TORISAN is the trade name of Sanyo's Tottori City plant which was connected to Tottori University and primarily made electronic components such as LCDs and precision mechanical components for optical and hard disk drives. Areal Technology, a short-lived American maker of hard disk drives backed by Sanyo, had their drives made there.
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.
I had one of those back in '90s on a 486. - it does work as a standalone cd player: you need a cable to connect it to the sound card and you can use the multimedia buttons on the drive. I used to do that while playing DOS video games. Back in those days Windows CD Player didn't handle the digital audio stream, it just provided the required "controls". - there are drivers available for Win 3.x/9x: you can make it to show up as 1 drive or 3 drives (having it show up as 3 drives was really annoying - constant automatic cd swapping). If you set it up to show up as 1 drive, you can still swap the disks using the select button.
I love how all of the vintage tech creators on RUclips have a focus; yours is CD drives, Techmoan's all hifi audio, LGR is mostly 90s tech, and so on. Nobody can dig into every topic for weekly videos so I can hit all of my areas of interest pretty much all week with how yall focus on different stuff.
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.
Wow, that brings back memories. I had this exact drive model in my Cyrix 6x86 166 System. The first PC (and CD drive) i ever bought myself. It was actually the cheapest CD drive the store offered. I remember needing special drivers in Win95 (and DOS).
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.
The Pioneer DRM-6XXX SCSI CD-R Jukebox drives use a 6 disc caddy very similar or identical to what they use on their Car CD changer, but these things are external and huge! It's very cool that your drive is that small and internal and utilize such a cool 3 disc magazine, my Panasonic IDE 5 Disc 12x CD-ROM Jukebox is still working, everything is packed so tightly that I'm afraid to even peek inside of it.
@@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.
@ 4:52 - you need to enable Digital Playback in the control panel/dev man/drive/properties tab. You can connect into the digital audio input on the motherboard.
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.
In my experience most Windows games that use CD Audio will only play audio from the first CD-ROM drive detected by the system. That is not a limitation of the drive but is instead just game developers assuming that most users would only every have a single drive and not bothering to look for more than one drive.
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.
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.
The first time I encountered a CD drive it had a caddy, and it was on an IBM RISC System/6000. It was very handy to use instead of tapes. The OS also came on floppy disks, which was nuts as there were over a thousand.
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.
About 20, 25 years ago I worked for a company that built custom computers. We got an order for an organisation that need 25 identical computers. So I built them with 5 each in 'parallel'. Got them all done in record time. I was so proud of myself. My coworker loaded them all in a van and went installing them. After, I dunno, about a week of work building them, installing them at every desk, showing people around in this all new "Windows 95" thing we were pretty proud of ourselves and satisfied. A few weeks later we get a call that some CD-audio on one of the computers isn't working. So my coworker grabs an 'CD-Rom audio cable', heads over there, opens the case, confirms our suspicion that it was probably missing, put it in, closed it and came back. Mere hours later a new support call. Same issue. Next day: Same thing. This time we grabbed 20-something of these cables and opened each and every computer and put it in. The hours wasted on that was eating a HUGE chunk out of our profit we made, which wasn't much in the first place since the customer negotiated very low prices for it being such a big order. All that because I forgot to put in a $0.02 cable in every single PC. What annoys me most is that probably only a few ever saw any use and even that would've been negligible since they were in an office (so not used for gaming or whatever).
There were leading major manufacturers who made 6-10 disc CD caddy drives for internal and external use a few decades ago. I believe the caddies used for the PC side of life could also be used with their car and home changers as well.
I had one of these - actually should still have it somewhere in a box. It never did work the way I was hoping it would, and at that rather slow speed, it just ended up being replaced by much faster and more useful drives. I think it was mainly aimed at people running BBS services - you could put a couple of archive CD's in it with stuff for people to download - access times and slow speed don't really matter over a 56K modem...
That is some VERY broken german on that lable. It says "Insert small cardboard box" instead of "Insert disc magazine". I'm guessing they just put it into the 1995 equivalent of google translate, as that sentence makes no sense at all. I guess that makes this already wierd drive just a little bit more odd.
Looking inside one of these it's pretty simple really. But it makes you wonder if we could make something as complex as a VHS recorder now, all those mechanisms to load and play a tape. We had the iron age, bronze age. Seems we've had the electro-mechanical age and we're now in the solid state age.
