VOGONS


~1993 CD-R drive

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Reply 20 of 42, by xplus93

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Also one reason I want a CD-r drive for this machine is these disks. Anybody who has seen the movie Eraser knows exactly what these are. I got almost two complete boxes of them.

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XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
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Reply 21 of 42, by Jorpho

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xplus93 wrote:

Honestly though I could have a weekend of fun destroying the OS on purpose and doing a full restore from floppies, so I really don't see a poor return on my investment. In fact I did just that recently when I added CD-ROM to my 486 system and went crazy with my autoexec.bat Ended up making a new completely messed up one and deleting the backup because I thought it was the new version, 🤣.

Okay – but you can have all that "fun" without spending thousands (?) of dollars on an obscure CD-R drive that offers no particular advantages compared to ones that are much more easy to find.

Also one reason I want a CD-r drive for this machine is these disks. Anybody who has seen the movie Eraser knows exactly what these are.

I have seen that movie, and I'm not clear what is unusual about these discs..? Are they somehow nonstandard?

Reply 22 of 42, by xplus93

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Jorpho wrote:
Okay – but you can have all that "fun" without spending thousands (?) of dollars on an obscure CD-R drive that offers no particu […]
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xplus93 wrote:

Honestly though I could have a weekend of fun destroying the OS on purpose and doing a full restore from floppies, so I really don't see a poor return on my investment. In fact I did just that recently when I added CD-ROM to my 486 system and went crazy with my autoexec.bat Ended up making a new completely messed up one and deleting the backup because I thought it was the new version, 🤣.

Okay – but you can have all that "fun" without spending thousands (?) of dollars on an obscure CD-R drive that offers no particular advantages compared to ones that are much more easy to find.

Not all of the fun. That's almost as bad as saying you can have all of the fun building a modern pc and running dosbox on it. It's just building a pc and playing dos games right? And honestly I wouldn't pay a single penny if I had to. I know from firsthand experience how much value this stuff has to 99.9 percent of the world.

Also one reason I want a CD-r drive for this machine is these disks. Anybody who has seen the movie Eraser knows exactly what these are.

I have seen that movie, and I'm not clear what is unusual about these discs..? Are they somehow nonstandard?

No, just the same packaging, design, etc. as the ones in the movie. Maybe same brand, but they were in plain white boxes. Found them at a goodwill in the norfolk/hampton roads area i.e. military contractors *x-files music plays*

When it comes to computers I pretty much trow all practicality out the window. I'm the type of person who hooks up a line printer to their server for hard copy log printouts just because it's fun.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 24 of 42, by xplus93

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After doing some digging in old issue of pc mag it looks like that yamaha is what i'll go with. Too bad the only one I found for sale is missing the front door.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 25 of 42, by Tetrium

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Ampera wrote:
Jorpho wrote:
xplus93 wrote:

Buy a representative system for each generation now and take care of it

Your expensive purchase will sit in a corner and collect dust while you either play games on a more usable machine, or fritter away your hours building more systems you will never use. Just sayin'.

No, don't question that, the moment you start thinking like this, the moment the entirety of our retro collecting falls apart.

I've build systems that were only used to run a benchmark or 2 and I never ended up regretted it. The building of these rigs provide additional experience that cannot be obtained from reading wiki pages or (worse) from merely hearsay.

That is...if you can live with the thought of actually building a rig and afterwards never using it. But in many cases one can't always predict if one is gonna be using a rig a lot before it's actually been build, especially if one is building rigs one after another (or even when building multiple rigs simultaneously 🤣).

Actually experiencing the rigs one builds is part of the experience and sometimes a rig that seems "meh" on paper may actually end up becoming a favorite.

But I do agree that actually wanting to build a rig of every era or socket type is perhaps not for everyone.

