VOGONS


First post, by Silent Loon

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There is no space for an internal CD-Rom in my retro machine: 286 Total Conversion
So I was thinking about buying an external drive with parallel port connection.
Some manufacturers still offer dos drivers for this, others don't. Is there some kind of "universal" CD-Rom driver for the LPT port? Are there any problems using such a drive with dos games?

Reply 1 of 9, by Jorpho

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If you have to load another driver, it's another thing that might go wrong and that will have to be integrated into your configuration somehow (potentially eating up more conventional memory).

Reply 3 of 9, by Jorpho

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I imagine it ought to be fine for the games that said retro machine will be capable of playing.

It also occurs to me that the parallel port will have to take up another IRQ, which could also be problematic.

Reply 4 of 9, by MiniMax

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Would not be better if you found a casing for a normal CD-drive and extended the normal IDE-cable and power-cable out of the PC enclosure?

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Reply 5 of 9, by WolverineDK

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MiniMax wrote:

Would not be better if you found a casing for a normal CD-drive and extended the normal IDE-cable and power-cable out of the PC enclosure?

That sounds like a brilliant idea, in my mind anyway.

Reply 7 of 9, by Silent Loon

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That's the point: there is no free slot.
I also had this idea of extending the normal IDE (and power) cable, but for this I would have to drill some holes... So using the LPT seems to be the most "elegant" solution.

Reply 8 of 9, by rumbadumba

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I once had a Cumana parallel port CD drive, which I could access on a PC from DOS using a driver called cpcd, which I think I saw recently (meaning I can probably find it if you needed). The drive would have been made for an Acorn machine - Archimedes etc.

As I recall it had a Matshita cd drive inside it, which I removed and ran through an SB card's CD interface. I still have the drive but threw the case and its internals away, so I can't tell you much more about it.

Reply 9 of 9, by valnar

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I use to have a Backpack parallel port CDROM that I used for emergencies (honestly don't remember what "emergencies" any more). It worked in DOS, but it had horrible performance because it spiked the CPU to 100% during usage. You couldn't tell your CPU usage in DOS, but when I used it in Win95, there were programs that did.

Because the parallel port is being maxed and CPU usage was high, it was unusable for playing any games, listening to music, etc. All it was good for was installing programs or copying files from a data CDROM. Just FYI.