The sweet song of that patreon list outro with the dot matrix playing while I'm printing away ASCII art holiday cards on my Panasonic W940 really makes for an interesting 80s-90s vibe in my room. Aside from that, that is a very neat drive, even if limited to "classic" types of discs, I gotta wonder why they felt like they needed the rubber dampening on a drive that would be expected to already cost a bit more than usual compared to single disc drives, but that's certainly not a bad idea to have on any optical drive
Brings back memories, had something very similar back in the very late 90's mine held five or six CD's and the caddy stuck out of the front of the drive when loaded. Was also very slow changing disks and struggled with CDR's.
I would enjoy a video looking at how the audio-out connectors on CD drives work. They're one of those things where I plug them in because I feel like I'm supposed to, but I don't actually know what they do, and I can't find a lot of information on them. They've disappeared from modern drives mostly but that just raises the question of why did we used to need them but we don't anymore. My suspicion is that the CD drives used to decode the sound internally and then the sound card would mix that in with the audio but computers have gotten fast enough that the CPU can handle that just through the data coming from the drive. If that's the case do modern CD/DVD drives lack the ability to just play a CD? Are they sending the audio information through the data connector or the raw data? I think that would be an interesting "How do things work" video.
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. :-)
The Sony CXD2510Q DSP is also used in some revisions of the original Sony PlayStation (most importantly on the PU-8 board of some SCPH-100X and SCPH-300X units).
I had this drive in pre-2000 era. And I can confirm that buttons work with CD audio, it can be set up as one drive letter via driver installation. Also it is multisession compatible.
I also have a CD burner with caddy somewhere in the closet. It was the same caddy as shown in 0:04, but for the brand "Plextor". I also know that many of the stranger brands of CD burners or drives, are often pilot brands for large brands. I can still recall having something like a 1-speed "plasmon" CD burner that was a pilot brand for Philips.
We had a '97 Ford Fairlane and it had Pioneer 6 CD stacker (you had to pop the boot (trunk for you yanks!) to access it). The caddy looked just like yours but was black. I totally forgot about that til now!
I used a similar drive, but did not have the front lid, as a BBS CD-ROM drive Changer. Back in those days, when HDDs were smaller than most CD sizes, having 3 of them at hand to offer files from 3 discs, was a bliss. To 'avoid' long loading times, a BBS simply would made an animated ANSI (for example) while the drive was loaded up. The files.bbs files (a txt file which held the info about the files) was mostly ON those discs to be read out first and you would be able to store (anr retrieve?) them locally. I loved getting these shareware cdroms filled with zip files and rotated the discs every month orso to add 3x650/700mb of new content. Which was HUGE back in those days. Had to get this off my chest after getting excisted to see a CD drive that I (pretty much) owned and STILL have in my old (defunkt) Pentium-133 system. Haven't turned that one on in over 2 decades and wouldn't know if it would still work. I compared the drives visually and the only difference I saw was the opening lid. Keep maming these lovely videos.
It's been a while but IIRC you can check if the drive supports multisession by using a cd burning program and use the cdrom as source to see what it lists. Bluebook is a really weird standard so you can't assume a drive wont support multisession just based on that.
Growing up we had a 6 disk changer that was slot loaded. Don't recall the brand, but it was pretty cool, I could have several games loaded up in it. I was never really a huge fan of caddy drives back in the day. Neat find though!
Maaaaan Shelby you lucked out with this score.... Most of the Goodwill's around here just have DVD players a plenty but never much computer stuff... Save that one time I went to a savers and got my Dell Inspiron m200st and occasionally a slew of KB's and mice... But often than not, nothing good like that
I love CD drives stuff too! Hope someday see you reviewing a Creative Infra. Maybe as a part of other episode with various drives? Because I don't think is too interesting even though I love it.
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.
What I wondered about and had a little trouble figuring out, and what you might have mentioned in the video is how the drive manages to access different discs within the confines of a (technically half-height, if we're old-school) 5¼" bay. You show this in the video, but it's a little hard to see: It turns out that the drive depth is a little over 1½ times a CD's diameter, and that's enough space for the entire caddy/magazine and pulling the active disc out halfway. Then that leaves enough space for a diagonally-moving laser head mechanism in one of the corners to access the active disc. Halfway is enough to see the whole disc, since it turns. And the caddy/magazine height-adjusts to meet the vertically fixed mechanism (whose diagonal movement is confined to a horizontal plane). I wonder what this drive would have done had you tried to multitask and started audio playback from one disc and then tried to access another of the logically separate drives in Windows. I wonder if those would still have remained separate drives if you'd installed the special driver software da1l6 mentioned. Overall, strong LGR vibes on this episode. Loved the cat. Has she(?) been introduced to the channel? PS: You might now be in the unique position where you technically could 3D-scan and print a replacement caddy in case anyone out there is missing one.
I actually found one few years ago, and it had 4 sd-s. In early 2000-ds it was miond blowing to me. Still collect cd/dvd drives, but the multi disk one is my favorate.