I actually had wanted to build at least one rig of every socket, but then came s775 and all those CPU sockets afterwards and this kinda made it a bridge too far! 😵

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
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Reply 26 of 42, by xplus93

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Yeah, every socket is pushing it IMO. I just plan on having TOTL Dell XPS from each chip model. Although i'm excluding the DX4 because I see it in line with the original pentium like today's pentium is with the i series. And i'm not sure if i'll go pre-486 due to the difficulty of finding a system 333d and system 220. My XPS 600 7950gx2 quad sli build is gonna be a lot of fun when I get to it.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 27 of 42, by Unknown_K

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My first CDR drive was a HP4020i (at about $1100) and it died after about 100 burns or so (they had a recall). When I got a replacement back I sold it for a Yamaha 4x caddy loader and it was maybe $400-600. I remember blanks came in all kinds of colors (gold, blue dye) and were $6-8 a piece in bulk packages of 10 (with jewel case).

The 4x Yamaha still works (last I checked) and is connected to some old 68K Macs (IIfx to be exact).

I also have a few CDRW drives from Yamaha (SCSI) in external 1 drive cases, used mostly on Macs.

You will need some software like Corel CD Creater , CDRWIN, Diskjuggler, etc to burn disks.

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 28 of 42, by Samir

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I hate to add to this thread so late, but since I have a lot of first hand experience of installing a CD-R in a system of that era in that era, let me share what I know.

First, you will want that Yamaha drive. It was the pinnacle of CD-Rs at the time and was THE drive to have for many years. You will need to make sure you have a caddy as it is a caddy-based drive. DO NOT settle for anything less than a caddy.

Second, sustaining enough continuous K/sec to the drive to write at 4x will be a challenge and next to impossible unless you're going all SCSI for your storage and accessories. IDE used the CPU for transfers which would make the CPU spike whereas SCSI didn't. In other words, your CPU would get pegged reading from the IDE drive and the SCSI CD-R wouldn't get the data it needed fast enough. With full SCSI, especially SCSI-2 since it supported disconnect/reconnect, your chances of a butter underrun (as it was known back in the day) becomes much less.

But even with full SCSI, do not expect to even run a screensaver without having a buffer underrun. The system our Yamaha is installed in is a Cyrix P166 based system with an Adaptec 2940UW or 3940UW (whichever one had dual SCSI channels). We put the CD-R as well as accessory drives like the Plextor CD-ROM and SyJet and Jazz drives on one channel with the MYLEX DAC960SUI SCSI-SCSI RAID controller on the other with 3 9GB Seagate 2nd generation Cheetah drives attached to it. The drives could sustain about 10MB/sec in DOS. For 4x writing you needed 600K/sec, and to be safe, you needed at least double that. On this system, we could write a CD with relatively little worry, but the stock starfield screensaver under Win 3.1 still could reduce the buffer (ie buffer wasn't 100% full).

Third, use superior media. After trying our hand with Sony media (which I wonder if it can be ready today), we moved to Mitsui (MAM-A) media. Even today, Mitsui (MAM-A) gold is still by far the best media money can buy and the Yamaha drive loved the media.

It will be quite cool to see a 486 write at 4x, but I highly doubt you'll be able to do it. Our 486dx2-66 could barely sustain 1MB/sec and it was full SCSI as well.

Reply 29 of 42, by yawetaG

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Samir wrote:

Second, sustaining enough continuous K/sec to the drive to write at 4x will be a challenge and next to impossible unless you're going all SCSI for your storage and accessories. IDE used the CPU for transfers which would make the CPU spike whereas SCSI didn't. In other words, your CPU would get pegged reading from the IDE drive and the SCSI CD-R wouldn't get the data it needed fast enough. With full SCSI, especially SCSI-2 since it supported disconnect/reconnect, your chances of a butter underrun (as it was known back in the day) becomes much less.

There was caching software available to help against this problem. IIRC it would cache up to ~8 Mb of data or so in RAM to speed up writing.

