Genuinely impressed that they didn't use the cursed method of showing/hiding tiny files in a hidden drive while the software keeps scanning for file changes and reacting accordingly.
Damn we both thought of the same cursed hackjob... Sounds exactly like the kind of solution me or any of my co-workers would come up with during a last minute prototype delivery crunch, then look at the other part with the most devilish, cartoonish evil smile, the other involved part would instantly reply with "...no" knowing precisely what the idea was without any words being spoken, and then at the end do exactly that.
I can't believe it; when I was a child at roughly age of 7. I remembered my parents having a PC with one of the Creative Infra drives. When I watched your video I felt like I went back in time as we had the exact same remote. And I thought I imagined as a good the machine saying "Audio CD, Media is Program CD etc" and hearing it again made me realize we had that. As a child it was awesome and magical; now as an adult it sounds annoying. Thank you for making this video and reminding me I didn't dream all of this as a 7 year old! Sadly I don't know what happened to the PC.
I used to work for Creative Labs technical support back in the early 2000's in Stillwater, Oklahoma. That darned sound bastard >:0 Side note: internally we referred to the 52xMX drive as the "might not explode" drive lol There were actually 2 versions of the 52x. The original one would sometimes fail to spin down the disc when ejected, so the disc could fly across the room. It was resolved with the 52xMX from what I remember
The commend two below this (at least at the time of writing) is literally about exploding disks (albeit not with 52x drives). I've had some loud DVD drives (I was born post Y2K, so I'm too young for DVD and Blu-Ray (I wasn't even in middle school when Blu-Ray PC drives failed to become mainstream).
Oh yeah I remember those. Quite dangerous if you had a multidrive burner machine on a bench at eye height! I will admit us techs in the office DID hold cd launching tournaments the first time we discovered this great feature.
Just a correction here, while a lot of other games used CD audio tracks, C&C was actually not one of them. The music was compressed in a .mix file, it was loaded from the CD iirc, but it wasn't CD audio.
of all the games to do something different with the way they play their music, it had to be the game with the soundtrack memorable enough to come to the mind first...
Haha I came to comment about this. Warcraft 2 which is contemporary to C&C did use CD audio but C&C used somewhat inferior quality PCM music (IIRC 22Khz mono, because back then something like mp3 was too much for the CPU to decode during gameplay) so the composer had to remaster everything for the recent remaster of C&C.
I love everything about you, but let me tell ya, Creative CD-ROM drives were anything but little known back in the day. Thanks for a great video! Thanks for a new perspective on the these drives! EDIT: HOLY SHIT THAT WAS MY EXACT DRIVE! I had the remote and everything. The remote was great in college, when I discovered the amotivational power of booze and weed. But to a sober mind, it sucked. But I absolutely did use the remote to browse the web. You just needed to be really lazy to the degree that pressing the remote button a million times seemed like less work than getting off the dorm room bed.
It was either my first or second CD-ROM drive. I had it hooked up to a Compaq that I upgraded with a Soundblaster AWE 32 and a 486 DX/4 100 mhz overdrive. It was a beast of an end-of-life machine.@@ax14pz107
Exploding CDs were absolutely a thing. I vividly rememer that moment when CD with a bunch of goodies that I borrowed from my schoolmate who in turn was borrowing it from his friend, just freaking exploded in my drive. It was very awkward to explain and I had to ask my father to disasemble the whole thing to pull out all the pieces.
jepp and the reaon was if you dropped a cd on its edge or bumped it into yor drive or cady it took microcopic damages who formed a strespoint for cracks more so on the inner ring where cd caddys you put them in was snapping on, cd drives was grabbing with metal clamps, the spindle you bought your rewritables from got trugh and so on. the noise and the exploding discs and reading errors was such a big thing there was specific software out there and settings in winamp and so on to slow down your cd speed
I only ever had one CD explode in the drive but it was terrifying, I think the CD wasn't laying completely flat or maybe it was due to it being slightly worn down from all the use but that thing shattered with an extremely loud sound, opening the tray was hard and it had was just shard central in there
In case you missed my video on the topic, it's a misnomer that pressing the turbo button slows down a PC (unless you wired it up wrong). The turbo button slows it down if you _don't_ press it. This is according to Intel's 486 datasheet: "turbo mode" is officially defined as the full speed of the CPU.