This looks more useful as a multi CD caddie sound system while you are working on the PC while being more cheap and occupying less space. I would loved to have this back in the day, load 3 albums and listen to them while doing homework next to my PC.
My Pentium 166 tower from AST has one of those. Very cool! My high school library had a pc with the single cd caddy. I always liked those, but never owned one.
I actually owned one of those that I used on my Renegade BBS's for a portion of it's user file base system. I'd pick up freeware cd's at the Dallas yesterday sale from time to time and update them. Long before the days of Tucows...
But wait, weren't the two games also multi-session discs if they have data and CD audio portions? I guess the order may matter for the drive is willing to mount, and could explain slightly why the games were unable to simultaneously play the CD audio -- granted the CD player software had no trouble finding it and playing it.
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.
The biggest down side I see is that each tray has its own drive letter. In my experience, 99% of CD software needs to be installed and won't just run from the drive, meaning that you have to always have a particular CD in the same tray and it won't work from a different one. As for the media buttons, there are a couple of possibilities. One is that the buttons on that side don't work anymore (mechanical failure). The other is that the driver has to enable media changer control. I had a 1-disc drive with a play button BITD, and my (admittedly faulty) memory says the play button could be disabled by the computer.
!! We had a 2003 Dodge Dakota that the cd player would intermittently read Poodlehat and play. Never occurred to me it was the data on the disk jacking with the drive!
Re: Isolation mounts... Nearly all drives have iso mounts on the transport mech. It’s just usually a little rubber grommet in three or four mounting points of the motor / sled assembly rather than the whole mechanism. Here, so much of the thing moves that it probably made sense to isolate all of it instead.
When i Was younger my local library had something similar that had all the MS encarta cd's in one cd drive can't remember if it was multi slot or caddy design.
I had seen one of these in the public library years ago thinking they were some prioperitary constructs. Now mystery solved. They are 3 CDs in a caddy.
Edit: I see later in the video you show the 4-pin analog cable hooked up, and you show the front headphone port is bad... in that case, I wonder if it needs to be recapped? Usually in old devices with broken sound (macs, sound cards, game consoles, etc.) it's bad caps. (Again, the reason why I think it's working for the CD player app is that it's using the digital API vs games which use the analog API). Original Comment: The CD Audio from this generation requires an additional 4-pin cable to be plugged between the drive and the sound card. Some apps will support digital sound out of the IDE Bus, but most apps just want the analog cable connected, it just depends which API they used to do sound playback. The analog route was used for games because it leaves the CPU free.
Do you have one of the first CD-RW compatible CD-ROM drives? It had dual laser/lens assemblies and rotated the head 180 degrees to read CD-RW. I had one briefly before putting it in a computer I sold.
Wow I also had this exact drive back in the day. It was AWEFUL. The pc took forever to post because of it checking each "drive" or cd. With Windows 3.1 it wasn't too bad, but Windows 95 or 98 (don't remember) had a field day with it and caused my computer to lockup whenever I opened my computer or a save dialog as it scanned the disks.....It got removed very quickly.
Host wondered: Is that there's a way they fitted more data In a disc with time? The answer is: Yes. But, as you could see with the rise of new optical media like DVD, bluray, etc. The CD reached its compression limits some later the DVD arrived. The first mp3 formats, had pretty bad sound quality per bitrate, compared to nowadays 48khz at 160/192 kbps, rendering an astonishing small amount of size per file, with almost neglectible sound issues per dynamic range.
Actually you could find this Torisan drives in the high end Gateway 2000 configurations back in September 1995 to early 1996.They were first introduced with the P5-120 and P5-133 Executive towers.
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) !
Really cool tech. A bit weird and clumsy, but could be handy. Tangen question: What is this nice keyboard on the right you have? I have the same key caps, but different keyboard, but that keyboard looks nice and would like similar one.
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.
Wondering if the select button might've changed the drive/disk types? With the multiple types of desks in there did it change colors of the LED between audio and data?
I'm kinda late to this, but that caddy is exactly the same one that came with the 3CD in dash changer in my 1999 Toyota Avalon. It was a dealer installed Toyota option. The only difference is my caddy is black, not white.
So I am 75% certain (but not 100%) that this drive had a DOS app or drivers, which let you change the behavior. You could choose between different drive letters like you currently have, or one drive letter with you cycling between discs.
I also have one, but I have never used it in my primary computer, I got it for as a novelty when we already had much faster drives. The constant clicking is so annoying, you have to eject the caddy when it is empty. The magazine sometimes gets stuck so I do not use the drive in my retro computers, I do not want it to break. There is a DOS driver but I do not remember if it worked for me or not.
