changes in the future. Not just for music but for eBooks and video it's important too. (As far as I know non of the current eReaders on the market support the old .Lit ebook format anymore for instance)
I agree. Seeing as now games at retail will still you an empty box with a code just kills the feeling for me. The internet has made things like this become soulless
have you heard of a little called stealing?
I remember back in 1984 when CDs first came out, I saw some woman on TV raving about how you could "literally drive a truck over a compact disc, and it will be just fine." Since an album on CD was like $40 or more, few people had the means to buy them for themselves and prove the audacious claims wrong.
The very first CD I bought was Def Leppard's Hysteria album in 1987. I played the hell out of that disc. I had it on repeat for days at a time. I even left it playing when I was asleep. It was the only CD I had and I wanted to get every dollar worth out of the little Toshiba XR-J9 disc player I'd bought.
The truth is, CDs really are durable, if you take care of them. Put them away in their case when you're done. Keep them free of fingerprints. But most people (especially when they're drunk) just yank the old CD out, toss it aside somewhere and stick the new one in. Next thing you know, your favourite album looks like somebody used it to scrape gum off a sidewalk.
kevnar : iirc the early cds really we’re almost bullet proof. But then mass production kicked in, cheaper components used, etc etc..
Great job, man.
Thank you!
Why does this comment only have 2 likes?
As convenient as steam games are, I still miss having a shelf full of CDs and DVDs
Bringing the box home and cracking it open for the first time. Going through all the contents of said box.
I never buy download only games, that need to run with their program (Steam and others), if they shut it down you will lose the money and the game. But I still can play all my old games on the PC.
@@XX-121 F--k Downloading Games.
We want to buy our games physically and we want them Full Games.
GOG is the way to go.
I have a lot of CD-ROM games for the PC, audio CDs and some data CDs. Good job!
They used to put CDs in cereal boxes. Those were the days. That's how I got a copy of Pacman Adventures in Time.
yep, kept getting slimed. I'm a horrible shot.
yeah i got Bionicle CD from a Nesquik cereal one time when Lego was advertising the first Bionicle movie and game for the PS2, good stuff indeed XDD kinda want to play that again but as well as a game called Betty Bad that needs a certian version of Java to run it, i need a certain version of Shockwave Flash to run the game that comes with the CD and that's pretty sad but Cereal CD's were the best indeed!
got age of empire from a box of nutri grain
I got a crappy angry birds cereal edition. Wow I'm so lucky
Reminds me my brother bought a gaming magazine that came with Saint's Row The Third a while ago, gotta say I miss the days of physical media PC games.
i swear you could talk about anything computer related from the 80s-2000s and ide always sit here with a grin on my face like the nerd that i am :P
Lovely! I remeber getting my first CD from a magazine. It was a while later I could actually use it when I got this very first single speed Mitsumi drive. The CD was packed with stuff, demos, shareware, videos. It took me weeks to discover it all.
Compilation and demo discs really were my favorite thing for a while. I miss those days.
So true. We didn't have Internet for quite some time, so magazines would start putting drivers, tools and all sorts of other stuff onto these discs. To me this was really an eye opener, a glimpse into the wide world from my bedroom.
Oh, you bring me back! My first CD came with a PCMagazine, a demo of CorelDraw! The gym's computer (my work) don't got the minimun requirements so an engineer student tested it and almost his hard drive was full but we try it a little (at least).
the magic of getting a cd burner 😍
Yeah, it was the coolest shit ever. All of the sudden you could make YOUR OWN CDs! Mine, I made it, look, it's a CD but made by me. It was like Tom Hanks making fire in Cast Away.
The greatest day of my young life was when the convergence of a "fast" (at the time computer), a CDR, Napster, and a cable modem all came together in about the same 30 days. I became a hero amongst mortal men.
Oh, the magic of owning an 8X4X32X CD burner and never being able to burn faster than 2X. And those pesky buffer underrun errors.
the powerrrrrrrrrrrrr
you could make alot of money at school
Somebody please send that 72X to clint, we need to hear that puppy spin!
Been looking for one for years!
Only useful as a curiosity - iirc they couldnt read CD-RW
Higgins2001 Some early CD drives (and I think built-in units in radio players) also didn't support CD-RW. I would say it would be quite cool to have one anyway, just for its weirdness value.
Often, burning a CD at the slowest speed your burner can do helps the CD drives that can't read CD-R normally to read them
When I would burn playstation games back in the day I would use a slower speed. For some reason when I would try to use the max speed the games wouldn't work.