Intel can define it how they like. I turned the PC on and it defaulted to full speed. If I press a button for the fir t time and it slows it down, that's what the button does, so to me, it be the slow button 😂
the soft-spoken british woman wishing you a nice day when you turn off the computer is exactly the kind of thing you'd see in a "home of the future" concept video from like 1965, i kind of love it?
Using those side-rails for mounting 5.25" devices was actually relatively common in a lot of cases. I had a *lot* of computers back in the day and I'd say maybe 50% of then did that (instead of making you screw the device in from the sides.) Super handy, I always appreciated that design.
Even now it's pretty common, but every case manufacturer has their own incompatible design for them so it's still pretty odd that CRD managed to stumble upon a matching setup like that.
Really? Half? I worked in a computer store in the 90s as a tech and maybe 10-15% of them had rails. To this day I am going through a skid of systems I had accumulated over the years and rails are quite rare. Packard Bell and IBM (into the 2000s) come to mind.
@@the_kombinator @aqualung2000 is showing his age :) . In the 80's and early 90's there were ONLY railed drive cases made -- up to when the 386 came out -- IBM PC/AT Clones... Should we mention full height drives (10M woot!) sometimes needing four rails?
@@seanfitzgerald5385 I was a tech in 1996, so I guess most of the 386s were gone by then, but I seem to remember that the store I worked at (Brampton Computes) did have a LOT of them still. Most of the retro gear I get now still doesn't have rails, even turbo XTs ;)
Just gotta perpetuate the urban myth about exploding CDs here - I was in the room when my sister's copy of The Sims™ 2: University shattered in her drive and took the entire drive with it. I will never forget the terrifying noise it made, especially right after the disk tore apart and the motor still tried spinning at full speed. Opening the tray to find a bunch of The Sims™shards was pretty funny though.
Oooff!! I had the exact experience while trying to save a cracked audio CD... I told Nero to copy it at 1x. After clicking the button, it immediately spun it at 52x anyway- Tinnus time :'D Was pulling massive shards of Harlej from the old Asus burner for half a year afterwards hahahaha (it still works and burns tho, somehow! Albeit with wonkier door opening now, it blew up a piece of the plastic xD) Edit: Fact check. Info in the replies!
That is one of the sounds that once you hear it, you'll never forget it. Ironically the strangest failure mode of a CD drive I've ever personally seen goes to my original Playstation, which suffered a bizarre mechanical failure:one of the springs connecting the arm that the laser was on broke, and somehow ended up sticking out of the drive through the laser lens slot. The sound was unpleasent, and having Final Fantasy IX disc two get genuinely *donut'ed* was even less pleasent. Hilarious in retrospect. and I kept both pieces for years.
Yep, I've experienced same thing in middle school with my "legally obtained" copy of Windows XP that I brought to my friend to install it. As soon as I heard this bizarre and scary sound I immediately turn off the power strip with a PC. I don't remember if the drive survived, but at least I've cleaned it. Check for cracks on old discs before trying to read them)
i experienced 2 exploding CDs in drives in early 2000s, the first time i was just the witness as it was my freind pc's drive to suffer the explosion, iirc it was a demo disc. The second time happened a couple years later to my own pc drive, i was installing the usb ADSL modem drivers after a fresh windows install. Both were worn and abused discs tbh, i'm pretty sure both also had one of those tiny hair cracks in the spindle hole aswell my friend disc drive was 48X at best if not just 32x, mine was 100% a 52x. Both drives surprisingly survived, my friend drive just suffered wonky tray since then but that's it (both explosions forced trays to partially eject)
I had a customer report a bang, and that his cd had disappeared. When I went to investigate, all the fragments were sitting on the floor of the drive interior, not a single shard had remained on the tray. To the customer it was like he put the cd in the drive. It went bang, and the cd was gone.