I don't know why I have that fascination to. I had a few Dries Wayback win and I would use them as dedicated CD players. There's a headphone jack on the front and then there's lines of Lonnie on the back it's so handy. That is until windows 98 I think it was that decided the audio from the CD drive needed to be routed off of the digital connection and would kind of default off analog output.
You know, I wish someone would make a writable BluRay drive that used caddies. Along with constant hard drive backups, I keep a set of month BD-RW backups and if they were protected in caddies they would be an incredibly safe system.
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.
we had like that. it was ok. different brand but I forget what the brand was. gave it to a cousin to use as cd player when we were done with it in few years. I think it was based around some car cd player. edit: biggest drawback is indeed that software doesn't expect them. maybe blade runner supported it? I'm not sure, but 99% of multi cd games don't understand multiple drives. edit2: and yea ours had 4, but it had the audio play buttons too.
hey hello i like what you post your youtube channel i like what you managed to find and test it I say take care of that cd-rom, it's a very interesting piece and I don't think you can find anything like it anywhere, but I don't think so on ebay but what can I say, I support you with a like on your RUclips channel, I wish you all the best in the world and to be always happy and always optimistic
Since the cartridge is a rarity to find, I would REALLY recommend recreating it as a printable 3D model, or loaning it to someone who can, as a means of making the other instances of this drive functional (+ safeguarding against the loss or damage of the existing one). Hell, it just might be simple enough that a flatbed scan of the tray(s) with a ruler, and caliper measurements of the other features just might be sufficient. Thusly, the remaining drives might be given a home, and be saved from the death at the ever-growing global garbage heap.
how does this kind of CD changer act with multiCD games when you need swap disc? can one stuff a bunch of discs and just change them in game? or need keep the same letter =\
These kinds of drives really only seems to make sense with MS-DOS, I wonder how long it would take for Windows' background tasks to wear out the mechanism otherwise. Not sure if I would have wanted it as a personal computer drive, but this sounds like a neat idea for information kiosks and the like, imagine the multimedia possibilities!
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).
These caddy drives were common as CD changers in cars, often then with room for 5 or more discs but never seen one for computer use. The operation principle is sort of the same as for the car stereo cd changer other then in those the playback mechanism and not the cartridge moves up and down. I remember however you also in those loaded the discs with the blank side upwards.
I had a 7 series BMW from the late 90's that had one of those 5 disc caddy drives from Pioneer. It worked flawlessly and even played CD-Rs just fine. Still does with it's current owner.
I don't know if this is relevant but Kenwood made a car audio system with a 6 disk "cd" cassette.. and Sony did it the same.. with 8/10 .. it was common was expensive cars.
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.
I do have to wonder what 1 mb or two of cache on the drive to store the toc and a few kb of data like the partition names and track times from all the CDs would have done for the perceived performance.
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TORISAN is the trade name of Sanyo's Tottori City plant which was connected to Tottori University and primarily made electronic components such as LCDs and precision mechanical components for optical and hard disk drives. Areal Technology, a short-lived American maker of hard disk drives backed by Sanyo, had their drives made there.
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.
I had one of those back in '90s on a 486.
- it does work as a standalone cd player: you need a cable to connect it to the sound card and you can use the multimedia buttons on the drive. I used to do that while playing DOS video games. Back in those days Windows CD Player didn't handle the digital audio stream, it just provided the required "controls".
- there are drivers available for Win 3.x/9x: you can make it to show up as 1 drive or 3 drives (having it show up as 3 drives was really annoying - constant automatic cd swapping). If you set it up to show up as 1 drive, you can still swap the disks using the select button.
I love how all of the vintage tech creators on RUclips have a focus; yours is CD drives, Techmoan's all hifi audio, LGR is mostly 90s tech, and so on. Nobody can dig into every topic for weekly videos so I can hit all of my areas of interest pretty much all week with how yall focus on different stuff.
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.
Wow, that brings back memories.
I had this exact drive model in my Cyrix 6x86 166 System. The first PC (and CD drive) i ever bought myself. It was actually the cheapest CD drive the store offered.
I remember needing special drivers in Win95 (and DOS).
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.
The Pioneer DRM-6XXX SCSI CD-R Jukebox drives use a 6 disc caddy very similar or identical to what they use on their Car CD changer, but these things are external and huge!
It's very cool that your drive is that small and internal and utilize such a cool 3 disc magazine, my Panasonic IDE 5 Disc 12x CD-ROM Jukebox is still working, everything is packed so tightly that I'm afraid to even peek inside of it.
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.