Clint, I just want to say thank you so much for these videos! I love them and it's so amazing how much time and effort you put into your channel. Can't imagine how many hours of research you've probably put into this channel.
Honestly Clint, you could read Bernard's Textbook from Day of the Tentacle to us, and I'd still thumb up the video. It's such a joy to hear your mind at work in your clips :)
I could probably stomach War And Peace.
I still use them myself, actually; I don't have a DVD-RW drive so...yeah...
I still think CDs are going to be around a while.
Rule number 1 when it comes to handling CD's:
-DO NOT TOUCH THE UNDERSIDE!
so, the opposite of women
And do not put it face down on the table!!
(CD-blanks are the opposite because the top is the fragile side and the label contains the reflective surface.)
@@XX-121 You can buff the plastic if its deeply scratched. Can you fix the label when its damaged? No, your data is gone.
@@700gsteak Then don't touch both sides.
End of story.
@@retrocysper3709 Right after you stop beating up your wife
i have some cd audio which is 30 years old and still works flawless. I love this kind of media, is so fascinating the way which is stored the data in a piece of plastic. Btw, great video
Clint you should rip every disk you own to ISO file before they rot. Save the games!
I'm working on it! I've uploaded some shareable stuff to archive.org as well.
Lazy Game Reviews should have known you would already been on that. Cool I love archive.org
Lazy Game Reviews Cool, great to know that you are also part of digital preservation efforts! I'm personally trying to get all my discs backed up too.
Lazy Game Reviews
In my opinion, I recommend backing up the disc images to somewhere on a NAS if you have one (I do).
As for data-only CD-ROM discs, it's recommended to save them to ISO files, but for older data-only discs that have separate data tracks for Windows and Mac OS, I recommend saving them as a BIN/CUE pair, and the same goes for discs that are both data and audio on separate tracks.
More info: winworldpc.com/library/disc-images
So your the guy (or one of them) who's been uploading shareware discs to Archive? Geeze there's so much and a lot of games on those discs I never heard of. Have you ever found any? Will you do some sort of shareware gem showcase on games that were, well under the radar? I'm afraid to go digging and fear I won't come out again...
I had to hold a talk about optical disc drives, even if it was more about the technical aspects than the history, I can now relate to how much work you put into your videos and appreciate them even more now. Presenting a technical topic like that in an entertaining yet educational way is a skill you mastered
CD's>Cassette Tapes... all I have to say
Great Video as always
cd's/dvd's/blurays/harddrives, its all just data storage, casette's has that analogue charm i feel it's hard to compare. Great video !
Oh, don't get me wrong I love cassette's but in terms of reliability I have yet to have a CD go bad.... But then again putting out Cassettes on display just does have that nostalgia that CD's are only just beginning to get.
Well, i'm a casette fan, so i had to write something :P
I never had a cd go bad either. Except for the ones i left in the sun, and that one cd-r i once wrote with a ball pen on - doh!
I've had data loss on CD's that I've burned 15 years ago.For long term storage you want what's known as M-Discs and a M-Disc capable burner.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
+Tarks Gauntlet
One of the big troubles of casettes was bad players (ofc there where cheap ass tapes too). I have an old high-end casette player that have never ruined a tape yet.
I used to integrate tape tracks in my music, like take a synth track - run it through the tapedeck and back into my DAW. I love the character and saturation of the sound you can get.
I agree with all you said, vinyl is solid for a lot of reasons, thats also why its such a popular retro format.
Somewhere a jealous floppy disk is staring at LGR... thinking of ways to murder the CD-ROM to have his full love!
Now I want to hear a 72 speed drive at max speed.
Well, sometimes you could hear "Boom" instead ^_^
It didn't actually spin any faster than traditional CD-ROM drives. It used 7 laser beams to read data in parallel (vs just one in a common CD-ROM drive). It's almost worthy of an oddware episode of its own.
The fastest mainstream CD-ROM drives were about 52X. If you go much above that, you risk shattering the disc. I think I might have seen 56X readers advertised at some point, but I don't know whether they spun the disc any faster or just used some DSP trickery or something.
called a glitter drive. because they would shatter discs at those speeds.
