Thanks to everyone for their replies.
Yes, I have a very fast harddrive. It is was overkill for speed on a 486; its a Ultra320 SCSI harddisk on an Ultra2LVD controller (80 MB/S, but I can only get up to 35 MB/s with benchmarks).
I was able to find nero5582.exe (love those Russian FTP sites), but it immediately wants a serial number saying my demo has expired. I tried setting the system clock back to 1999 but that didn't help. However, it does let me look for which burner I have installed, and it doesn't find it, so I don't think a working serial number will help any.
EDIT: Nero 6 serial works for Nero 5. Unfortunately, my DVD burner is not supported in Nero 5.
cdrecord looks tempting. I've installed the Win32 binaries but wasn't in the mood to read-up on commands.
The doscdroast also looks tempting. It had some issues with WinNT so I'll have to play with this in Win98SE/DOS later. The GUI works in NT and many of the features do as well, but it frooze at some point.
With the 20 modern burning apps sampled, I did find 1 (only 1) which works in Windows NT 4.0. It is Cute DVD Burner. I was successful in burning a 3.6 GB DVD. It was a movie image file and I tested it out later by watching it. I used a DVD+RW disc, which seems to insist on burning at 4X only; so about 4-5 MB/s. The CPU usage was way up at 95%. I'm not quite sure how this operation would fare with an IDE DVD burner, certaily worse.
Cute DVD Burner did not seem to be able to burn an audio CD though, spitting out some missing file error. I used wave files instead of mp3's to cut down on the CPU load. I could burn CD and DVD data fine though. I also tested Cute DVD Burner in W2K, I was also able to successfully burn a DVD. The CPU in W2K was fixed at 100% and the buffer got low at times, but never went to 0.
In general, I wouldn't recommend Cute DVD burner unless you are using Windows NT4.0 since it is a bit of a CPU hog. I found Express Burn to be much more CPU sensible when I tested it in W2K. (Note that the W2K version of Express Burn wouldn't install in W2K, but the Win98SE version would.) I could burn the same DVD with only 50% CPU utilisation in W2K and about 75% utilisation in Win98SE. Burning CD audio still didn't work though. This has always been an issue with SCSI burners for me. I think some specific ASPI's work for this, but I forgot how I did it in the past. Unfortunately, Express Burn doesn't install on NT 4.0, but it sure makes for a lightweight FREE burner in Win98SE/W2K.
luckybob wrote:What on earth is so large that it doesn't fit on a cd
Actually, the DOS version of Norton Ghost allows one to create backup images of their hardisks directly onto optical medium, such as a DVD burner. This is great for system backups if you don't have a second harddrive in the system. That's one practical answer. There may be more?
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