That's how much I love your videos! 😉 The "Special" feature might be intended for ripping audio CDs! If I recall correctly, ripping CDs was done by reading digital audio instead of reading the data as such. Lower speeds would improve possible jitter and error correction results. Also, when playing CDs you don't need high reading speeds, so this feature would keep the CD drive quieter for a better listening experience. Makes total sense to me!! Have you heard of Alphasmart Neo "typewriters"? They are making a comeback as "distraction-free" writing devices. They use IR for transferring/printing files, and also do have a very particular way of transferring files to your computer. Can be connected straight to a printer via USB as well. I just bought a used one for my 90 year old grandma! She missed her Olivetti electronic typewriter, and she's too old to learn how to use a computer! She is so happy now that she can type her "letters" on a device like this! And last... what's the joke behind the "AMOGUS" t-shirt design available on the CRD store? 😂
Disks exploding definitely happened, I suspect the disks were damaged before being put in the drives, but cannot be sure. I did tech support in my high school in the early 2000s and cleaning out drives that were full of plastic shards from exploded CDs was not exactly frequent, but happened at least 3 times during that year. And a stuck disk that was being held together by the label but folded such as to block the tray happened once as well. Surprisingly, once cleaned out the drives seemed to be undamaged by these events.
@@sivalley The >52× drives used multiple beams at a lower rotation rate reading multiple tracks simultaneously. A lower spindle speed meant less vibration so the drives were quieter and less error-prone. The fastest one I'm aware of was the Kenwood 72X True-X which had 7 beams and an average read speed of 72×. Edit: A polycarbonate CDROM disk will shatter at ~100× rotation speed. Running at 52× thus gives a safety factor of about 2 (this is an oft-used factor).
I had a disc explode into a thousand little parts for me once. It was a Laurie Anderson CD I had borrowed from the library. Rather than having to explain this to the librarians, when I didn't really understand myself what had happened, I opted for quietly ordering an identical CD and returning that one instead.
Regarding the speed and pegging out the CPU issue you were having on the older systems. Most of the time in windows 95/98 used PIO mode as the default (slower and used more CPU). You usually had to manually enable DMA mode on CD-ROMs under the CD device properties in Device Manager. From what I remember, Windows used PIO mode on CD and HD drives as the safe setting on most if not all PCs. I can only remember a handful of machines that refused to operate in DMA mode, resulting usually with a BSOD.
Pretty sure the Windows 9x installer had no way of detecting if DMA was supported and so always defaulted to PIO mode on everything and left it to the builder to turn DMA mode on by hand. It was a common optimisation recommendation to check this as numerous systems in the late 90's were shipped with UDMA66 hard drives bottlenecks into using PIO. There was also a bit of poor UI design here in that if trying to enable DMA had failed there was no warning of this, the only way you could confirm enabling it had worked was to go back into the setting following a reboot and see if it was still enabled. This was fixed when Windows 2000 was released as that could usually autodetect the correct setting.
@@chriswathen9612 You enable DMA, it works at first, then a few weks later something happens and it's not on any longer. :( especially if you have an ATAPI and an IDE device sharing a bus.
@@SianaGearz This never happened to me, but then I did always make a point of putting hard drives on the primary channel and ATAPI devices on the secondary.
This was the first thing I thought of too when he got to that segment of the video. Without DMA enabled you're capped at 16.6MB/second as a theoretical maximum speed for IDE (PIO Mode 4). As you pointed out PIO modes really like to chew up CPU cycles as well.
Addressing some comments I'm already seeing: 1) Accessibility is important, that's why I mentioned it. My assertion is that none of these functions improve accessibility. Perhaps that's what they imagined, but I don't think hearing "pause" out loud tells you anything more than you knew from hearing the track pause. That said, I think I should have chilled on this subject entirely, it's not my wheelhouse and I should stick to what I actually know. 2) I didn't mention the adlib because it isn't a general purpose sound card. It did not solve the problem that the PC did not have quality audio. The overwhelming majority of people, then and now, would not agree that the adlib card gave the PC "sound." It was explicitly sold as a "music" card, and that's the only thing it was good at: producing one, extremely specific style of music. The sound blaster was the first device that put a decent DAC in people's PCs, and if you aren't just being nostalgic, general purpose audio is obviously the gold standard. 3) Command and Conquer didn't have CD audio. I just flubbed that one. I had no idea it had its own audio format! 4) I was kind of vague at the beginning when I said that they hadn't really made anything since the early '90s. I didn't mention their mp3 players because I was talking about PC peripherals, which was the whole theme of the video, so I didn't really think about people hearing it in terms of their entire product line. And while they were of course making sound cards and whatnot, the significance of their later ones, no matter how much we may have liked them at the time, was minimal compared to the impact of the original sound blaster. Yes, they made good cards, but they weren't so special that they represented unique functionality for the PC the way that the original sound blaster, or these drives did. Sometimes that illusion of transparency just gets me and I forget to write down the preconditions in my head when writing a script, so, oops.
