The thing about retail games back in the day tho... when they got a couple years old they got CHEAP. Casually replacing them with a new copy was a no-brainer. None of this 20% off 10 year old games on Steam. 3 year old game? 10 bucks at your local big box.
LOL, that game was multiple DVDs if you were fortunate enough to have the appropriate drive. I think the CD version only existed because they couldn't afford to leave those users out, and couldn't count on people buying a new drive just for the game.
Put all 5 discs in slot 1 of each drive so you dont have to wait for it to mechanically swap the disc. In slot 2 of each drive would be a different game.
This also scales better, if a game is more than five discs. Even though CRD only has five Nakamichi drives, the sixth one could be the ordinary ATA drive left in the system.
That sounds great for games where you can specify which drive to read from or read the titles, like Riven, but absolutely awful for games that check each drive sequentially for the disc, which many did. For those, going from disc 1 to disc 2 of a game would mean it swapping through every disc in the first reader before finding it in the second. Going to the 3rd/4th/5th disc could mean swapping through dozens of discs before getting to the right one. There is a sneaky workaround that could avoid that somewhat: change the drive letters, so D: is reader 1 disc 1, E: is reader 2 disc 1, F: is reader 3 disc 1 etc. Then you'd get the effect you want... For the game/s with discs in the first slots. Discs in later slots would mean swapping through each drive for each disc change (which isn't really any worse, or better, than this setup).
@@AdrianWoodUK also make sure that games that use labels are latter in the alphabet since they aren't scanning every drive anyway vs in the video the label using Riven was at the front. Could maybe even launch games with a little script that touches the relevant drives to trigger the physical switch before the game even wants the disks or maybe even reletter drives as each game launches to minimize scanning, cut down on letter use, and bypass the 26 letter limit.
@@AdrianWoodUK Nah, the physical layout of the disc drives is not connected to the Windows Drive Letter Assignment. If you have a game that goes sequentially you simply reassign the drive letters so that they appear sequentially in Windows.
This is the perfect Gravis video: A completely out of nowhere montage with excellent production values, "of course I got two of them, and when I say I got two of them I of course mean I got three of them, and when I say I got three of them I of course mean I got seven of them and a bigass SCSI enclosure shaped like a mini tower," and being 100% on board with you owning Riven until you insisted a suspicious amount of times that you definitely own it legally and they just are in your storage unit in Canada
26:00 Technically SCSI still exists in the enterprise space in the form of SAS. Just as IDE/ATA was replaced by Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI was replaced with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). I don’t doubt the old parallel version is still used for some niche purpose, though.
@@unicodefox Heh, forgot about that. I actually have an enclosure for laptop HDDs (currently has my 2-in-1's old 1tb HDD, after it was replaced by an SSD).
Despite all the cool stuff on display here, the thing that floored me was he revelation that Riven just scans for the appropriate disc title. I agree/it makes sense that it's because they were a Mac house first, but it still shocks me that they were handling it that cleanly on a PC at that time. Loved the music video!
Right?? Fact: I had to rewrite the script when I found out that it scans for the right disc. I was CERTAIN it made you type in a path - and possibly the VERY first release did.
@@CathodeRayDude I know the game LGR showed for this device was coded to use the same disc path for every swap and defeated the purpose. But I don’t recall which game that was, heh. This way seems way better.
When I was playing this game, I had a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM, so I would just load two discs at once. (Arguably, this is better than a changer -- no delay. But, if you have five changers, why not load one disc of each game into each drive?! :-D Anyway...) So, AFAICT, Riven has always been cool about finding the disc on its own. It was pretty seamless. Later, I just used Alcohol, and then even later, got the DVD release (and loaded THAT into Alcohol), and that was that.
Honestly Foone, if Gravis hadn't done this himself I'd absolutely expect something like this in a huge Twitter thread from my favorite monarch of insane but also lovely tech projects
HottTTtTtTTTtttt - I never thought I'd see an accurate representation of what it would look like if a SCSI tower assembly was crossed with a pole dance. So creative and funny!
16:56 "The drive knows exactly where the discs are because it knows where they arent" By subtracting where the disc is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The disc changer subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the disc from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the disc is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the disc changer. However, the disc must also know where it was.
I remember in school year 03 talking about the theoretics of scsi, and chaining drives together and what you could possibly do. Here almost 20 years later I'm watching someone do those pipedreams IRL and I'm loving it. Lol
I didn't learn about it in school, but yeah, I recall learning about SCSI in the late 90s or early 2000s, and thinking about the crazy things you could do.
Oh you got me. That musical montage. The buildup of the completely factual interesting info and then the payoff of the RU-vid title being correct was just chef's kiss, awesome.
SCSI was very exotic for PC users. Only "the rich kids" had it. When CD burners came out some people invested in SCSI because of less likely buffer underruns, but when CD-ROMS got buffer underrun protection that advantage was gone too.
@@scottlarson1548 SCSI was the Macintosh standard, both internally and externally, for hard and CD drives from the Mac Plus in 1986 until the beige Power Macintosh G3 of 1997. Only after that (iMac and G3 Blue and White from 1998) would they use IDE internally (FireWire externally) and S-ATA (from the PowerMac G5 in 2004).
The big advantage of SCSI in the olden days was that it used bus master DMA transfers by default, while IDE drives were still stuck in PIO. The ability to use multiword DMA was included in Intel southbridges from about 1995 on (PIIX), but it took until Win95 OSR2 for DMA to become a standard OS option, so 1996/97. SCSI did remain the best option if you wanted the fastest harddrives (there weren't any ATA 10k RPM drives until the WD Raptors years later, and 15k always remained SCSI/SAS exclusive) or a fancy scanner.