Reply 30 of 42, by GL1zdA

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Two articles about CD-R drives. The 1994 looks really extreme:
1994-05-17 PC Mag https://books.google.pl/books?id=L39FUG-zDswC&pg=PA137
1996-04-09 PC Mag https://books.google.pl/books?id=K8IS2A_xDLUC&pg=PA107

getquake.gif | InfoWorld/PC Magazine Indices

Reply 31 of 42, by NJRoadfan

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Jorpho wrote:
xplus93 wrote:

Buy a representative system for each generation now and take care of it

Your expensive purchase will sit in a corner and collect dust while you either play games on a more usable machine, or fritter away your hours building more systems you will never use. Just sayin'.

Wait until you have to move and you land up getting rid of it anyway.

FWIW, CD recording was really rare in 1993. The "top dog" CD-ROM drive found in that year's 486DX2-66 was a caddy loaded SCSI Toshiba drive. Looks like the XM-3301B was the drive. The XM-3401B was the 1994 2X model and XM-3501B is a 1994 4X model (and available on ebay at the moment).

Reply 32 of 42, by Samir

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NJRoadfan wrote:

The "top dog" CD-ROM drive found in that year's 486DX2-66 was a caddy loaded SCSI Toshiba drive.

Almost all of the good drives of that era were caddy based, and almost all CD-R drives were caddy based since most were SCSI.

Reply 33 of 42, by peklop

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Samir wrote:

It will be quite cool to see a 486 write at 4x, but I highly doubt you'll be able to do it. Our 486dx2-66 could barely sustain 1MB/sec and it was full SCSI as well.

I writed at 6x speed wit 486 without buffer underrun protection.
My mid-class 1995 computer was Am486DX4/120, PCI SiS 496 chipset with onboard EIDE, 8MB RAM and 3 platter 850MB IDE caviar.
In 1999 it was still same machine but with 16MB (or 32?) RAM and second HDD: 2GB EIDE Maxtor.

My first CD burner was 1999 6x speed drive YAMAHA CRW-6416S. Probably first drive with 6x speed write. Almost same drive as older slower and well known 4416 with 4x write and 4x rewrite. Of course "S" was SCSI version.
(later 8424 was next generation hardware)
My SCSI controller was Tekram DC-390: low cost PCI board with 10MB/s "Fast SCSI2" mode and BIOS for HDD. Much cheaper compared to Adaptec 2940 series.

I used WinOnCD software and burned at 4x without problems with my 486. I cannot remember if i burned at 6x speed without buffer underruns because later i bought refurbished 2GB SCSI HDD and used for burning. Connected to the same SCSI controller.

Reply 34 of 42, by Sammy

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my first CD burner was from Plasmon, it died later, only Reading was possible.

So i buyed a HP surestore 6020i and used the Plasmon as a Reader.

I was the only one from my friends and coworkers who was able to copy CDs "on the fly".
That was pretty cool. 😀

Reply 35 of 42, by Samir

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yawetaG wrote:

There was caching software available to help against this problem. IIRC it would cache up to ~8 Mb of data or so in RAM to speed up writing.

Even with caching, you could still eat through that in less than a few seconds and have a buffer underrun. Our Cyrix system has 128MB of RAM and we allocated 16MB for a drive cache and it still was chancy.

I was also thinking about the theoretical maximum transfer rate on a 486. The bus is only 33Mhz, and even if it is 32 bit to the memory as well as to the bus with a 32-bit PCI, the maximum theoretical bandwidth is only 125MB/sec. And with the PCI bus being much slower than 33Mhz (can't remember the speed right now, but probably half of that), you're looking at transfers half of 125MB/sec at best. And as you keep going down the line--the controller, the drive, etc, etc, the available bandwidth for transfers dwindles pretty fast.

Reply 36 of 42, by Samir

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GL1zdA wrote:

Two articles about CD-R drives. The 1994 looks really extreme:
1994-05-17 PC Mag https://books.google.pl/books?id=L39FUG-zDswC&pg=PA137
1996-04-09 PC Mag https://books.google.pl/books?id=K8IS2A_xDLUC&pg=PA107

That first article was a pretty interesting read along with the ads since I still have a working Nanoa monitor as well as SyQuest drives.