Yea, Westwood Studios were pioneers in digital video and audio compression. The proprietary compression algorithm they used in most of that (LCW) still holds up fairly well to modern standards, which is pretty surprising given the fact it's basically an RLE extended with some extra commands to copy previously-decoded snippets. Some game discs of C&C games do have CD audio on them, but those were extras. The only C&C game that uses CD audio is the Sega Saturn port of the first game.
If Creative ever figured out how to pair this stuff with CD-Video I bet these would have been the hottest computer product in most of Southeast Asia for years. Love this thing. I will keep saying on every video that your editing and pacing is so much better with a giant weight off your back to drive the point home, because it's true, and you should be proud of what you've been doing.
Those drives were pretty popular in Germany as well. When they were at their peak, I worked at a small computer store that custom built PCs. One of the upcharge options we offered was replacing the standard CD-ROM drive with one of these, and a lot of our customers wanted them. While the software has its flaws like you discovered, at least they were quite reliable as I don't recall getting too many of them back to be replaced. Needless to say that I had one in my own PC at home as well. 😁
I remember that some applications such as games with FMVs would skip if they were played by CD-ROM drives that ran too fast. When I was in high school, the IT teacher would send us to the old computer lab downstairs to play one of those educational games because it had CD-ROM drives with 16x rather than the 32x and 52x drives in the computer lab upstairs. I don't remember the title of the game, but the explanation he gave us made perfect sense. I imagine that a Turbo button to toggle between slow and fast mode could have mitigated those problems.
Both Apricot and Packard Bell offered IR remote controls for their PCs in the mid-90s with media controls (including CD playback). The PB remote was called the Fast Media remote
I also had some noname 2x cd-rom with audio controls, 5 or 6 buttons (they were at least twice as wide), that occupied most of the lower half of the front panel And used it as cd player for “garage system”, after its retirement ))
My Dad's first computer was one of those Packard Bells. A name I always thought was derived from neither the prestigious company Hewlett Packard, nor the Bell Telephone company and was just a name thrown together to sound like it may have industry cred. But I learnt later my assumption was incorrect and the company actually dates from 1926. Anyway it was a pretty decent computer with a lot of cool multimedia features for the day.
@@llMarvelous yes I came here to make the same comment, quite a few white box ones tried media buttons, though still in the minority and no fancy software like the SB.
Lots of MP3 players and lots of MPEG players. Some people bought MPEG decoder cards. Some people bought DVD and MPEG decoder card comboes. MPEG decoder chips and H264 decoders are now part of the GPU.
The channel DankPods is a sort of retro review of early 2000's pocket tech and he's reviewed a few Creative devices. You'd probably enjoy it if you enjoy Cathode Ray Dude!
I had a SoundBlaster AWE32, DVD drive and DXR2 in my P400 back in the late 1990's. I watched The Matrix on a 14" Sony Trinitron TV attached to the PC. I still own that TV. :D
You got me thinking about the golden age of visualisers. They used to be a big deal to the extent you could even buy collections of them and see if your new PC could run them at full resolution. Or maybe that was just me. Anyway, I think they'd be an interesting topic for a video.
Up until the end I had my money on the IR functioning via out-of-band signalling on the analog audio line. But custom SCSI messages over ATAPI makes more sense -- while being much less jank. Which may or may not be a good thing depending on your perspective.