@@MacPhantom I got a Mac SCSI drive to work on my Apple ][e using the Apple ][ SCSI 2 adapter. Original scsi wasn't compatible because, SCSI. Having a 30meg drive on my Apple ][ was awesome. Also ran a 5.6MHz accelerator, and has a 1meg ram card which I had set up as a 512k ram disk on boot that loaded off the HDD for most commonly used apps. Such a fun system way back.
I knew one person who had not one, but three of these. In his tower PC. He ran a BBS (well past BBS' "sell by" date) and used them for his file library, boasting the biggest file library of any BBS in town. (with a dozen shareware/shovelware CDs loaded.)
Im rarely speechless and in awe at a youtube video these days but i really did not expect you to just assemble ALL THE DRIVES. that was an insane turn.
The 5 bay tower + Robocopy were how we created all of our dogfood distributions at Microsoft for MSN Explorer back in the day. A poor PM would just be locked in the duplication room for 2 hours making tons of discs.
Blimey. I remember similar internal Microsoft CDROM distributions. Was that the same part of Microsoft that shipped IE3 on a bunch of CDs to ISPs? (I was at the time at one of the receiving ends of that very sneakernet CDN).
My god the production standards here are outstanding, I can totally see why you're so proud of this one, it's worth being proud of! The opening sketch, the music video that makes setting up a SCSI box look like a montage tuning up a classic hot rod, it's all outstanding. You keep outdoing yourself with each successive video, my only fear is that you'll burn yourself out with your own standards 😅
I have a NEC "4X4" (4-disc, 4X speed) CD-ROM changer. It is IDE and shows up as four drive letters. And personally I think of the jumper settings on IDE drives as M for Main and S for Secondary.
Seems to me if you loaded a game, like Riven, "vertically" - meaning a single disc of Riven in each of the drives (each disc 1 slot) - you could press button 1 on the front of all the disc drives and load a single 5-disc-game at once. This would eliminate disc swapping mid-game. Great video - enjoyed it.
great idead but this unfortunely wouldn't work unless the game was programmed to specifically take advatage of that and even for a disc swapping game it normally wouldn't work as the game is looking at the disc drive it's currently in and would add a headache layer to make it work.
@@blendpinexus1416 Hi, thanks for your reply. But isn't it the case that the multi-disc changer already applies a unique drive letter to each of the discs that it has stored inside? When the user selects a disc #, you're not swapping a disc to the current drive letter, you're selecting a different disc, on a different LUN, which is a different drive letter. I agree, there probably are some games that expect a single drive letter, but it looks like his solution for Riven, specifically, was just having a enough discs loaded all at once that he doesn't have to change CDs. I'd hazard a guess that most games look at the disc volume label rather than drive letter.
@@blendpinexus1416 are you sure @ 31:40 of the video its explained that it searches all available drives so I think if you loaded all 5 disks into slot one it would be almost instant to load disks
Moving the plant pot to make room for the inset - yes! I don't know why I loved that so much but it's just so damn good Edit: also love that you went to the effort of chroma-keying off the paint colour so the other plant appears on top in the tiny bit of overlap. That utterly unnecessary attention to detail and craftsmanship is kinda badass.
Back in the day we had a multi-cd thing like that in the college where I worked, it was connected to the network to allow students to view encyclopaedias and other dull but worthy content. It got abandoned when they found that a class of 30 students all accessing the same CD was a poor learning experience.
I had three of these (although I think another brand name) in my BBS server in the late 90s. It was great to host an incredible amount of files on my BBS. Everything ran smoothly for months until a dreadful moment when two different users tried to browse through 2 different CDs in the same disc changer. My server did nothing besides non-stop CD swapping from that moment on. Never found a good solution for that scenario, but larger harddisks made CDs obsolete pretty soon after that incident and then came the internet that basically made my entire BBS obsolete! :-P
I had a similar setup for the exact same reason except mine was more of a single CD autoloader the size of a stereo that supported 15 CDs vs a 5 CD changer drive. I remember MajorBBS had a request queuing system that'd change CDs as you needed. I want to say I saw a few ProBoard BBS with a request tool that'd act as a door (how games and other external apps were launched) for you to get what file on what cd you wanted. Once you selected it, you could go back and play another game. It'd alert you through the BBS that your request was ready and you could start the download. Those were the days.
I remember a BBS that had to implement a system where there was one CD always online, and another that rotated daily to provide access to the others that had suddenly been yanked due to hardware problems. You might have been that guy.
Bro, another user in the comments described their friend or something as doing this? I think your long lost neighborhood friend is in this comment section haha.
@@matthewrease2376 LOL, found the comment. Thanks for pointing it out. I was indeed boasting to be the largest BBS in town back then, because I was. :-D
I recall one of these towers used with normal drives as a "network CD sharing center" in our company back then. All the Corel Draw cliparts as a network share, ready to use for all licensed users instead of copies and CD drives per workstation was a huge benefit.... and it avoided people like that one guy who used sticky tape to tape a CD ROM to his office door so he wouldn't forget to return it and then he peeled off the reflective layer... Nope, CDs won't work without that.