I can't believe that I just watched a 23 minute long video about a CD-drive. And I enjoyed every bit of it 👍😊
@ 4:52 - you need to enable Digital Playback in the control panel/dev man/drive/properties tab. You can connect into the digital audio input on the motherboard.
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.
The cat watching the patron list print is a fine addition. They are such cute little critters.
Gotta love it when a collector of retro stuff has Kid Pix in their collection. That's how you know they take it seriously.
In my experience most Windows games that use CD Audio will only play audio from the first CD-ROM drive detected by the system. That is not a limitation of the drive but is instead just game developers assuming that most users would only every have a single drive and not bothering to look for more than one drive.
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.
The first time I encountered a CD drive it had a caddy, and it was on an IBM RISC System/6000. It was very handy to use instead of tapes.
The OS also came on floppy disks, which was nuts as there were over a thousand.
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.
About 20, 25 years ago I worked for a company that built custom computers. We got an order for an organisation that need 25 identical computers. So I built them with 5 each in 'parallel'. Got them all done in record time. I was so proud of myself. My coworker loaded them all in a van and went installing them. After, I dunno, about a week of work building them, installing them at every desk, showing people around in this all new "Windows 95" thing we were pretty proud of ourselves and satisfied.
A few weeks later we get a call that some CD-audio on one of the computers isn't working. So my coworker grabs an 'CD-Rom audio cable', heads over there, opens the case, confirms our suspicion that it was probably missing, put it in, closed it and came back. Mere hours later a new support call. Same issue. Next day: Same thing. This time we grabbed 20-something of these cables and opened each and every computer and put it in. The hours wasted on that was eating a HUGE chunk out of our profit we made, which wasn't much in the first place since the customer negotiated very low prices for it being such a big order. All that because I forgot to put in a $0.02 cable in every single PC. What annoys me most is that probably only a few ever saw any use and even that would've been negligible since they were in an office (so not used for gaming or whatever).
There were leading major manufacturers who made 6-10 disc CD caddy drives for internal and external use a few decades ago. I believe the caddies used for the PC side of life could also be used with their car and home changers as well.
I had one of these - actually should still have it somewhere in a box. It never did work the way I was hoping it would, and at that rather slow speed, it just ended up being replaced by much faster and more useful drives. I think it was mainly aimed at people running BBS services - you could put a couple of archive CD's in it with stuff for people to download - access times and slow speed don't really matter over a 56K modem...
That is some VERY broken german on that lable. It says "Insert small cardboard box" instead of "Insert disc magazine". I'm guessing they just put it into the 1995 equivalent of google translate, as that sentence makes no sense at all. I guess that makes this already wierd drive just a little bit more odd.
Looking inside one of these it's pretty simple really. But it makes you wonder if we could make something as complex as a VHS recorder now, all those mechanisms to load and play a tape. We had the iron age, bronze age. Seems we've had the electro-mechanical age and we're now in the solid state age.
The sweet song of that patreon list outro with the dot matrix playing while I'm printing away ASCII art holiday cards on my Panasonic W940 really makes for an interesting 80s-90s vibe in my room. Aside from that, that is a very neat drive, even if limited to "classic" types of discs, I gotta wonder why they felt like they needed the rubber dampening on a drive that would be expected to already cost a bit more than usual compared to single disc drives, but that's certainly not a bad idea to have on any optical drive
"cat watching dot matrix printer" was not a thing I knew I needed in my life until this video. :)
We had something similar like this drive that was hosting storage for a BBS running Wildcat. pretty cool for the time.
Night Owl FTW.
This is so interesting my friend! Thanks for sharing, i have no idea of those rare drives but o boy what a fun time watching your videos
I love the cat watching the printer in the outro.
Brings back memories, had something very similar back in the very late 90's mine held five or six CD's and the caddy stuck out of the front of the drive when loaded. Was also very slow changing disks and struggled with CDR's.
I would enjoy a video looking at how the audio-out connectors on CD drives work. They're one of those things where I plug them in because I feel like I'm supposed to, but I don't actually know what they do, and I can't find a lot of information on them. They've disappeared from modern drives mostly but that just raises the question of why did we used to need them but we don't anymore.
My suspicion is that the CD drives used to decode the sound internally and then the sound card would mix that in with the audio but computers have gotten fast enough that the CPU can handle that just through the data coming from the drive. If that's the case do modern CD/DVD drives lack the ability to just play a CD? Are they sending the audio information through the data connector or the raw data?
I think that would be an interesting "How do things work" video.
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. :-)
The Sony CXD2510Q DSP is also used in some revisions of the original Sony PlayStation (most importantly on the PU-8 board of some SCPH-100X and SCPH-300X units).