I can imagine them doing something worse, but as soon as he mentioned that it's just IDE so there's no way to communicate with the drive other than IDE... I happened to know that CD drives use ATAPI which sends SCSI commands, so it seemed obvious what the outcome would be.
I was expecting either the correct way (that it actually does) or something extremely cursed (simulating a hard drive whose contents change when you press buttons).
My first thought was special IDE hackery maybe with the status port, then I remembered: It's a CD-ROM drive, it uses ATAPI and is packet oriented, probably just a custom packet type
Back in the day of TV tuner cards, I had a Pinnacle systems one, which came with a full size remote. The receiver for it connected to the serial port instead of the card itself (usually they connect to the card directly). It also had a separate software for the IR, in which you can redefine all of the remote buttons to any key or combination. I mapped Alt-Tab, arrow keys, Enter, Alt-F4 and some other keys, so i can wander around in TotalCommander and select the next episode, or music I wanted to consume. I kept the remote and receiver long after I stopped using the tuner, since the card was not required for it to work.
This is a feature from the people above, and the people below begrudgingly made what they were told. The massive icons scream of "These icons are too small on my screen", so the developers make them massive and say "Ship It™"
A real programmer would offer the option to choose between large, medium, small. It's called scaleable GUI. I have a lot of applications, even Win 10, where a text doesn't fit inside the button.
Just as a side note: software solutions existed to slow down CD drives. I vaguely remember having a tray icon to set the CD drive speed and using it to manage the noise.
I can confirm (by reading the source code of LIRC which is compatible with your drive/remote) that it indeed uses ATAPI to talk to the IR receiver. In particular it (ab)uses the generic mode_sense command to get a byte at a time from the port in some reserved fields in the response. LIRC ends up polling the drive every 40 miliseconds to not miss any codes from the remote, i wonder if the Creative software uses the same polling frequency...
Wow, thank you! I tried pulling apart the EXEs and DLLs with what limited tooling I had, but didn't think to look for compatibility with open source software. Terrific to have confirmation!
Oh oof, that's a bit nasty, though hopefully doesn't have a meaningful CPU or IDE bandwidth hit. Is there no way for the drive to send actual non polled notifications that would cause the controller to raise an interrupt or whatever? (like, is the OS continually doing that to sense ejects and suchlike anyway?)
As you were saying, "only drives ever made that went beyond these two buttons" I started shaking my head and thinking about those NEC multispins and then your correction graphic popped up and it really made me smile! Those NEC drives were the "best" drives you could buy when they were new so whenever I saw a PC that had one equipped I was so envious! Wonderful nostalgia right there! TY :)
Those were super popular in Brazil in late 90s, specially in the form of multimedia kits: a CD-ROM drive, soundcard, speakers and the little remote control. I had one bought in 1997 and the software was exactly what you showed here. There were also Creative branded PCs, with the aforementioned plus a webcam and fax modem.
These things weren't unheard of in Australia. My university (an institution with over 30,000 students) had Creative branded optical drives in all their student PC machines from the late 90s until at least the early 2000s For a time, they were a pretty common sight in second hand institutional computer shops. I hadn't thought about it in years, but the teal screen print and the IR window triggered a memory.
I believe there was a specific portable Discman CD-Player which could be used as a PC CD-ROM, which could have been an alternative to this. It did not have a remote, but transport control. But i only have very little information about thi and believe it was an USB device or used something proprietary. My dad worked at Siemens as an engineer at the PC devision (when they still had one) and knew people which had weird shenanigans. Edit: i did a bit of googling. I do live in Germany and found an old local news article from 2002 about the Discman MPD-AP20U, which i believe is the device. It was a Discman which could connect to a PC as a CD drive and burner which could also read DVDs. It came out in 2002 tho, which fits the time frame.
Lots of external SCSI CD-ROMs were designed to function as very chunky Discmans. They could be powered by batteries and had playback controls and often an LCD display. Even the Sega CDX console would do it.
That might have one of those inline controls, although good luck finding it if you don't already have it with your unit. Not IR, and Sony made dozens of different incompatible inline transport controls because that's what they did.