20:03 Fun fact: It's incorrect that this couldn't be done over IDE. All standard IDE CD-ROM drives do their business over ATAPI protocol, which is a wrapper protocol to allow sending SCSI commands over ATA/IDE, and multiple SCSI LUNs over ATAPI was absolutely a thing that the protocol permitted. If you search "multi-LUN ATAPI" you can find some references to this being done out there. Nakamichi made an IDE version of this very drive in fact! (EDIT: Made this comment before getting to the part where you mentioned Nakamichi's IDE version. In any case, even if the Nakamichi device didn't do it, from what I can find, it looks like true Multi-LUN ATAPI IDE devices definitely existed, though finding specific models is trickier at least with the search terms I know to use. Mostly finding mailing list posts of several different Linux kernel developers attesting to their existence back in the late 90s and early 00s. It wouldn't surprise me if some OSs had ATAPI implementations that didn't support this however, which might be why Nakamichi's IDE drive didn't do that.)
It looks like at least some versions of the ATAPI standard require multi-disk changers to act like a single disc drive but with extra commands to query the number of slots and switch discs. (See section "9.0 Changer Model".) That's probably why they act that way rather than reporting multiple LUNs. Of course, the driver could still present multiple virtual drive letters and handle switching between them despite that.
This is the realization of so many dreams of mine. I laughed, I cried, I acknowledged that you legitimately own at least one copy of Riven. 10 out of 10.
Speaking of Nakamishi - when I was a kid, one of my neighbors had a cassette player of that brand. For audio quality reasons they didn't believe in bi-directional read/write heads, so their technical solution for auto reverse was to have a mechanism that would physically push out the cassette, rotate it 180 degrees and pull it in again. I thought that was insane but fascinating 🙂
I believe the justification was that the tracking would never be exactly the same in both directions... so don't even try. They came to this conclusion after trying a lot.
The most painful game I ever played in terms of disc swapping was "The X-Files" from 1999. It came on 7 (seven!!!) CD-ROMs! I mean, it was totaly worth it, I loved the game. But a CD-ROM changer would've been *gold* to me back then. Great video!
The original Mafia did really annoying, you boot it up with DISC 1 but when you wanted to choose anything in the menu, you need to insert DISC 2. And for some bonus modes, DISC 3. Baldur's Gate 2 wanted you to swap between disc 2 and 3 and for later parts of the game, disc 4. No, I don't miss it.
Love this one! Great work on making the music video/montage bit work within your format--it keeps the flow of the video going but it's still just egregious enough to be rad. Well done! 😄👍 Looking forward to the followup!
For a second I thought: "no way he has several of these drives and will stack them, that's just too cool". I was wrong and You delivered. Marvelous video, thank You!
I have a nit to pick - you actually can assign non-floppy drives to A: and B: now! Not sure how long ago it changed, whether that’s a thing that was always possible on NT or if it only recently changed in Windows 10. My 2 data HDDs are assigned to A: and B: on my PC because I just happened to notice those as an option while fixing the drive letter ordering one day and just knew I had to see whether it’d work. Disappointingly none of my apps seem to have raised any eyebrows over my 2TB A: drive. Love how obnoxiously unique the SCSI tower is. Fortunately/unfortunately (your choice) I grew up in the era when high capacity hard drives started becoming cheap and ethernet became just a normal thing every school has, so I don’t think I got a glimpse of the networked SCSI CD-ROM experience. Sure was a seemingly infinite list of Flash edutainment games to pick from though.
This has been true for ages, "A:" and "B: " can be used like any other letter, no issues. You can assign "A:" to the primare OS disk, and have Windows run from "A:" but unfortunately some crappy software does use hard coded paths (which is evil)
Excellent acting in this video, definitely one of your most engaging yet! I spent so much of the video thinking ‘but hang on, there isn’t a game that was clever enough to search all disk drives…’ and then bam, there’s Riven! Strangely, I still miss optical media - there was always something exciting about picking up a game on several discs and waiting in anticipation for half an hour while the game installed one disc at a time!
I worked at a small computer store in Germany specialized in building custom PCs around the time this drive came out. And you are correct, people didn't want to add SCSI unless they really "had to". Because you either went with a cheaper controller, risking a lot of compatibility issues, or you went with Adaptec which worked... if you were still able to buy any drives after forking over the money for the controller. I'd estimate in hindsight that something between 1 and 2 percent of the computers we sold had SCSI. Mostly people who had high performance scanners wanted SCSI, as USB wasn't a thing yet, and parallel port scanners were pretty bad, both in their scan performance and in their data transfer speeds. This is in fact the first time I heard about that particular drive. But I don't recall seeing any Nakamichi branded drives at all when going through our suppliers' catalogues, which makes me wonder if they were sold here at all. Probably not. I'm not going to comment on the name that was used at that time to tell apart the two drives on an IDE channel (so please don't ban me), but I don't think your suggestion of "primary" and "secondary" is a particularly good choice either, for a technical reason. All controllers that I remember, no matter if they were standalone cards or integrated into the mainboard, used these exact two words to tell apart the two channels the controller had. So to indicate the complete address of a drive, you'd have to call it the primary/secondary... or wait, is it the secondary/primary? So maybe just calling them drive 0 / drive 1, like on SCSI, only limited to two options, would work better. The same term to differentiate two channels and two drives on these channels is confusing imho. And for a time there was, at least on some controller models, even a difference between the primary and secondary channel. When the faster (I think it was called UDMA-66, the one that used the higher wire count ribbons but still 40-pin connectors) variant of IDE came out, many controllers only supported the faster standard on the primary channel (for fast hard disks), while the secondary channel only supported the slower variant, which was well enough for your average CD-ROM at that time. When assembling PCs, this made it especially cumbersome, as slow CD-ROMs would have slowed down a faster hard disk, so we usually went with both drives set as "drive 0" (yes, that name works) on each of the two channels. But that of course meant two of these unwieldy ribbon cables to be squeezed into the case.
