I use this disk from Samsung. Never failed me.

Well upon closer inspection of the replacement drive it's a GoldStar...

dosquest wrote:

Well upon closer inspection of the replacement drive it's a GoldStar...

And your point is?

You said Samsung, how will a Samsung driver help me?

Because it will most certainly recognize your drive? How about try it first?

Just out of curiosity, what kind of memory footprint does the Samsung driver have? OAKCDROM.SYS takes like 35k and I'm wondering if this is any less.

What should my device line look like after adding the new driver? Because it says c:\sbpro\drv\drivernameiforgot.sys

Stull wrote:

Just out of curiosity, what kind of memory footprint does the Samsung driver have? OAKCDROM.SYS takes like 35k and I'm wondering if this is any less.

I don't know. I must check in my DOS machine. What drive do you use? I have several drivers. Some are smaller than others.

dosquest wrote:

What should my device line look like after adding the new driver? Because it says c:\sbpro\drv\drivernameiforgot.sys

Did you run CDSETUP?

There is a README file included. Did you even bother reading it? Is that asking too much?

I hope you did not plug the replacement cd-rom drive to the SB Pros Panasonic CD-ROM interface.
I guess the Goldstar is ATAPI compliant and should be connected to an IDE controller.

sprcorreia wrote:

I don't know. I must check in my DOS machine. What drive do you use? I have several drivers. Some are smaller than others.

I have a LiteOn drive. I just tried the driver for the hell of it and it looks like it takes up 28k, so that's an improvement. Thanks!

I have a LiteOn drive. I just tried the driver for the hell of it and it looks like it takes up 28k, so that's an improvement. Thanks!

I always used Mitsumi's driver. As I just got one 486 and I checked its memory usage. Its just 11.168B == 11KB. And as far as I know it works as it should. I have version 1.55 that isn't the latest - the latest is 1.58 (i believe) and can be DL'ed here:
http://www.pcwelt.de/downloads/Mitsumi-1-58-D … er-1325122.html

I will try the new version later and I hope it recognises my DVD-RW unit NEC 2500A. The Sony CD-ROM unit that is installed right now isn't reading CD-RW discs. 😒

kixs wrote:

I always used Mitsumi's driver. As I just got one 486 and I checked its memory usage. Its just 11.168B == 11KB. And as far as I know it works as it should. I have version 1.55 that isn't the latest - the latest is 1.58 (i believe) and can be DL'ed here:
http://www.pcwelt.de/downloads/Mitsumi-1-58-D … er-1325122.html

This is a thing of beauty. It works with my drive, is small enough to load in high memory...620KB available now...wow!

dosquest wrote:

What should my device line look like after adding the new driver? Because it says c:\sbpro\drv\drivernameiforgot.sys

CONFIG.SYS should be like:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\SSCDROM.SYS /D:BANANA

AUTOEXEC.BAT (/L:E is for drive letter E:, change accordingly):
LH C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:BANANA /L:E

kixs wrote:

I always used Mitsumi's driver.

I second the Mitsumi driver, it's small and has worked with a couple of different brand drives for me.

Ok I have come to the conclusion that the drive is dead, the optical eye is fried, the audio pass through stil works but it's function as a cd-rom is no longer

This is a thing of beauty. It works with my drive, is small enough to load in high memory...620KB available now...wow!

Believe me that back in the days I was quite a sucker for optimising DOS and Windows 3.1 performance - memory tuning was essential. So I checked every possible driver for smallest memory footprint. I even used an old MS mouse driver that used around 10K and was still compatible with evey mouse attached - the same is with Mitsumi CD-ROM driver - never had any problems with any brand (Sony, HP, LiteOn, Goldstar, Teac, Plextor, Traxdata...).

Btw:
My 486 system has 625KB free.

cy

From my experience the drivers size does not matter much as long as you have enough UMBs available. For older systems this is usually 192 kB. So even if I load all default drivers that have a rather large memory footprint there are still free UMBs left (incl. EMS pageframe).

In most cases the problem is more related to using a newer system where graphics cards use two or four times more memory for BIOS ROMs etc., so you get less UMBs and have to consider loading smaller drivers.

The usual configurations nowadays are modest. It gets much more interesting if you want to dial a BBS with ISDN and have to load CAPI and cFOS in addition to the regular drivers and still want to have enough free memory to load a good terminal, external ZModem or Doorway game etc.

dosquest wrote:

Ok I have come to the conclusion that the drive is dead, the optical eye is fried, the audio pass through stil works but it's function as a cd-rom is no longer

Hmmm...even if the "optical eye is fried", that shouldn't stop the mscdex from finding the drive. Does the driver in the config.sys able to load in the first place?

(A burnt/spoilt lens is of no use anymore for reading data, but the hardware should be detectable.)

Some old cd drives are very stubborn in that, they insist on loading their proprietary drivers.

elianda:

there were games that required more than 600KB free. I even used Stacker or Dblspace then and this was not an easy task to achieve. So every free KB was necessary. And usually the more free conventional memory you had, less problems with it occurred.

The driver size matters a lot if one chooses not to use EMM386 (or similar) and thus cannot use the UMB's to store the drivers.
(Whenever I need Expanded memory (EMS) I load the game from Win98SE.)
I don't even use a CD-ROM in my system but still had to disable Doskey2 to free up some more conventional memory.