I owned this drive, which came with an AWE64 multimedia kit. It was the 2400 (16x), I think. I hated how Creative adopted this terminology 1800 (12x), 2400 (16x) etc., which was essentially duping the customer, because they made the first two digits bigger, making everyone think those were 18x and 24x drivers. You're running v2.0 of the software, by the way. The drives came with v1.0 on the installation disk, which had a much smaller status widget. About the height of the a Windows title bar, so not as obtrusive. Speaking of drivers that didn't do its job, my worst drive was probably the first 4x drive ever sold, the Teac 55a that came with a Diamond multimedia kit. Made terrible noises trying to seek and Teac never launched proper, non-beta Win 95 drivers for it. You could make it work with the beta driver, but it required a Creative card with the Panasonic interface and wouldn't work on the Diamond one. Total crap.
the drive speed numbers are the KB/sec read speed of the drive. it's not some kind of dupe. Even Apple used that type of nomenclature in their original 1x, 2x and 4x drives (CD150, CD300 and CD600)
CREATIVE really did *creative* things to PC interfaces... The "ProdiKeys" driver tunnels MIDI data *through the PS/2 keyboard port*, which is totally bonkers and, of course, super non-standard (I know that, because I reverse-engineered the protocol and created an Arduino based USB adapter so I can still use it 🤓🎹⌨ )
I remember seeing PS2 in an AT motherboard with a DIN connector and thinking that could run MIDI data, its kind of electrically compatible with some diode and resistors. I wonder. lo, and behold. someone did it.
The lack of PC IR remote thing boggled the mind at the time. It was the reason that many of us simply built our own remote for PCs. It's the reason I learned to program my first PIC Microcontroller.
I was more lazy back then and just used winlirc + it's diy instructions on building a cheap ir receiver for my 486 and P75, using a cut of serial cable from a crappy old mouse, ir diode, resistor, capacitor and some electrical tape, oh and a voltage regulator it seems (looking up the old page) but i don't remember using that...
@@bok.. IIRC that was because the dongle was not only the remote receiver but also a license key because a small indie company like Microsoft couldn't afford to pay to have DVD playback enabled out of the box.
Command and Conquer didn't use cdaudio. The music was mono 22khz compressed and needed to be decoded by the cpu. There just wasn't enough space on the cds for uncompressed 44khz stereo Audio with all the FMVs the game had. On low specced pcs (like a 386) the game ran a lot faster if you stopped the music. The expansion has cd Audio tracks but the game didn't play them. The cd tracks are a noticeably higher quality than the compressed versions the game plays. Only with the recent remaster could the full Quality versions of each track could be heard in game.
My question is how tf does one use the “surround sound” jacks on motherboards? None of my speakers have those jacks on their ends, and my AVR doesn’t have opposite jacks either, and the only way this could be utilized from what I’ve seen is to get 3 pairs of those computers speakers with a 3.5 jack and USB for power, and plug all three sets of those in to those jacks… but I’m also confident that doesn’t make any sense and I’m just missing something.
No, you really are supposed to just buy lots of sets of speakers and just plug them straight in. Creative themselves (or at least Cambridge Soundworks, one of the brands they consumed in their ravenous quest to regain dominance over PC sound) sold a few sets of surround speakers that were just a normal left+right+subwoofer setup but also included an extra pair of monitors to be used as rear speakers.
I think I know the Kenwood you're talking about, if it is what I'm thinking about Clint (was that his name?) from LGR made a video about it, it had several sensors to detect the laser, but a single laser that was spread across several tracks at once, and all went through the same lens. Read at like 60x or more and spun a lot slower, extra silent. Quite a remarkable device.
I still have my Kenwood multiread drive. I believe it was only 40x but it copied games faster than my 52x drive in the same machine. I only stopped using it due to it's lack of compatibility with Windows Vista. It was noisy as heck though while it searched for files on a disk.
Notoriously unreliable - I had several slot loads when they were new-ish, and recently in retro builds. Not one survived. Hell, I have a Sony 2X in a 386 and a bunch of retro machines running CR-562x drives just fine.