The sentence "I want to give it Poodle Hat" in terms of testing a piece of equipment is delightful
I had this drive in pre-2000 era. And I can confirm that buttons work with CD audio, it can be set up as one drive letter via driver installation. Also it is multisession compatible.
I also have a CD burner with caddy somewhere in the closet. It was the same caddy as shown in 0:04, but for the brand "Plextor".
I also know that many of the stranger brands of CD burners or drives, are often pilot brands for large brands. I can still recall having something like a 1-speed "plasmon" CD burner that was a pilot brand for Philips.
We had a '97 Ford Fairlane and it had Pioneer 6 CD stacker (you had to pop the boot (trunk for you yanks!) to access it). The caddy looked just like yours but was black. I totally forgot about that til now!
Interesting bit of kit, you are very trusting putting in real media in, rather than CDRs!
The original cd rom in our 486 had a caddy drive, in fact we still have one of caddys around somewhere
LGR would so love this!
i had one of those Torisans. I think I kept it because it was really cool. IIRC I didn't need special drivers.
I used a similar drive, but did not have the front lid, as a BBS CD-ROM drive Changer. Back in those days, when HDDs were smaller than most CD sizes, having 3 of them at hand to offer files from 3 discs, was a bliss. To 'avoid' long loading times, a BBS simply would made an animated ANSI (for example) while the drive was loaded up. The files.bbs files (a txt file which held the info about the files) was mostly ON those discs to be read out first and you would be able to store (anr retrieve?) them locally. I loved getting these shareware cdroms filled with zip files and rotated the discs every month orso to add 3x650/700mb of new content. Which was HUGE back in those days.
Had to get this off my chest after getting excisted to see a CD drive that I (pretty much) owned and STILL have in my old (defunkt) Pentium-133 system. Haven't turned that one on in over 2 decades and wouldn't know if it would still work. I compared the drives visually and the only difference I saw was the opening lid.
Keep maming these lovely videos.
It's been a while but IIRC you can check if the drive supports multisession by using a cd burning program and use the cdrom as source to see what it lists. Bluebook is a really weird standard so you can't assume a drive wont support multisession just based on that.
Making cd changer that makes things more frustrating than actually swapping disks is pretty strong achievement
Growing up we had a 6 disk changer that was slot loaded. Don't recall the brand, but it was pretty cool, I could have several games loaded up in it. I was never really a huge fan of caddy drives back in the day. Neat find though!
This excites me, I thought I had the only one in the wild, mine is 6x 3 disc
These were actually very common in the day. Some were even cadyless slot loaders. I had several back then.
Very interesting bit of quirky hardware.
Maaaaan Shelby you lucked out with this score.... Most of the Goodwill's around here just have DVD players a plenty but never much computer stuff... Save that one time I went to a savers and got my Dell Inspiron m200st and occasionally a slew of KB's and mice... But often than not, nothing good like that
I love CD drives stuff too! Hope someday see you reviewing a Creative Infra. Maybe as a part of other episode with various drives? Because I don't think is too interesting even though I love it.
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.
Can we get more info on the industrial music sample CD, info on where to get sample CDs for making music in general would be great
What I wondered about and had a little trouble figuring out, and what you might have mentioned in the video is how the drive manages to access different discs within the confines of a (technically half-height, if we're old-school) 5¼" bay. You show this in the video, but it's a little hard to see: It turns out that the drive depth is a little over 1½ times a CD's diameter, and that's enough space for the entire caddy/magazine and pulling the active disc out halfway. Then that leaves enough space for a diagonally-moving laser head mechanism in one of the corners to access the active disc. Halfway is enough to see the whole disc, since it turns. And the caddy/magazine height-adjusts to meet the vertically fixed mechanism (whose diagonal movement is confined to a horizontal plane).
I wonder what this drive would have done had you tried to multitask and started audio playback from one disc and then tried to access another of the logically separate drives in Windows.
I wonder if those would still have remained separate drives if you'd installed the special driver software da1l6 mentioned.
Overall, strong LGR vibes on this episode.
Loved the cat. Has she(?) been introduced to the channel?
PS: You might now be in the unique position where you technically could 3D-scan and print a replacement caddy in case anyone out there is missing one.
I wonder how would it work on Linux. The `eject` command has this option called `--changerslot`, that according to docs is for ATAPI CDROM drives.
I actually found one few years ago, and it had 4 sd-s. In early 2000-ds it was miond blowing to me. Still collect cd/dvd drives, but the multi disk one is my favorate.
Cat inspecting the print quality was the best part of this video
This looks more useful as a multi CD caddie sound system while you are working on the PC while being more cheap and occupying less space. I would loved to have this back in the day, load 3 albums and listen to them while doing homework next to my PC.