The funniest part of this video to me is the fact that the very first DVD drive we got at our house came with a pack-in game to show off the extra capacity and it was; you guessed it, Riven, so I never experienced the particular form of suffering demonstrated in the intro. That aside, amazing video and I absolutely loved the tower assembly montage. Windows pathing has always been (and seemingly always will be) incredibly stupid, and there's so many layers of abstraction and compatibility all woven into each other at this point that I don't think they'll ever get themselves out of the mess. I still need to step away from my computer and take a few deep breaths every time somebody suggests using NTFS junctions as a solution to a particular problem, because anybody saying that has clearly never tried to actually use one in real life and run into all the weird broken behaviour you encounter months down the road now that your filesystem isn't following the standard "drive letter equals one disk" conventions that Windows is built on.
That was, as always, excellent. Thanks for making this and for teaching us about more weird shit. I'm imagining the 7 users on one PC thing + the SCSI tower, and the results are giving me major commodore pet vibes for reasons that I can't fully explain.
I’m also not too surprised this “just worked”. IDE cdroms used ATAPI (ATA Packet Interface) which basically encapsulated SCSI commands inside of the crummy ATA protocol (this is also what USB does). So a “native” SCSI “interface” is what the OS is pretty much always taking to, and thusly what the software developers would expect to deal with. Also, looking forward to the next video if that’s what I think it is. I remember external media carousels back in the day (SCSI, USB, or FireWire) targeted at libraries, universities, and extremely wealthy people who didn’t want to have to swap their music or DVD libraries around, they just wanted to press a button and listen/watch a thing.
The amount of information and detail you've provided here is astounding! I would have loved one of these back in the day for Under A Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive. The third game in the series, Overseer, was also released bundled with both a multiple CD-ROM version and a single DVD-ROM version of the game.
Re: your choice in terminology, I'd go for device 0 and device 1 rather than "primary" and "secondary", since those words are already used for the IDE *cables* and "primary primary", "primary secondary", "secondary primary", and "secondary secondary" is a bit confusing.
@@K-o-R That works, but it's an unnecessary extra word. There's nothing wrong with "primary" and "secondary", so using different words for the channel and the device allows you to compact it down... even to "primary 0/1" and "secondary 0/1" if you want, which gets you as much brevity as the old way.
@@ssokolow I guess I'm thinking of situations with multiple IDE controllers, where you could be fancy and say tertiary, quaternary, etc., but just incrementing the channel number is easier. Or say IDE device 0a and 0b, but that could get mixed up with hex numbers.
@@K-o-R Coming back to this years later, I think nomenclature like A1, where the letter is the bus and the number is the device would probably have been the cleanest way to get something concise.
Things I learned from this video: 1. There are many ways to be banned from this channel. 2. I have to solve problems that don't exist 3. That solution is "put 1 disc from each game into a unique drive so that it only has to mechanically change discs one per drive for that game" 4. I know no one ever asked, but I feel better posting this. 5. Most of these are not things "I learned" 6. I like lists.
10:30 I remember I got a legitimate, brand new copy of Half Life 2 and it triggered the copy protection. I got to a point in the game where a character is supposed to get in an elevator with you and take you down, but that didn't happen. Basically I was unable to progress past that part. I went to every forum I could find and everyone said "that's just copy protection, that happens when you play a pirated copy". Eventually I found a little thread of people complaining that their legit copies of the game were triggering the copy protection just like mine. I ended up having to crack the game anyway.
iirc, Valve released a patch, essentially an official no-cd crack for the DVD version of the game shortly after release because so many people were having trouble with the DRM and it not being compatible with a lot of dvd drives. I remember the DVD drive in my laptop at the time had trouble with a lot of games due to weird incompatibility issues, Securom protected games would just refuse to run and Starforce and some others could be iffy. I had to get cracks for all the games I legitimately owned (and would often crack them just for convenience anyway)
I've had to download pirate copies of DVDs I had just bought because their protection made them unusable in my player. This problem still hasn't gone away either. If Google decides your device is too old to run the latest Play Store update, then you have no legal way to install the apps you've paid for.
Almost no everyday people had SCSI in the pre-SATA era. I remember having the conversation with friends. It was expensive and required a free card slot and extra cables. I got into some SCSI fun once they started turning up in my university's eWaste stream (especially 68 pin), but in the 90's internal SCSI was a commercial kiss of death.
I think this is my favorite video of yours so far! Exactly enough information covered on topic that I don’t feel like I have to go research more info, and just the right kind of topic that makes me reminisce of years past where hardware ruled supreme over software! 😯
I HAD THAT DRIVE! I was so angry when XP did not have drivers for that drive. So cool that you review stuff I used. that and the LS120 were my favorites when they worked.
I had an LS-120 and a CD-R drive at the same time in 2000. The idea was that I'd fill up five or six of the LS-120 disks, and then burn them out to a CD and re-use them. I never did need more than the box of 10 disks bought at the same time as the drive.
I definitely broke a friend's Riven disc back in the day when I thought it would be a good idea to keep the unused ones in a bizarre CD holder that was built right into the plastic of the tower. That thing had a death grip on disc 2... This would have been so much better to have had instead!
Wow, such amazing production quality. I absolutely loved this presentation :) - In my 39 years i have seen the drive ONCE, and that was the IDE version - So it couldn't have been the "expensive" SCSI barrier stopping it, but why it never caught on, idk - i think it's freaking cool! - I remember that at my dad's old employer they had a 6CD Pioneer changer (external, SCSI) hooked up to one of the NT File servers, serving a range of CD's for all the employees, stuff like digital maps and "phone books" - This was at the time with a slow and expensive ISDN line at best :D - Oh wow, those were the times!
