VOGONS


Reply 20 of 29, by JonathonWyble

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keenmaster486 wrote:

Clearly you've never gotten a CD stuck in a drive before.

You're correct! I've never had a situation with an optical disc like this one. I just asked a little question about what the OP was doing with his disc tray.

1998 Pentium II build

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Reply 21 of 29, by keenmaster486

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JonathonWyble wrote:

You're correct! I've never had a situation with an optical disc like this one. I just asked a little question about what the OP was doing with his disc tray.

Your day will come. Better stock up on paper clips.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 23 of 29, by keenmaster486

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Some work done:

  • Replaced malfunctioning 3.5-inch floppy drive; disconnected 5.25-inch drive for now because it has a mechanical issue (makes a horrible noise upon startup and won't stop) and I don't have a 5.25-inch disks to test it with
  • Replaced RAM with two 16 MB SIMMS for a total of 32 MB, seemed to fix the random sprite dropouts I had been experiencing with Keen earlier

Still can't get the CD drive to read disks. I will have to open it up and try to figure out what's wrong with it.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 24 of 29, by keenmaster486

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More work on this project and some more pictures!

  • Upgraded RAM to 52 MB (with two extra 8 MB sticks... I believe there is 4 MB onboard already) -- I tried doing 64 MB but my two other 16 meg sticks appear to be bad somehow, or perhaps it will not accept 68 MB of RAM.
  • Fully cleaned out CD drive and lubricated the eject mechanism... lens looks OK but the drive still will not read disks. Accordingly......
  • Replaced CD drive with a generic IDE one. Someday I will fix the "Multimedia upgrade" drive but for now I am using a different one.
  • Installed Windows 95 on second partition - nice. Works well so far
  • Set up on desk with nice keyboard and mouse setup

Some pics:

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Uh oh! I had forgotten to load SHARE.EXE. Doh!

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World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 25 of 29, by Caluser2000

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I had a DVD burner last week whose tray wouldn't open, not even with a paper clip. Had to basically pull on the tray to get it open. Pulled it apart to see what was wrong. Nothing obvious so in the bin it went.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 26 of 29, by chinny22

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I found with my DX2/66 I didn't really need a CD drive as long as it's networked that is.
As long as you have a large (by 486 standards) HDD you can keep the OS and drivers in a separate partition. and once the network up you can transfer everything else over that.
This is how I kept the original CD drive in my 486 so it still looks original, just useless 😜

Reply 28 of 29, by chinny22

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Many early CD games used the size as the copy protection, you may find simply copying the cd to a partition and runnning the installer from there is enough to have the game running direct off the HDD.
otherwise cracks my exist.
shsucdx is an option for dos, or Daemon Tools 3.4.7 fro Win95.

Benefit is much faster load times then a CD drive, but of course you do loose the nostalga of a CD drive spinning away, which i do admit has a certain charm about it.