Boxed Dxr3 arrived today:
It is shrinked (still has one of those RFID anti-theft things on it too), but it shows its age. And yes I'm going to open it. 🤣 I'm hoping to put it in my in-progress Win98 build, but if the Dxr3 card itself doesn't co-operate it still means a new drive and software package, which is also fine. 😀
UPDATE
Alright, I really dropped the ball on pictures, but I opened it up and it was indeed brand new - installed it and it all does work. At first I almost had heart failure because the DVD drive wouldn't eject, but what appears to have happened is the "tray" part got dis-oriented in shipping or storage or whenever. I released it with the override pin, and then gently eased it out with a flat-blade screw driver, and heard it "click" into place, and it's worked fine ever since. It's a fairly quiet drive, despite being 40x CD-ROM. 😀
The card itself isn't anything spectacular to behold - it has some EDO memory on it like Voodoo2, some Creative-branded chips, and connectors for your soundcard (if you can't make it out on the box, it says a Sound Blaster compatible card is required - I have mine paired with an SB Live!); it uses those smaller white 4-pin connectors on the board (you can see them in the first picture), which the box included adapter cables for, but if you just found the card/drive loose might be minorly annoying to source. The drive does *not* connect to the card - the manual suggests giving it the secondary IDE channel as master, which I had no problems doing, but does explain the method for setting it up as a slave (apparently you have to mess about with DMA/IRQ settings to confirm that it's accessible to the card if you do this - I didn't really read those sections because they didn't apply to me 🤣).
Once getting Windows installed it's just another "PCI Multimedia Controller" in device manager (note: it was pure hit and miss to figure out which was this card, and which was the Voodoo2 🤣) - the CD refused to run its setup insisting the card was not detected or available, and the floppy disk it came with ran its setup and that didn't help. I had a moment of genius and thought maybe it works like the 3dfx card, and just clicked "Update Driver" and pointed it at the floppy, and indeed it popped right up "Creative Dxr3 Card" and installed with no reboot required. The CD then installed all of the DVD playback stuff, which I briefly tested and it does appear to work - it really does behave just like a hardware DVD player in terms of the buttons and controls it gives you, and PQ looked fine on my monitor at 1024x768. The only thing I've yet to figure out is if the drive can actually read DVD-ROM - I've tried a few and it acts like it has no disc loaded, but DVD-Video is detected and works just fine. Not too much of a travesty though - how many games from the 1990s actually came on DVD-ROM? 🤣
Novelty aside, I'm not actually sure if this thing has any real application - I know back in '01 the P4 this card is installed in did not have anything beyond a GF2 MX, and it played DVDs just fine, and I'm guessing that other machines from around that era would be equally OK. The box says it requires something like a 400MHz CPU to work (I don't know if that could handle DVD playback or not), so I doubt it'd be useful to help out an MMX or PPro with DVD either. Still, a fun little gadget to setup, and it seems to not cause any trouble for my graphics cards, so I figure it can stay with no problems. 😎