My Pentium 166 tower from AST has one of those. Very cool! My high school library had a pc with the single cd caddy. I always liked those, but never owned one.
I had a Nakamichi MJ.5.16si CD-ROM changer (5x slot-in) for the SCSI bus. This was awesome.
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.
I love caddy drives, I miss my old SCSI Plextor caddy drive.
I actually owned one of those that I used on my Renegade BBS's for a portion of it's user file base system. I'd pick up freeware cd's at the Dallas yesterday sale from time to time and update them. Long before the days of Tucows...
Amazing friday's stuff! Thanks!
Was there an outtake featuring soldering? Noticing the solder reel at the end.
But wait, weren't the two games also multi-session discs if they have data and CD audio portions? I guess the order may matter for the drive is willing to mount, and could explain slightly why the games were unable to simultaneously play the CD audio -- granted the CD player software had no trouble finding it and playing it.
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.
The biggest down side I see is that each tray has its own drive letter. In my experience, 99% of CD software needs to be installed and won't just run from the drive, meaning that you have to always have a particular CD in the same tray and it won't work from a different one.
As for the media buttons, there are a couple of possibilities. One is that the buttons on that side don't work anymore (mechanical failure). The other is that the driver has to enable media changer control. I had a 1-disc drive with a play button BITD, and my (admittedly faulty) memory says the play button could be disabled by the computer.
Awww, the cat watching the Patreon printout
!! We had a 2003 Dodge Dakota that the cd player would intermittently read Poodlehat and play. Never occurred to me it was the data on the disk jacking with the drive!
Re: Isolation mounts... Nearly all drives have iso mounts on the transport mech. It’s just usually a little rubber grommet in three or four mounting points of the motor / sled assembly rather than the whole mechanism. Here, so much of the thing moves that it probably made sense to isolate all of it instead.
When i Was younger my local library had something similar that had all the MS encarta cd's in one cd drive can't remember if it was multi slot or caddy design.
I had seen one of these in the public library years ago thinking they were some prioperitary constructs. Now mystery solved. They are 3 CDs in a caddy.
You spoilered your own video with "it ended up working so well" msg before getting to the smoke test.. 😁
Edit: I see later in the video you show the 4-pin analog cable hooked up, and you show the front headphone port is bad... in that case, I wonder if it needs to be recapped? Usually in old devices with broken sound (macs, sound cards, game consoles, etc.) it's bad caps. (Again, the reason why I think it's working for the CD player app is that it's using the digital API vs games which use the analog API).
Original Comment:
The CD Audio from this generation requires an additional 4-pin cable to be plugged between the drive and the sound card. Some apps will support digital sound out of the IDE Bus, but most apps just want the analog cable connected, it just depends which API they used to do sound playback. The analog route was used for games because it leaves the CPU free.
Do you have one of the first CD-RW compatible CD-ROM drives? It had dual laser/lens assemblies and rotated the head 180 degrees to read CD-RW. I had one briefly before putting it in a computer I sold.
Wow I also had this exact drive back in the day. It was AWEFUL. The pc took forever to post because of it checking each "drive" or cd. With Windows 3.1 it wasn't too bad, but Windows 95 or 98 (don't remember) had a field day with it and caused my computer to lockup whenever I opened my computer or a save dialog as it scanned the disks.....It got removed very quickly.
So now I knowthat caddy drives and disc changer drives existed back in the day. Now I need to see if I can get my hands on one.
Host wondered: Is that there's a way they fitted more data In a disc with time?
The answer is:
Yes. But, as you could see with the rise of new optical media like DVD, bluray, etc. The CD reached its compression limits some later the DVD arrived. The first mp3 formats, had pretty bad sound quality per bitrate, compared to nowadays 48khz at 160/192 kbps, rendering an astonishing small amount of size per file, with almost neglectible sound issues per dynamic range.
Actually you could find this Torisan drives in the high end Gateway 2000 configurations back in September 1995 to early 1996.They were first introduced with the P5-120 and P5-133 Executive towers.
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) !
Really cool tech. A bit weird and clumsy, but could be handy. Tangen question: What is this nice keyboard on the right you have? I have the same key caps, but different keyboard, but that keyboard looks nice and would like similar one.
5:26 -- Pioneer car-type CD changers move the magazine up and down instead of the laser as well
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.
Wondering if the select button might've changed the drive/disk types? With the multiple types of desks in there did it change colors of the LED between audio and data?
I'm kinda late to this, but that caddy is exactly the same one that came with the 3CD in dash changer in my 1999 Toyota Avalon. It was a dealer installed Toyota option. The only difference is my caddy is black, not white.