I remember a classmate had one on their family pc back in the day, but when I talked to my dad about it, he saw no benefit in getting one for our family pc.
We had a 4 cd changer that had a small thing that had things like car cd changers had. Ide. It wasn't that expensive iirc, but playing most games it wasnt practical
OMG that drive montage killed me! I'm currently dead. Humour-wise at least. Anyway, I was one of those weird consumers you talk of who had SCSI drives in their computer in the late 90s. I might have even had one of these if I knew they existed! I switched to a SCSI CD burner when I got sick of buffer underruns while burning CDs. That was before they figured out how to make drives that could recover and resume burning after an underrun. Eventually I bought a SCSI DVD drive (a slot load Pioneer model, and later DVD burner - also a slot load Pioneer model), but my 400MHz celery CPU was too slow to play back DVD movies without dropping frames. So obviously I had to buy a MPEG decoder card. (It was a second-hand card, so cheaper than buying a whole new CPU at the time.)
The Pioneer DRM-604X 6-Disc Laser Memory CD-Rom Changer looks quite cool as it accepts the cd caddy cartridges. Would be easy to swap the caddy from one to the next with each containing a different game. Great video. This is the kind of stuff my buddy and I would do out of boredom in the garage.
What an exceptional device. This is straight out of my dreams, like if you asked me to naively design a miniature disc switcher this is how I'd build it, but I always assumed it wasn't possible and never got made. I need to get my hands on one of these!
We had one 4 cd drive one that worked like a car cd changer. Ide too. Long term it sounded like a better idea than it was, it could be set every cd as different drive or manual change by button and show up as one drive. I dont recall how the setup was done, but it wasn't useful that much with most games
I just spent 40 minutes watching an interesting, engaging video on...multi CD-ROM operations on vintage Windows PC's? Also, I enjoy seeing you set boundaries for acceptable comments. It keeps a welcoming mood for friendly people.
Disagreement on particular terminology and the exclusivity of slavery to imperialism aside (as I, an engineer, slightly unqualified for that), for accuracy, the two IDE drives on a single cable were not actually equivalent. The controller on the "primary" is actually in complete control over the pair, and the "secondary" must make queries to the primary in order to find out if the line is open to transfer. This would not be obvious to the end user (both drives appear to behave the same in windows), but you weren't exactly right on the way the hardware interacts with the wires.
29:16 - What about the POSIX notation? You should be able to access more drives this way. You can even "mount" a drive into a directory, even in Windows XP! For letters A and B, not sure about XP, but in Windows Vista and upwards I could always assign A and B to any volume no problem.
In 1994, my university's library installed an IEEE magazines archive corner. The corner had several computers, each with a CD changer attached (I think each had 16 CDs at once). The CDs stored the complete magazines back issues in text and image formats. The setup was considered very advanced back then, when most of the library's archive was still in microfilm.
Hot damn, this video was a hoot. I could feel my teenage self burning with envy over the -thought- of having this kind of power and convenience, even tho my system has three optical drives. Incredible work as always. Also holy shit big ups for mentioning Heavy Gear 2. Still the best mecha game after all these years.
We used those in the airforce similar to your setup. It held a parts catalog for the aircraft so it was easy to find the correct replacement parts gaskets orings seals basically every part nut and bolt of the aircraft. It was also accessible thought the local area network and yes it was an windows nt system windows 2000 then later 2003 I believe.
17:04 The CD ROM knows where it is, by knowing where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance magazine system uses deviations to generate corrective commands to shuttle the CD ROM in the magazine rack from a position where it is to a position where it isn't and, arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation; the variation being the difference between where the CD-ROM is and where it isn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it, too, may be corrected by the CD ROM Drive's firmware. However, the CD ROM must also know where it was. The CD ROM guidance computer scenario works as follows: because a variation has modified some of the information the CD Rom drive CD manager has obtained, it is not sure just where it is, however it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice versa. And by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
26:03 SCSI is sort of still around today in the form of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) which is mainly used for servers. It, too, uses a variety of connectors, though the most common one is essentially a SATA power and data cable connected together (so you can plug a SATA drive into a SAS drive bay, but not vice versa) It also supports up to 65,535 devices connected together.
I am fairly sure windows can do higher drive letters than Z, I cant remember how I found it out or which version of windows/dos i did it in but I remember exceeding the drive letter count somehow and it resulted in it moving to AA, AB and so forth though now that i think about it i may just be mis-remembering overpopulating an excel spreadsheet.
yeah, I'm pretty certain that I also did this at one point but just don't remember when or how, maybe it's just a false memory but I'll have to do some experimenting :)
OK, just did a bit of testing with Windows 11 Pro on a VM and the drive letters only go from A to Z indeed, maybe we could have used more for a short period of time on only a couple of versions and this was removed due to compatibility and/or stability issues? anyway for most use cases NTFS mount points would do just fine.
@@SergioEduP .... it MIGHT have been a feature on Windows Server, 2003 I think? I just recall it being so jank as to be worse than not having it at all.