We have all three softwares--Corel, In-Cat, as well as Gear and ended up using In-Cat exclusively as it was the most powerful and straight forward. Easy CD Pro became the standard for quite a few years with Corel still in the mix depending on who was bundling what.

It was interesting to see the small details that we take for granted today pointed out--bus mastering controllers, scsi cables (which were hard to find back in the day--our p166 internal cable was a custom $80 cable), and more. We've come a long way from $7 media and 4x writing for sure.

Reply 37 of 42, by Samir

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peklop wrote:
I writed at 6x speed wit 486 without buffer underrun protection. My mid-class 1995 computer was Am486DX4/120, PCI SiS 496 chipse […]
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I writed at 6x speed wit 486 without buffer underrun protection.
My mid-class 1995 computer was Am486DX4/120, PCI SiS 496 chipset with onboard EIDE, 8MB RAM and 3 platter 850MB IDE caviar.
In 1999 it was still same machine but with 16MB (or 32?) RAM and second HDD: 2GB EIDE Maxtor.

My first CD burner was 1999 6x speed drive YAMAHA CRW-6416S. Probably first drive with 6x speed write. Almost same drive as older slower and well known 4416 with 4x write and 4x rewrite. Of course "S" was SCSI version.
(later 8424 was next generation hardware)
My SCSI controller was Tekram DC-390: low cost PCI board with 10MB/s "Fast SCSI2" mode and BIOS for HDD. Much cheaper compared to Adaptec 2940 series.

I used WinOnCD software and burned at 4x without problems with my 486. I cannot remember if i burned at 6x speed without buffer underruns because later i bought refurbished 2GB SCSI HDD and used for burning. Connected to the same SCSI controller.

Your CPU and PCI helped out a lot there. At 120Mhz, you basically had a Pentium 90--much faster than a 486dx266. And having PCI helped quite a bit too as that has more bandwidth than the ISA bus. If the 6416S supported Fast SCSI, that was big too as it doubled the bandwidth on the but from 5MB/sec to 10MB/sec. The CDR100 we have only supported SCSI-2, so it was limited to 5MB/sec. The WD Caviar drive was creme de la creme back then, so it doesn't surprise me that you could write at 4x. 😎

Reply 38 of 42, by yawetaG

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Samir wrote:
yawetaG wrote:

There was caching software available to help against this problem. IIRC it would cache up to ~8 Mb of data or so in RAM to speed up writing.

Even with caching, you could still eat through that in less than a few seconds and have a buffer underrun. Our Cyrix system has 128MB of RAM and we allocated 16MB for a drive cache and it still was chancy.

I was also thinking about the theoretical maximum transfer rate on a 486. The bus is only 33Mhz, and even if it is 32 bit to the memory as well as to the bus with a 32-bit PCI, the maximum theoretical bandwidth is only 125MB/sec. And with the PCI bus being much slower than 33Mhz (can't remember the speed right now, but probably half of that), you're looking at transfers half of 125MB/sec at best. And as you keep going down the line--the controller, the drive, etc, etc, the available bandwidth for transfers dwindles pretty fast.

I don't think there were any hard drives that reached that theoretical bandwidth back in the day, IDE or SCSI. SCSI-1 and 2 were limited to 5 MB/s and 10 MB/s, respectively, then going up to 20MB/s with later variants. The very high speeds only showed up in the late 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_SCSI

Reply 39 of 42, by peklop

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some historic links:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/1993 … Kw/CNteNjo6rSkJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/1993 … n8/4-CmNjjNobsJ
https://www.google.cz/search?q=Kodak+PCD+Writ … -I7KE8QfR7I2YBA
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/1993 … uI/fQ0x5npGwJQJ

1992 writer:
https://books.google.cz/books?id=mVEEAAAAMBAJ … r%20200&f=false

first 80min CD in 1994:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/1993 … 6I/XNhmEB1WDtgJ