Joe McPhail it.never hit 72 x speed. only for a bout ,3 seconds while it writes the TOC and lead in
Go to the airport, I guess a jet plane sounds similar. JK
Hey there! My first family computer didn't have a CD-ROM drive, but rather two floppy drives. My next family computer had our first CD-ROM drive, and we lived every minute of it. Our next family computer came with our first CD-R/RW drive. This ranged between 1998 to 2003. Love your insights on all your videos, and keep up the great work! ☺
I have the same memories with CDs that you have. My first experience was at the library with my Encyclopedia included in the Sound Blaster Pro box bundle in 1992. I sampled the voices from the audio portion of that one, the Eagle has landed and such, and used it too many songs back then. :)
My best friend won a caddy drive to his Mac LC IIc at a computer fair we attended, and I was so jealous...but I didn't have a mac so it was for the best.
It was a delightful time back then. Man, I'm getting old! ^_^
how was this posted 2 weeks ago?
Patreons get videos early
The magic of RUclips
Hey you're they guy that hooked Techmoan up with that cool visual on his worldeye right? I think I recognize the avatar ^^
The CD's were magic to me, I fell in love with the possibilities, and when CD recorders were available, it was like a dream come true. Thanks for the memories Clint!
The moment I realised some CD-ROMs had audio tracks that could be played on my CD-player, I've discovered some of my all time favourite music!
The Sega Dreamcast's GD-Roms were notorious for their film decay. I have a collection of about 12 games, and about half of them have holes in the film (Visible when help up toward a light source). My Resident Evil Code Veronica Disk 1 is completely covered in little holes, which makes it freeze at certain parts of the game.
One of my favorite games growing up was Dino Defender, over time it got a hole and I couldn't play it anymore.
Yeah, but the less you play, the longer they last. My copy of Soul Calibur is pretty bad and I have a Sonic Adventure that doesn't play anymore. I have a bunch of sealed games that I plan on keeping for later. One of these days I'll probably mod all my old consoles to run games off SD cards or HDD.
That's just tragic.
Does burning on DVD works?
@@retrocysper3709 Dreamcasts can't play dvds
Ah, using AOL CDs as birdscarers on the vegetable patch. Halcyon days.
p.s. I also remember us having a 6x CD-ROM drive, which we got because 8x hadn't come out yet and we wanted to be a bit flashy.
Secretly playing Phantasmagoria at my friends house (it was 17+😱) and freaking ourselves out is one of my favorite middle school memories.
17? Don't you mean 18? (theres no PEGI 17)
She's from the USA there is the ESRB they have 17+ Only Europe has PEGI they don't have 17+
I'd love to see a retrospective on the advent of Steam and digital distribution through your eyes as a long time PC gamer. Great work!
I remember when my friend told me about Steam before it was active. He was really excited but I said the downloads would take too long and it would never work. Hmm.
personally, optical storage is one of the most fascinating storage methods according to me. Just being able to turn a plastic disc into a ton of data by using a LAZER on a infidecimally small pit and a bunch of dac’s and adc’s is just mind blowing.
My older sister she was subscribed to a magazine called Manga Madness and one day it came with a CD filled with mpegs of higly compressed anime. And she loved it. She would watch that stuff all the time until one day when she was gonna watch it the CD drive made a sound almost like a lawnmower when spinning the disc after a while it started to give off a cracking sound. When she pulled it out the CD was in pieces all over the place and none of us had any ide of what happened. She was of course devastated. Apparently from what we figure the CD drive had spun it so fast that it broke. I don't know if that is true but that is the most clear memory I have of CDs.
A poorly made unbalanced disc will explode if subjected to the high speeds of 16X and higher drives.
Funny story time. Comcast sent out an upgrade CD for their cable internet service software. The discs were poorly made and exploded in high speed CD-ROM drives. The computer store I worked for had quite a profitable week replacing drives.
I absolutely love the black underside of PS1 discs. I get a warm rush of nostalgia every time I see one.
Hold them up to a light source and you will get a surprise they are actually purple, i found that out one day held the disc up in front of the tv while the ps1 splash screen was on and thought it looks like one of those black light bulbs
And PS2 games that came on CD like Ridge Racer 5 had blue undersides. But most PS2 games used DVDs so people didn't really get to see the blue discs. But yeah those black PS1 discs were fucking awesome!
You should get published on History channel wth these. Thorughly enjoyable.
I shudder to think what the History channel would do to LGR.
Adamant Consternation I imagine the History Channel narrator going like this:
"A collector of old and forgotten computer games.
Or is he?!
What dark secrets does he hide?