18:00 AV nerd from the 90s reporting in on lived experience of this era. The magazine changers of the time weren't this clever. My Kenwood DP-M6650 had a 6-disc magazine that IIRC was exactly the same as (as in, compatible with) the common Pioneer units of the time, plus a single drawer-loading tray for quick exchanges. The magazine and the "Plus-One" tray had thin plastic carriers that were extracted by a claw mechanism and shuttled completely out and down into the transport. No space-saving disc shuffling there! :-) The Nakamichi method might have been typical of in-dash car CD changers, which weren't common until the late late 90s (except in large, double-size+ dashes), but the usual under-seat or trunk-mounted changers seemed to all use a regular magazine that loaded the entire disc on the carrier either out the back or side end. As for the carousel players being the "trash option" of the time, mmm... I wouldn't agree with that. I realize that was probably just a sarcastic jab, but, while I was proud of my 6 (technically 7!) disc changer, as it was clearly superior to the lowly 3- or 5-disc carousel 😉, the latter players really were a little more convenient. Changing out the discs was far more fiddly with those little plastic carriers. Kenwood certainly attempted to minimize that issue by letting you load discs into the drawer while a disc was playing from the magazine, but it was still clunky and slow and noisy compared to the carousel. It seemed like magazines were more ideal for carting collections between your home and car, if you had compatible players, or if you tended to keep the same six discs loaded most of the time. One idea is that you might buy more magazines and just keep your music categorized into collections, but they weren't cheap at around $35 apiece (90s money.) I pretty much left my most-often played CDs loaded and just used the single tray most of the time. I think I would've probably used the changer more in a carousel, particularly if it were one of the Sony types that let you exchange discs while one was playing.
Saw this on twitter, and truly this is the rare video where I hear "subscribe if you liked it" and think, "hell yes, I need more like this in my life". Excellently produced, and sets up and answers so many of the questions that went through my head watching (like, "what's does windows do with the drives after Z?" even being disappointed is educational!) My dad was an engineer till he retired, and is still a huge nerd. I have tons of memories when I was a child in the 90s of going with him to weird meets looking for computer parts, and he still has tons of stuff in the basement I've rarely if ever seen anywhere else, and at one point a giant stock of ComputerEdge and some other magazines. And if I had more space myself I'd love to follow in his footsteps there, I'm really fascinated by old pc hardware. I feel like I've seen a drive like this once, though I can't remember if it was my dad's or not; at any rate I've certainly never seen the inside of it before, and it's really cool that you were able to get so many working at all! I also checked out Riven from a local library over and over when I was like 10. I never beat it but that game has had an endless grasp on my imagination nonetheless, so bonus points for that too
I love this video so much. Idea, though: Couldn't you obtain more consistent performance by loading the discs for each game into separate drives? For example, Riven disc 1 in drive 1 slot 1, disc 2 in drive 2 slot 1, disc 3 in drive 3 slot 1, etc. That way, when you're playing a game, it can queue up all the discs it MIGHT need and swap between them instantly instead of having to wait for the changer. And then, when you swap games, it makes a noise like an industrial printing press as it swaps all the drives simultaneously, and you're good to go!
I remember at work in '98 we had a tower with 2x7 of these 6-disc drives that was accessable over LAN, with each disc corresponding to a sharename on the network server. It was a pain when you were in the server room to change a disc to a new version and had forgotten which drive and disc number to eject. But it held a LOT of discs 🙂
Changer setups like your Mega setup were common for BBS use. There were places to buy a pack of discs with bunches of games, shareware, gifs, etc, all intended for use with the internal file system of a BBS. So if you ran a board and wanted to attract new users, and yeah sysops did brag about how many files they had available, you might buy a set of these file discs and put them in a disc changer. Hard drives were insanely expensive in those days so the idea of keeping files on a CD changer ready to go was a good solution.
Having grown up in the 90s with disc swaps being a thing, I can testify that I would have absolutely LOVED to have one of these! It especially would have been nice to have for when you wanted to rip your entire music CD library.
At the risk of getting banned; there is a difference between the primary and secondary drives on an IDE channel, the secondary can only write if it gets the clearance to do so from the primary. Also primary and secondary are already used in IDE land to talk about the channel being used, so they make less than ideal substitutes. Not saying the terms master/slave aren't insensitive, just clarifying history as someone who was there and building computers at the time.
I was wondering why they'd choose those terms at all since they don't seem to make any sense. That explains it. So they're not entirely incorrect, just bad.
@@Snaperkid Yeah, I don't really see the point of dying on a hill about master/slave. The IT field in general is constantly doing term updates and redefinitions for all kinds of reasons, not really sure why not this one as well.
Well, no -- while that explanation is correct and more detailed, it still does not dispute Gravis' point about the terms being unsuitable and non-descriptive/misleading. Like he said, they are both "equals" in the sense that they are equally as functional. There are no limitations on the secondary drive, or functions/features/modes exclusive to the primary drive. The original designation *strongly* implies that one drive is more functional, or has more privileges, or more bandwidth, or higher-level system access, etc, than the other. Somewhat in the same capacity of an Admin vs a User, but its nothing like that at all. tl;dr - The original designations imply that there would be a reason to use one over the other, when such a circumstance doesn't really exist. They can both function identically and perform all the same tasks. and more importantly, the primary drive *cannot send commands to control or inhibit the secondary drive* -- it can't command it to read/write, and it can't command it to stop either. (Which is probably a more relevant interpretation.) As you described, all it does is flag when it's safe to write, more or less. -- To simplify a bit, they're essentially just two equals daisy chained in series. One drive, being earlier in the chain, consequentially has to send it's status to the other down the chain in order for both to function collaboratively. They are working together. There is no privilege, limitation, control, or instructional authority to speak of. (and IMO, the fact that the terms "Primary" and "Secondary" are used in another context for IDE doesn't even matter. Yes, they would both be using those words correctly, they're pretty common words. I cannot imagine any scenario where one use in context could actually be confused for the other; something like "try disconnecting the secondary drive" is pretty clear and cant think of a (realistic) example that wouldn't be.