I love that you say "CDROM" instead of CD-ROM drive in the video :-) refreshingly immune to pedants, plus somehow gives me "vibes" of the era... when we were all kids and couldn't care less about details: "how big's your CD-ROM? Whoa 32x awesome"
I would guess the audio cues are exactly that; meant for when you're away from the screen so you know it actually registered the button press. If you're across the room, and can't see the screen, this let's you know it's doing things.
While living in Japan I bought a Toshiba laptop that had a built in media remote that stored away in the PCMCIA card slot, it also had a touchpad with an LCD surface that played a dragon animation or other animation of your choosing (behind the scenes it was literally cycling through about a dozen B&W images in a loop). Man I miss that computer! But honestly, I think I used the remote less than a dozen times during the ~4yrs I used that machine. Turns out it was an "International" model from Toshiba, meaning it was most easily available at boutiques in airports or "skymall-type" catalogs. That made finding one nearly impossible unless you lived in japan and frequented akihabara (look it up if you don't know and keep the drool off your keyboard), it also made warranty repairs insanely complicated.
Dude, CRD, once again, I thank you so much for doing such a fantastic job of carving out a niche where, if you make a 1 HOUR VIDEO about a Creative Disc Drive, that you have us eager fans that have already given ya 850 upvotes in 2 and a half hours waiting to hear all about it hahahah
Thanks for making me remember my Creative Infra 1800 drive from around 2000! I didn't use the remote much, but I had fun ejecting other people's drives at LAN parties, so apparently I wasn't the only one who had one here in Europe.
I had one of these (US). Specifically, one with the blue turbo button but with a white remote and it was neat. I remember you could modify how the remote sent controls to the PC. I don't remember how anymore though. I think maybe there was a text editable file you could change. We setup the PC directly to a TV and the only things we used on it was the remote and controllers for our um... our backup verification software for game cartages and CDs.
@@dextrodemonNo, it was the same credit card style plastic remote. It was a long time ago so I'm probably overly rosy in my recollection. I do remember navigating around icon to icon on the desktop and opening programs without using the mouse function.
Also, concerning the rebranding thing with CD Drives. I believe creative used to rebrand Panasonic DVD-ROM Drives to put with their DXR2 line of DVD packs and mpeg decoders. At least those drive sure looked like rebrand of Panasonic ones.
Yeah, I would be really surprised if they actually made any of these drives from scratch, they're almost certainly all panasonics with modifications, given that creative had the history of selling Panasonic compatible drives with their sound cards in the early '90s.
I would believe it. Panasonic is a common top shelf white label provider for other brands. Not something you see very often anymore, other than super flower and seasonic. Most white label providers offer low end stuff now.
I worked programming for CDROM drives BITD and consequently saw quite a lot of them (but certainly not that one!). Early CDROM drives respected the flag on the discs that said audio tracks could not be read as raw data, and so this was a big part of the reason that playback occurred on the device itself and the presence of the internal audio connection to the soundcard. I suspect the music industry were keen to uphold that design decision, but it didn't last. While at that early point it wasn't so practical for various reasons to stream data digitally to the soundcard, that changed quickly. As discussed, the earliest CDROM drives were also SCSI, but I remember receiving a preview drive from Plextor that had their first implementation of ATAPI and, as you might reasonably expect, it was just a SCSI drive with a small converter board plugged into the SCSI port with an ATA port on the other side.
These would've been dope for people doing budget car stereo swaps in the 90s and 2000s. One of these, an amp that was more powerful than anyone needed, some cheap speakers on the dash, and the most expensive subwoofer the rest of your weed money could buy and you'd be the most tubular dood that worked at the Taco Bell on the corner of 25th and Lake St
Not sure about these specific drives but the general problem that makes PC drives not a good idea for that is they normally don't have an anti-skip buffer for CD audio playback.
@@JeremyLevi tons of people used portable CD players in cars and put up with skipping, or demanded a friend try and hold it steady in order to get a ride in the 90s
imagine if every one of your components had some audio greeting when you boot... all overlapping and whatnot. seems like something that should have been a thing back then. lol
One of the main differences between CD-ROM drives from various manufacturers was how well they read CDs that were scratched or otherwise damaged. I remember Teac drives being pretty good in this regard. As for Creative, they still make pretty decent budget speakers like the T20 line.
