computergeek92 wrote:

2nd: Probably so. The oldest cd drives I have that are working are both 4x Cd-roms. I know they don't read my disks burned at higher speeds, but sometimes they read store bought game disks requiring lets say 8x or faster drives.
When I tried watching newer DVDs on my older slow PC DVD drives from 1999-2003 they won't read or they will play for a while then the dvd software would crash. (I'm using VLC media player)

I would sooner believe that your drives are starting to physically fail than I would believe that you are encountering some kind of inherent limitation of disc-based media.

I'd also just ignore the MHz requirement. If the system is configured correctly (DMA for HDD and CD-writer, preferably w2k for better multitasking and stability, enough RAM) writing CD's shouldn't use much CPU cycles.
Did that Nero version already have all these multimedia features? Perhaps that's the reason for the high requirements?

You could also have a look at Feurio. I talked to the brother of the developer quite a bit, the made their own CD's for distribution by connecting several CD-writers (probably a lot of SCSI ones) and writing CD's with all of them simultaneously.
http://www.feurio.de/English/index.html
"System Requirements

PC with a Pentium®-procesor (at least 90 MHz)
(Feurio!® also runs e.g. on a 486DX2® 100MHz, but this is not recommended)

Windows 95®/98®/Millenim or Windows NT® (4.0) / Windows 2000® / Windows XP®
(Recommended: Windows NT® or Windows 2000®)

16 MB RAM (Recommended: 32 MB)"

I think the 500 MHz is only needed when burning a Audio CD from MP3 Files on the fly.

Or do something with SVCDs.

If the Drive and HDD Work with DMA-Mode and there is enough Ram , then there should be no Problems.

I have the best Burning Results with a LG CD-Only-Burner (52x Speed, Burned at 16x Speed)

Even my old CD-Roms speed up to 16x Reading Speed When Reading such a CDR.
Burned with other CD-Burners, the CD-roms stay at low Reading Speed.

A 486 can burn CD-Rs, why? Because that's all we had back in the day! The DOS DAO tools by the Goldenhawk folks worked great in those machines, but we also had SCSI CD-R drives.

Chances are your "ISO" files aren't really ISO images, the format is universal and software should just burn whatever the contents are to a disk. Its literally a sector by sector raw image of a data CD, I don't even think it has a checksum embedded in the file. Nero 5.5 works on 300Mhz machines anyway.

Your optical drives are likely toast anyway. Errors reading CD-Rs (which aren't as reflective as stamped discs) is usually the first sign of failure.

Think like most back then I used Easy CD Creator 4.x (I think) and Nero 5.5 Pro (the express interface hides to much) Definitely used Nero to burn Iso's as well.
This was using a P2 400 64Mb RAM, and Win98SE or Win2k. Didn't make that many coasters as long as the PC was only doing that 1 task.

In win98 I used Nero Burning Rom with 440BX Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB RAM and a x2 Philips Burner, never had any issue unless I tried on-the-fly, which was dumb with such specs. I too can recommend x16 if using new media.

I think in those days I was using a crippled version of Nero that came with my drive, a HP IIRC. This was with W98 on a 350Mhz PII. I recently cleared out/reburned all of my old CD-Rs from that era and most were still readable, but there were also a lot of duds.

That reminds me, can anyone recommend a good software for recovering data from flaky CDs?

ISOBuster?

DVD Disaster

Tries to read every sector from CD/DVD into the image file.

And then you can try to read the missing sectors with another drive or another PC.

Oh I tried lots of different drives. I rarely throw away optical drives. Typically when the doors stop opening I replace them and throw them in a box, which now contains about 20 of the things. They remain functional, at least for reading disks. I've tried the bad CDs in most of them.

And thats a way DVD disaster can help... One Drive can read this sector, but the other.

Another Drive can read the other sector, but not the sector the First Drive can read.

An so hopefully you can collect all sectors to One image File.

If not and the File is only 99% complete... you can try isobuster to extract some Files... (music, Photos, Videos)

Yes I was just reading about it now. It looks interesting. I did try ISOBuster a while ago without success. When I have time I'll get the old drives out and try DVD Disaster.

I used to REALLY like FireBurner back in the day, I think the last release was 2.2.1. It's been long since discontinued / not worked on by the author, however it's very light-weight and a damn good burning software from back in the day.

It's shareware but can no longer be registered so you'll need to either figure out who the original author is and maybe ask them if they would still like to be paid for a serial and if that option isn't available [as in you can't contact them], find a serial if you want all of it's features.

***Be sure to download it from a legitimate source*** because there's quite a few fake versions of it loaded with adware, malware, and/or viruses.

Dvdisaster seems cool but win version is discontinued by huge amount of time, you've to install a linux distribution or similar to use latest improved releases.

I burnt CDs at 4x on a Pentium 133 back in the day 😀

Was a Yamaha with SCSI. Not sure what the software was. Some quite compact tool, that's all I remember. Ordered it via FAX to the US 🤣

ODwilly wrote:

leileilol wrote:

Mitsumi 4X's are a nostalgic pain in the ass, even for '94 standards (they're the FX5200 256mb of CD-ROM drives). Just replace them with something newer from the turn of the millenium and forget about it

pfffft, it's all about the 128mb fx5200's 😉 just kidding, I would rather use a Geforce 4 mx than a fx5200. On topic I really do not see the desire to use old slow cd-rom drives when newer ones are so plentiful. Unless it is like your first pc and the original drive of course.

Those quad speeds were very quiet and they didn't spin down/up like later drives. I think they have their place in some special systems, especially the good ones that can read CD-R's. CPU utilization and DAC quality are really the only other concerns, those probably got better with time despite cost reduction.