There is much more lurking in the dark corners of his mind than you might believe.
After the break we will find out whether this lone game collector found mystical clues and direct evidence in the games he collects for the second coming of Jesus, for ancient alien artifacts and for the location of the Illuminati's secret headquarters.
Stay tuned to find out".
@@elimalinsky7069 Now I don't want LGR on History Channel.
"We went to the beach, just Grandma and me"... I remember this interactive animated story for the younger audience. That was on CD. Of course, there was the multimedia CD from Monty Python too. Wow, the CD's were awesome!
In spite of the fact you pretty much have to treat them like glass, at least with things like CDs and DVDs, I just can't bring myself to migrate to a digital only existence when it comes to gaming. There's something undeniably satisfying about looking over at the shelf (or shelves) of games you bought over the years and thinking "I made that. My money did _that_."
Fuck yeah.
I still have CDR-R's.. spindles full ... all over the place from 20 years ago. darn things still work!
Also they made great coasters when they got scratched too much.
Steven Morara Or wall art
LGR should do a retrospective video about cassetes.
I know but a standalone LGR episode would be better.
I was so obsessed about CDs and CD-Drive, I could literally look at the reading indicator (green LED) while listening to the sound of disk spinning inside the drive for 10 mins. And I don´t need to mention how excited and even proud I was when I got my first CD-RW drive. Looking at my 52x CD-ROM and 24x CD-RW both from BenQ working at the same time (copying CD mostly) was a pure enjoyment. :)
My old pc's and CRT monitors made a lot of noises. After 2 upgrades I am kinda saddened that the only thing now I can occasionaly hear is HDD and DVD in my PC, so I cherish every sound they produce because soon only fan noise will be heard from PC's.
I loved the sounds my first Toshiba x4 drive made. Felt somehow...pleasant, for some inexplicable reason.
But when I had a 52x drive I hated it and used it as scarcely as possible. The noise made me worry it's either going to fly off the desk or explode. Can't imagine what a x70 drive sounds like. XD
What's interesting is for a long time in the 90s, a CD was either larger or a very significant portion of the average HDD size. Many people had a 200MB - 1GB HDD and a CD-ROM drive, and many dreamed of having an HDD the size of a CD, which is silly to think about now. Back then HDD storage was expensive and badly needed, meanwhile CDs were cheap. So when the first CD burners came out, it was this amazing thing that could basically back up your entire HDD almost for free, like suddenly you had access to tons of free storage. CDs just sort of preempted Moore's Law in a way, they first came out in the early 1980s when 600-700MB of data was an INSANE amount, yet they were relatively cheap. I can't think of another example of something like this.
Yep, back in the days before Steam and DRM you could get PC games from the library! One of my favorite memories of my childhood was checking out CDs from the library and taking them home to play on a summer afternoon. In fact I probably played way more games that way than anything my parents got. It's probably how I ended up a PC nerd TBH.
That is literally how I was introduced to SimCity. XD
I don't know how can you make something so trivial in something so entertaining to watch. Keep up the good work! Love this types of videos!
X72 speed? That almost sounds dangerous; I can only imagine the whole computer shaking.
Yeah, damaged discs could shatter at over 58x The mythbusters even did a story on that in one of their first seasons. (Though the actual myth was not if the disc would shatter but that fragments would fly out of it and hurt the user which wasn't the case, The did get disc's shattering but the fragments stayed in the CD-ROM drive, and that drive would never spin a CD again.)
It spins slower than 56x
*_216x speed_*
@@PhoenixNL72-DEGA- Myth doesn't mean it's real.
@@retrocysper3709 Ehrm, do you know what Mythbusters was for a program? They took myths and scientifically tested them to see if they held any merrit. And they showed the discs would shatter above a certain speed. So that part was proven NOT to be a myth.
I was one of the first folks that had a 4x CD burner in my high school. My mix CDs still play fine 17 years later.
Putting me on the nostalgia feel train again Clint :P
Hi Clint Basinger!
despite my lack of interest in a lot of the stuff he reviews i still watch lgr's videos. i feel like i can watch any of his videos all the way through and still be entertained.
CD-ROM, 3D graphics and household internet basically arrived at the same time back in the 90's and it was friggin' AWESOME!
I remember reading about how Windows 95 had proper 32 bit pre-emptive multi-tasking and then seeing it run blew my mind. I would happily watch a PC run 2 or 3 really boring programs at the same time like it was an episode of Game of Thrones, or something.