EDIT: I keep using write here and it just hit me that's going to be very confusing. When I use that word I mean the drive is putting data onto the IDE channel, just looking at everything from an IDE perspective. @@RyanMan767 I dunno, I get part of what you're trying to say here but to me the master/slave dynamic was always just one of permissions. In IDE the first drive on the chain can observe the second one write, so it needs no go 'permission' from the second drive to write. The second drive can write anytime it wants as well, that's true, but it doesn't because the spec (as in the document outlining the behavior) explicitly prevents it from doing that without asking the first drive for 'permission'. Also cause that would be a terrible idea for data integrity. The words, to me at least, don't imply a user/superuser dichotomy; the industry already had those words, they would've used them if they needed to in this case. It always implied an arbitrary assignment of power between two otherwise equally capable entities, like the case here. In DB land the relationship is equally as arbitrary, one of the exact same (in terms of capability) DB instances is selected as the primary source of information (master) and all other DBs are replicas of it. They all have the same information (once it matters), one's just the co-ordination point for the others. Nothing's stopping a rogue replica DB from reporting incorrect information to people querying it, except the spec that is. Even the original RFC where the terms were 'coined' uses them in the context of an exchange between two DNS servers where one is "in charge" of the conversation to the other one. There's nothing stopping the receiver of the information from disregarding it and reporting whatever it wants when DNS queries come in. That author of that RFC himself concedes that there are better terms that would have been less insensitive but he didn't think it was a concern at the time as the terms were common in other industries. This was a piece of insensitive jargon from an old time that denoted a generally trivial difference between two linked items, but one that had to be made for the sake of resolving what can be best described as 'turn order' issues. I think the idea that terms that are so historically charged were used for such a banal distinction is where the outrage for this comes from. Though if the industry used those terms to signify a genuine difference of capability, like in a Mainframe/Terminal scenario then I imagine the shitstorm would've been much worse. Deservedly so. Then again selling something called a "Slave Terminal" for corporate employees might have been a challenge. The other point about it not being confusing is absurd. As someone who actually did phone tech support with people telling them to remove their "primary primary" drive and plug it in to their "primary secondary", and then take a new drive and plug that in to "primary primary" just sounds like a setup for a really bad comedy of errors. People are already stressed in the situation, miscommunication is already easy enough, why would you possibly make the problem worse by having ambiguous or extra-long terms. Again, the terms are bad and easily replaceable with initiator/responder or other alternatives.
I remember some games had the unfortunate assumption that your CDs would only ever be in drive D:, so when I had a second CD drive, I'd still be forced into swapping the disk manually.
NEC had a 4 "drive" 4x version back in the day. It's default mode was presenting 4 drives like in the video. It did have drivers to only show up as one CD drive though.
I actually have one of those drives in my windows 95 machine ... PITA to setup but works as you say. When you boot DOS you run one cdrom driver and all your drives show up as different letters. Finding the driver for windows 95 was near impossible, I dug through archives for a week or better until I found one. Windows would only see drive one without the driver.
I had an NEC 4x4 Changer for years, loved the sound, I remember that there was a driver to allow all 4 drives to act as 1 logical drive. I always used them as 4 individual mappings though. Fond memories of that unit, and i agree with Neodra that they were a PITA to get setup sometimes!
My friend had NEC 4x4 connected to his Amiga 1200 back in '90. Worked like a charm with all 4 discs available all the time. AmigaOS addressed devices byl volume name, so it was easy to access all your stuff.
I remember seeing these around and always wanted one and wondered how they work. I never even fathomed having a whole tower full of them. Well done Sir you have done the unimaginable (at least by me).
Riven could always be played completely from HDD. I even released a small program that copied the necessary data files from the CDs to where they needed to be on the HDD. Problem was that back when the game came out, most people simply didn't have large enough HDDs yet.
Back in the day 97-98 I was a high school kid and got first after school job in a computer company. Assembling and fixing pc's, workstations and servers etc. Saved all the money for a year and went all out. 10krpm SCSI hard drive, 128MB of ram, Matrox graphics with video editing, big Trinitron monitor, sb live, surround speakers and of course the hand picked Celeron from the inventory for maximum overclock. (it was faster than any PII) For CD I got Plextor SCSI CD and writer. I was aware about the changers but these were much slower than the top of the line single drives and that's why you didn't see them much even if you had the means to go all out. There had to be a specific reason you wanted one. Multi CD games were not the thing as all the software at the time was cracked and ran from hdd in this part of the world.
I was trying to remember why we had SCSI cards on PC's and yeah, on the enthusiast side of thing it was definitely for those high performance burners which were just better than IDE for a long time. Some people ran SCSI hard drives too of course but the compelling reason to get a SCSI card for a Windows PC in the late 90s was definitely the fast burners.
I don't know if I'd say the big turntable CD changers are cheap trash. I think if space isn't a concern (and for a modular HiFi style unit, you basically have to make it that big anyway) they're probably a lot easier to use: You can access all 5 discs relatively conveniently instead of waiting for the magazine changes and slot loading, and often you can even access them while it's still playing a disc.
Back in the 1990s in the DC area, there was a commercial for something where a consumer goes to the computer section of a store and asks the young clerk about something. The clerk wasn't familiar with what the man was asking, then asks the customer "Have you played Riven? Riven is wicked" with a kind of a pot drawl. Really digging your channel, sharing your shows on Mastodon.
Caching the disc label was definitely a good move on Nakamichi's part, but it would've been awesome to have it go a step further and cache the entire TOC.