I guess it would be useful in a situation where you needed frequent access to specific discs but not at the same time.
When you pressed the select button, it took the drive control away from the PC, so perhaps that enables the CD audio controls on the drive?
So I am 75% certain (but not 100%) that this drive had a DOS app or drivers, which let you change the behavior. You could choose between different drive letters like you currently have, or one drive letter with you cycling between discs.
Yea, kitty's back!
It's from a Gateway2000 computer they put those stickers with the computer's serial number and assembly date on all the components.
I also have one, but I have never used it in my primary computer, I got it for as a novelty when we already had much faster drives. The constant clicking is so annoying, you have to eject the caddy when it is empty. The magazine sometimes gets stuck so I do not use the drive in my retro computers, I do not want it to break. There is a DOS driver but I do not remember if it worked for me or not.
I don't know why I have that fascination to. I had a few Dries Wayback win and I would use them as dedicated CD players. There's a headphone jack on the front and then there's lines of Lonnie on the back it's so handy. That is until windows 98 I think it was that decided the audio from the CD drive needed to be routed off of the digital connection and would kind of default off analog output.
Nakamichi and Panasonic both did 5-disc caddy based internal drives.
You know, I wish someone would make a writable BluRay drive that used caddies. Along with constant hard drive backups, I keep a set of month BD-RW backups and if they were protected in caddies they would be an incredibly safe system.
Its like the same caddy for Amiga CDTV in 1991.
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.
Hear me out, what if you put Stroopwaffles in the caddy? For a three-waffle quick-access kit?
I have several changers. neat old tech
we had like that. it was ok. different brand but I forget what the brand was.
gave it to a cousin to use as cd player when we were done with it in few years.
I think it was based around some car cd player.
edit: biggest drawback is indeed that software doesn't expect them. maybe blade runner supported it? I'm not sure, but 99% of multi cd games don't understand multiple drives. edit2: and yea ours had 4, but it had the audio play buttons too.
hey hello i like what you post your youtube channel i like what you managed to find and test it
I say take care of that cd-rom, it's a very interesting piece and I don't think you can find anything like it anywhere, but I don't think so on ebay
but what can I say, I support you with a like on your RUclips channel, I wish you all the best in the world and to be always happy and always optimistic
Since the cartridge is a rarity to find, I would REALLY recommend recreating it as a printable 3D model, or loaning it to someone who can, as a means of making the other instances of this drive functional (+ safeguarding against the loss or damage of the existing one). Hell, it just might be simple enough that a flatbed scan of the tray(s) with a ruler, and caliper measurements of the other features just might be sufficient.
Thusly, the remaining drives might be given a home, and be saved from the death at the ever-growing global garbage heap.
how does this kind of CD changer act with multiCD games when you need swap disc? can one stuff a bunch of discs and just change them in game? or need keep the same letter =\
I have this drive and caddy. They're cool!
These kinds of drives really only seems to make sense with MS-DOS, I wonder how long it would take for Windows' background tasks to wear out the mechanism otherwise. Not sure if I would have wanted it as a personal computer drive, but this sounds like a neat idea for information kiosks and the like, imagine the multimedia possibilities!
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).
Side mission. Team up with 3d print RUclipsr to make a second caddy.
These caddy drives were common as CD changers in cars, often then with room for 5 or more discs but never seen one for computer use. The operation principle is sort of the same as for the car stereo cd changer other then in those the playback mechanism and not the cartridge moves up and down. I remember however you also in those loaded the discs with the blank side upwards.
Yeah, that was my first thought when I saw how well isolated the internals were.
I had a 7 series BMW from the late 90's that had one of those 5 disc caddy drives from Pioneer. It worked flawlessly and even played CD-Rs just fine. Still does with it's current owner.
Used stuff like that for libraries back in the day
Maybe the orange/red LED is for denoting Red Book audio disks.
RIP test bench chipset :(
Have you found a replacement board?
I don't know if this is relevant but Kenwood made a car audio system with a 6 disk "cd" cassette.. and Sony did it the same.. with 8/10 .. it was common was expensive cars.
**with expensive cars.
Really nice video
Was that the Motherboard, that died in the last stream?
RIP Motherboard
I'm seriously surprised this system wasn't more popular.
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.
Have you seen this video "I eliminated CD swaps FOREVER. [Nakamichi MJ-5.16]" from
Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]. It is similar but more disks.
I do have to wonder what 1 mb or two of cache on the drive to store the toc and a few kb of data like the partition names and track times from all the CDs would have done for the perceived performance.
Well, at least the testbench's power supply didn't fail, unlike with the last computer you used a cd changer :)