LGR, you capture perfectly that time as a kid when computers were so exciting for me. CD ROMS, hell yeah, back when everyone thought the future of games was FMV (lmao).
I thought the disc defragmenter was a fun game. I liked to watch the data move and the little boxes rearrange themselves. Ah the good ol days.
It was mesmerizing!
I remember wasting time sitting and watching. Exhilarating!
Was Windows 95 the start of the bar/fullscreen/cross icons in the top right?
3.1 just had down and up pointers, yeah?
Windows 95 changed the way we used a PC (if I remember it right).
Multi-fucking-tasking - how could we live without it today?
Windows 3.x had the same functionality as the 3 buttons in the right corner on Win9x. Maximize, Minimize, Close. The window had 2 buttons on the right side and the "control" button on the left. The "Close" or "X" button was added but the control on the right had the same function when double clicked.
Actually, even if you don't see it, recent windows versions like 7, 8 and 10 still have the control button, although hidden and still close the window when double clicked. Try opening an explorer window and double click on the top left corner, even when there's nothing visible there, the button still exists and closes the window.
Awesome video! loved the editing in this and the music was fantastic! Very informative!👍 Thanks Clint!
the autorun of simcity 2000... the nostalgi
I remember when AUDIO CD's were new. A couple of years before they hit the market an adult neighbor was talking about how this new technology was coming out that would make music sound perfectly clear as if it were live! I think that was my first exposure to tech enthusiasm.
Cds are magic
Back then
They will never die for me since I usually prefer buying a physical CD for albums instead of just buying them off Amazon or some other online distribution.
I'm too young to have ever experienced the days where you used a cd/dvd to load a game on pc... but I still love them anyway! There is nothing quite like burning an iso to a disk and hearing it click away as you install linux or boot another os. The slowness makes you feel like you are doing stuff and having that physical copy of data just doesn't compare to a flash drive. 📀 💿
Also the sounds my Philips DVD burner makes are so damn fine and fascinating.
Slowness of a CD... Lol I grew up on cassettes. THAT gave you time to do stuff.
The Mockracy yeah haha
Wow, were you born after 9/11? I grew up in the mid-90s and I used CDs all the time for all of my games.
The Mockracy: Ugh, 15 min of loading time on a C64 Cassette drive only to have it crash just before it was loaded... I was so happy when I could finally afford 5.25" floppy drive for it. (Ocean-118 drive, the official Commodore 1541 was way to expensive) First ever Floppy game was Zork III I was in my early teens then and hardly understood english back then but still I had a blast.
Man you do a great job of capturing how exciting this stuff felt the first time around.
OMG Feels dude at 1:35
I switched to Steam and other similar systems for my games a few years back, but for my music i still prefer to have the disc. I'm not really sure why, as I always just end up importing it to my computer and phone, but the feel of flipping through a row of CDs and seeing all the covers just feels right to me.
PC GAMER MAGAZINE!!!!! There was an exclusive partition once, offering the whole Tiberium sun game!!!! Not a demo! my favorite realtime strategy of all time!
in this video there where nothing new but a huge catharsis! thank you man, you nailed it. as always, quality content you don't see very often! thanks !
Will you ever talk about myst?
Oh it'll happen someday. I'm just in no rush since it's so well known.
Well yeah but i havent seen alot of people here on youtube that have talked about myst, altough i guess i can wait for some quality. Thanks!
Yeah!! It only seems to be known amongst slightly older gamers who are interested in gaming history, most people my age (25 and under) haven't heard of it. I have not met someone in person who has played it. Ever. It would be awesome to give it some more attention, but also Riven which was the far more accomplished game really...
I'm still waiting for him to do a Tex Murphy retrospective.
MxMagpie is right, I'm 26 and it was a bit before my time (the time I had a computer to run games, that is). Most younger gamers know nothing about the Myst series.
That box of shareware discs made my mouth drool. As a kid, that would have been absolute heaven.