I had the NEC version of that multi-CD drive. I used to load it full of shovelware disks for a BBS I ran in the 90s. It was great for that. Wide-SCSI gave you up to 14 devices in the chain.
My dad's PC tower was a stack of drives, both hard drive and disc drives. The case was always open with extra drives stacked up on top of it. The assembly of the SCSI express tower was just a flashback to dad's basement staring at this set up. He very much could have used a case like that. (He eventually swapped to hot swap drives instead. I think there's still a tower of drive bays in the room that was my bedroom back there because he was a massive data horder.)
This would have blown my mind back as a kid playing multi-disc games! It wasn't until about 5-6 years ago I knew of their existence at all. Things could have been so much easier! (Also, that Bad Attraction segment absolutely kicked ass!)
The Old New Thing is such a good read and complements the blog of the same name extremely well. Also, I got two Tex Murphy games - MS-DOS ones at that! - that support multiple CD drives like this. I have a high level of respect for authors of multi-disc games that support this kind of setup.
Fun fact: we all still use a subset of the SCSI protocol in USB storage devices. At their most basic, they all speak SCSI. That's why they show up in Linux as /dev/sdx devices.
I remember games that were like 20 floppies to install or whatever. Or they were a single CD. With like a jillion demos and stuff. And added voice files. And added cutscene video files. It was HUGE! HUGE, I SAY!
SCSI was definitely the main limiting factor for most people. They would've had to get and install a SCSI card and configure everything, which usually meant hiring some nerd to do it. Anyway, I know our company did have a similar SCSI mini tower like that full of (single-disc) CD burners. I think it was all sold as a single package and could act on its own as a CD duplicator, where you'd load the disc you were copying up top and it would burn all the others simultaneously at the press of a button.
SCSI was a turn off for most consumers back then because not only were they notoriously hard to set up with the termination and id assignment which was over the head of most home users, the SCSI models were significantly more expensive, especially if you factor in the cost of the cards and cables.
I fricking love your videos dude!!! I really dig your vibe, take me all the way back to them good ol’ days! Oh man do I miss the all those peripheral upgrade, power plays of the serious PC Trail Blazers who had no boundary’s(except for my constant one I ran into when my bank account was empty!). I played with SCSI drives and made my own server for my home network. I was really just addicted to pushing my gaming experience to the max I could do with almost no extra cash. I received a huge amount of hardware from a close friend who worked for a company as a network engineer. I bought a large number of PC’s and laptops when they upgraded their hardware, for very cheap prices. It was so fun to just see what I could build when I stripped stuff down and combined the best parts I had into whatever I could find a use for. Ahh…..the sweet, sweet memories! Luckily I really remember the misery that definitely never happened while trying to get that stuff to do as my overzealous imagination dreamed it should do! 😂 Thanks for your obviously hard work in making this little gem of the RU-vid video archives. I swear if I ever get my hands on some extra cash, I will gladly donate more to your channel. But I will at least buy you a cup of coffee, I wish I had more to give!
By 24;20 I was laughing so hard; but this is EXACTLY something I'd have done when I was in the late 90's (If only I'd had enough $). Absolutely brilliant and from one old nerd to an amazing content producer, this is BRILLIANTLY done!
Makes me even more glad I bought Unreal Tournament 2004 on a single DVD, as opposed to 5 CDs as it was also sold... Learned about these drives a few years ago, ever since I've wondered how they fit all the disks inside the drive but keep it the size of a 5.25" bay. Thanks for explaining! Additionally, what you said around the 8:30 mark about multi CD and copy protection, going back to UT2004, it needs CD 1 in the drive at all times (or the DVD) to launch, since it installs all files to the hard drive. But you can just open an ISO file of the game CD, map it to D: and it'll be happy. Or install the latest patch, where Epic themselves removed the CD limit, love when developers leave abandonware useful...
Yeah, that is a serious insult. Frankly, I bought Myst for Nintendo DS just in hopes that I could help the sales numbers and convenience them to release Riven that way too, with a real pipedream of Exile. BTW, I highly suggest getting Myst DS if you can find a copy, as it’s the only version I know that has a static-image version of the Age of Rime.
26:01 Why yes, there is still a SCSI format around today, SAS, or Serially Attached SCSI, which is being replaced with directly attached PCIE storage in more modern server environments. It is to Parallel SCSI as SATA is to IDE/PATA.
I had a CD changer, but I do not remember if it was SCSI or IDE or how many slots it had. It had a driver to configure it to use one drive letter or one drive letter per CD. Ithink it looked like the 8x/6-Disk IDE one from TEAC I found with google. I sold it because I found it too slow and noisy changing disks and/or because DVDs came around. BTW: I also tryed the 72x multi ray CD drive but that was very picky readying disks so did even less sense. Soon games were installed to HD when HDDs became much bigger than CDs, however often requiring disk 1 for copy protection. I think HDD installation works with MYST and RIVEN as well. A lot of games to be installed to HD could be installed from a directory if put into directories named DISK1 ... DISK. So you could run the installation unattended with suche a drive using the drive manager having the CDs mounted in directories as you showed. However the fastest way nowadays would be to connect several USB(?) drives in parallel and copy them at the same time to directories on disk and then install from that directory. Or if it is a disk based steam game the DVD drives may just 4 times or so faster than installing the game from the net it makes sense ignoring the disks and just having Steam download the whole game unattended from the net (Are there Epic or GOG games on disk around?)
![I eliminated CD swaps FOREVER. [Nakamichi MJ-5.16]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