I was the first person in my school to get a CD-Burner in early 2001. It was a 2x so it took about 45 minutes to burn a full disc. I was also the only one I knew that got Cable internet, it was through Comcast from a company called @Home. I remember when the tech set it up it didn't work and he had no idea what to do. Turned out he did everything right, it was something on the back end. I spoke back and forth for a couple days with a tech who told me I was actually his only case at the time and the first cable internet issue with his department lol. I got it the 2nd day it came out so it makes sense. Anyway, I had some things queued up to download in Kazaa, and really early, like 3am, the tech called me and said he thinks its working and I checked and it was! I got right up and went nuts downloading. Went from 56k i.e. 5-6kbps, to almost 1 megabyte per minute. I went on to burn a bunch of music disc and Movie VCDs (the first Spiderman and Jason X leaked really early that year) and made bank. Anyway, if you read this all thanks! CD's changed the game!
seeing your library of CD's makes me miss my own and now i'm realizing how much i've taken them for granted. Unfortunately, I lost some of mine from bad storage and plain deterioration from badly placed shelves.
Alcohol 120% memories. I did enjoy the lightscribe drives with auto labelling.
I put so much effort into the light scribe disc labels, just like I did designing the menus for the pirated DVDs I burned.
What a great video. I'm amazed of how many experiences can be shared even in different continents. For me, in Chile, the cd was the same, I had to use arj a lot to get games from one computer to another, but when the cd came up, just one cd could contain many games, at once!!. Revolutionary.
Regarding its reduced duration, the same can be said of the floppy, they are supposed to last as much as 30 years, but you never know what materials a manufacturer is going to use. You could even end up with faulty floppys right from the store.
those damn AoL discs. Everywhere.
Yay for Stewart Cheifet! I loved the Computer Chronicles! Clint, have you ever thought of getting in contact with him and doing a retrospective? I mean especially with Gary Kildall from Digital Research Inc and his GUI like GEM and his original DOS like OS being a co-host and the amount of programs they ran from the 80s until the 2000s there is wealth of knowledge to explore. Plus the Techtales of either DRI or Computer Chronicles would be fascinating. One could be on Gary and his "rivalry" with Bill Gates and the whole DOS and IBM fiasco. Even a techtales about the Computer Chronicles Quiz show that had people like bill gates as contestants (and eventually host) would be awesome. I'm sure you know all about the history of DRI and DOS war with Microsoft but it'd be great to hear that story in your silky smooth duke nukem voice 😜
+Lazy Game Reviews
I remember that some drives had Playback buttons(play/pause, next, prev., volume etc.), were those for using the drive as a standalone music player, or were they just "shortcuts" to the pc's media player?
MrHack4never On mine it controlled the drive's music player, independent of the OS.
MrHack4never standalone :)
If a music disc was inserted, the play/next button will play and skip forward or you could stop the playback using the stop/eject button. There was a headphone connector on the front to listen to the disc. All that was completely independent of the OS.
Stewart Cheifet! That sure brings back memories. I watched that show for years and years. Really hitting the ol' nostalgia button, Clint.
I wonder if there is a way to make a disc changer that works for a PC. That way you can have a video game jukebox instead of having to swap out discs. I would really love it if someone made a PS2 like this, so I wouldn't have to keep swapping discs.
Pioneer and NSM manufactured CD Jukeboxes for PCs. Although they were expensive and cumbersome, they used 4X SCSI CDROM drives. Look up Pioneer DRM1004x
Buying the CD-ROM based game before you even had an optical drive is so endearing to me and I totally get it. I miss that excitement.
can you please do a show on demo discs around the 00's
Very well written video. Keep up the neat work, LGR!
back in the late 90's when I turned seven my dad gave me a compac laptop with swapable cd/dvd and floppy drives, i had to save my homework papers on floppies so i could take them to school to print, when homework was done I swapped the cd drive and spent endless hours destroying my index finger on the little nub mouse playing age of empire 1+2
thanks for linking the music because that ending music was really nice. Epidemic Sound has some pretty nice techno/"synthy" type stuff, its great
The CD-ROM drives and sound cards became affordable soon after the introduction of Windows 95 the summer of 1995. Windows 95 brought the multimedia to the masses and the essential parts of digital multimedia were the CD-ROM drive, the sound card and the mouse and maybe a graphic acceleration card.
That sounds default and obvious today but during the DOS and the anaemic Windows 3.11 era it wasn't. Windows 3.11 could support multimedia but there wasn't any plug and play technology and special knowledges of DOS commands, configuration of drives, autoexec.bat etc were required. In practice most of users were paying 20-30% beyond the hardware cost for the installation fees.
After windows 95 anyone without any particular skill, after reading for a few minutes some very basic instructions could insert a CD-ROM drive into the second IDE port with the IDE flat cable and a SoundBlaster card inside a free black ISA slot of the PC tower. With the start of Windows 95 there was automatic detection of the new hardware and the drivers installation was fully automatically. That was a bless with reputable peripherals and a curse with much cheaper peripherals which had problematic third party drivers.
During the 1995 the affordable hard disks were around 300-500 Mbytes and the most expensive ones a little more than 1 GByte. The first edition of windows 95 supported only FAT16 which couldn't format more than 2 GByte disks.
The basic installation of Windows 95 needed around 22 floppy disks or a CD-ROM and about 60 MBytes on the hard disk. The full installation wasn't more than 100 Mbytes.
So the 650-700 Mbytes of a typical CD-ROM was an enormous capacity. Today a cheap Laptop has at least an 1 TByte rotational HDD. Imagine an optical disk with 1,5 TByte storage today.
The CD-R drives existed then but were exceptionally expensive and even the blank CD-R disks were expensive too.
So the CD-ROM piracy wasn't easy and software manufacturers relied totally on CD-ROM. Floppy Disk were rewritable and could be inflected with viruses when were shared with other pic users. The CD-ROM was read-only and the original CD-ROMs from the software companies were always virus free. CD-ROMs were cheap with huge storage and safe. The perfect way to store data.
The data storage of CD-ROM was so vast then, that game developers didn't bother a lot with audio compression and image compression (something typical with floppy disks). This made the Games full of audio, graphics and images than didn't demanded very fast CPUs. The games were mostly run by the CD-ROM. Usually a small installation of 10-50 Mbyte on the hard disk was required. The real golden era of PC games before piracy and PlayStation changed everything in the game Industry.
After 1998 the CD-R drives and blank CD-R became affordable. That was a headache for software manufacturers. Some copy protection technologies on CD-ROMs started to appear. Also hard disk drives reached storages of 10 GByte. The DVD-ROM were affordable only after 1999 and very few games were available on DVD-ROM. Nearly all manufacturers until 2000 preferred to sell their games with multiple CD-ROMs. Everybody had a CD-ROM driver.
After 2000 the CD-ROM died very fast. Its storage wasn't enough anymore and everybody had a DVD-ROM drive. The first USB flash disks appeared and the CD-R disk wasn't very popular any more.
Dude, I love your videos not only do they feel nostalgic (yeah our asses our getting ... old) but they are very educational and concise I would recommend this to teachers or what.
1:35 you want... som fuk?
I'm polish, poland sucks XD
It always brightens my day when somebody references The Computer Chronicles. I still love that show to this day.
hey Clint its your cousin Eves Daguhter Katherine
Hello!
oh right i forgot that
Mind the Brick Hello cousin, Eves Daguhter Katherine, what a strange name you have.
sorry my sister got on my account
And I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.
I feel the same way about VHS tapes.
I can watch movies in 1080p whenever I want,
but there's something special about the experience that goes along with watching a movie on tape.
CDs were certainly presented better than the games we get today. Loose crappy eco-boxes that feel flimsy and sport no manual. Vs the hard jewel case of a CD case that could sport thicker cases for more discs or even demo discs.
There was something special about getting a PS1 game back then with the folded plastic sticker over the top with the reflective bit.
Now it's cheap plastic wrap and cheap box and no manual.
What's more I equate used games with having no manual, so now I feel like I'm always buying used games.
I remember some games having books so thicccc they'd revival college textbooks, especially sim games. I haven't bought a physical game for a long time now but the last one I did just had some cheap 3 page or something install guide and disclaimer written.
yeah! like with my delta force blackhock down game. Now, I have no key to instal it cause it was made so cheap
Snotnarok lmao those jewel cases were weak as fuck and breaks easily
Funny, I was watching your floppy disk video again when I noticed you uploaded this just recently. I think we got into CD-ROMs about the same time, my first CD-based game was Diablo. Before that, I looked at the CD-ROM drive on my then-new PC and thought "what am I ever going to do with this?" So at first I just listened to music and stand-up comedy CDs in it while I played a cracked version of Doom II that was pre-installed by the local computer store I bought it from. Up to that point, I was still trudging along with my Amiga 1000.
Any relation with Kim Basinger?
Yes, I'm her. In disguise.
Prove it. ;)
Thanks. Now I have the image of you crossing your legs on a chair and it's not nice.
You weigh a little more than a hundred and eight.
Being just a tad younger, CD's started being a common thing by the time I started elementary school. I did witness the jump from having a walkman to having a CD player for music, and I remember my dad spent an ungodly amount of money when he bought a CD reader+writer which I promptly used to burn music compilations and share games with friends. And while we did have a PC, it was the PS1 that made me realise just how cool it was to be able to play games from a CD. I felt like an insider when I discovered that you could plop most ps1 disks into an audio player and listen to the audio tracks after skipping the data track.
Its probably for this reason that CD cases and the cardboard boxes bring a nostalgic feeling with them for me. For me, the jump to DVD is also a bit nostalgic, since it happened in my early teens. I remember buying GTA on a DVD and only realising afterwards that I need a DVD drive to read it. Brought it to a friend of mine who did have one and we played on his pc. Bought one myself later and tbh we never really knew what to do with all that space on these things.
Nice video, thanks.
CDs and DVDs are considered so redundant that new PCs are made by default with no CD/DVD drive. I bought a new PC a year ago and when it arrived, no CD/DVD drive, so I couldn't install my games or programs I use (yes, it's all on disks. I hate digital download as it's unreliable to download and use and it can all be taken from me in an instant. So I disagree with you Clint about them being better and more reliable). I didn't think to check before I ordered the PC online that it had one as they always have one. So I had to buy an expensive and shitty external CD/DVD drive because I would have to wreck the case to put a drive in myself (The PC is an Alienware so I'm not wrecking the frigging case!). The ironic thing is, the PC came with a OS backup disk. WTF?
Games/music/movies/series/porn/audio books are now digital download so they can charge us more. If we got it on CD/DVD, we owned it forever. Could put it on all our devices. Could make a copy of it for ourselves (legal) or others (illegal). Now much is only available if we pay a monthly fee. They give the excuse of being more environmentally friendly, that no plastic wrap, cases, boxes, booklets, disks, etc are going to landfill. Less going to landfill is great but companies think with their wallets not with their greenie hats. They don't want us to have the file in our possession so we can't pirate it. And so they can keep charging us.
There are DRM removers for all those formats though. Even though they claim it's not legal to do that with your own legally bought copies, I wonder if they can really make that hard in court. And there are services like GOG that sell all the games on their platform DRM free, and quite a few books on Kobo are downloadable DRM free EPUB files (though the majority still is DRM protected and as ussual the only ones they inconvenience with the antipiracy protections are the legitimate users. The pirates just strip it of/crack/hack it anyway.
(Never understood why on a movie DVD or blue ray you get all those FBI warnings and stuff and you have to wait forever to play the movie. All that stuff is stripped from a pirated disc and the movie plays immidiately. It's ridiculous)
First computer my house had that came with a CD-ROM drive was our Pentium 2 Patriot tower. Those were the days
I remember when my friend had 40 CD's and I was blown away. I really wish I could've just said: "Take this, it's a USB stick that has more capacity and speed than all of these..."
Quality vid as usual my man. Actually plays out to my own life somewhat, as I finally acquired myself a retro-pc just a while ago, after having to get rid of my old stuff almost a decade ago due to space shortage. Don't have any floppies or a CF-solution yet, so cd:s are the way to go - ROM and otherwise. A Nokia brand Pentium 100MHz machine with 40mb of RAM and a SB16 + even an era-appropriate monitor.. Didn't cost me a dime.. So happy.
make a video of dvd's now :)
Nice review brought me fond memories. I have my first cd-rom back in 1998!
Clint, make " Intel CPU " Retrospective....;)
Intel VS AMD Retrospective.
They sre not dying hard, ryzen just didnt kill them...
So. Many. CDs. My parents loved buying music on CD. And burning their own. We had at least 5 huge binder/album books of CDs, a bookcase, and two smaller CD cabinets. The ones with at least 50 pages of 9 CDS on each side. One of the binders was games (mostly AOL CDs we kept for some reason...) Most of them are gone now because my dad is an awful person who would change CDs in the car and throw the old one on the floor instead of putting them back in a case. But I loved just sitting there flipping through the pages looking at all the shiny designs and all the cool album art on the cases in the cabinet. Especially when my mom let me choose the music for cleaning. We had a CD player that shuffled something like 8 discs, and we would dance and clean the house while dad was at work or in the garage. I'm glad I watched this, I hadn't thought about all that stuff in such a long time!
MEGA RACE!!!! I Need a good copy of this game, I loved it as a kid, my friend had it and we played it constantly
fantastic review!! my first experience with a CD was Strike Commander CD - on pc around 1995. speech packs were the coolest!!!