Had the one with the orange button, Don't recommend putting discs in it you wish to not have scratched. It liked to drop the disc on the tray while it was still spinning when going to eject and was responsible for alot of scratched discs in my collection. I also use a Creative sound card to this day a ZXR to be exact, sorry but onboard sound is still VERY bad I've gave it a shot on every new gaming PC i've built in the last decade and I always end up back with the Creative cards. Onboard which is almost always realtek, sounds like its being muffled even with EQ adjustments and I can't stand it for very long.
I still use a 9 year old sound blaster Z, bought it new in 2014. Even my £600 ASUS board has crappy onboard because they shoved a compressor on it and ruins everything. It’s decent otherwise, which is a shame.
Totally agreeing about onboard audio! I can't stand it either! Have a SoundBlaster Z with the external volume control accessory and I love it! I will still buy dedicated soundcards in my PCs until they stop making them in the future.
Mine didn't have any problem with spinning down the disks before ejecting, but mine also had the turbo button work the other way around (eg defaults to slow mode, turbo speeds it up). Probably just a little bug in the firmware which they fixed on later models.
Even when the power output and the noise are okay, there seems to be latency or something which cuts off the high end. IDK maybe it's just a crappy hardware low-pass/band-pass filter. Even very easy to drive headphones sound "crisper" in the high (and low) end on a proper external audio interface.
Thank you for bringing back good memories of this drive, and always appreciate your way of explaining features and reasons like the special mode button
They could have just named it the "silent" button, that's a positive term whose meaning is obvious. But personally I like the sound of my old 50x CDROM reverberating in the case, that's just a sound my brain associates with "real computing," specifically bootable CDs.
Here in Brazil, there was a computer launched in 1996 called Itautec Infoway RTV A96, it had remote control and multimedia capabilities, despite having a common Intel Premiere motherboard, AT, which had an ATI Mach64? 1MB onboard, but no atx capabilities. However, this company developed a power supply combined with an electronic circuit board (which was installed in place of the Hard disk), which was responsible for making the computer act like an ATX. It was possible to connect via the remote control, and it had inputs to connect a home alarm, which was connected to this circuit board which, in my understanding, was a kind of standby for AT. The on-off button was soft like ATX, and activated this same board. The remote control could change TV channels, radio, volume, and other things. PCEm has a configuration for Socket 5 exactly for this machine, people who have the restoration CD can use it on PCEm, to emular this computer.
I knew ATAPI was an extension of IDE but never realized until now that it tunneled SCSI! By the way, the SCSI command set is still alive today as it is used by the USB mass storage class.
Which would explain the way Linux labels things! I plug in a USB drive and it shows up as, say, /dev/sdg and my blue-ray burner is /dev/sr0 (presumably for "SCSI Removable 0").
The "silent" button actually seems like a great feature; I would have loved to have it back then! Concerning the bad performance on older machines: Did you enable UDMA or did you do the tests in PIO mode? Motherboards for Pentium II/III upwards do usually support it. That would explain the bad performance and high CPU load.
This Creative media player unlocked a childhood memory for me. My first computer didn't come with a soundcard, but did come with a CD-player. I was very pleased to get audio out of my computer thanks to the headphone jack and play button. After getting a Soundblaster soundcard my computer came with this media player.
I hung out in the alt cdr and cd-rom groups on usenet back in the day. I had the creative drive and mpg2 card you featured in this video, plus a plethora of other makes and models. My first cd burner was (pinnacle?) 2x ($1000) and SCSI II using an Adaptec card - that was the premium burning setup back in the day since the IDE chain was so busy and early burners had no cache, so if they had a bufferunderun, the disc was toast. At the time, there were some brands that were better at copying discs that had copy protection (game, audio, etc), so sometimes the drives themselves mattered. The drives in the Xbox's for instance, the brand kinda mattered (Thompson drives were trash) and had issues playing some games. If you were just a standard user wanting to play DVD's and CD's in your PC, the brand/manufacturer wasn't a big deal, but if you were a power user, it kinda mattered. There were times I would buy a drive based on the fact I could flash the drive with a new custom firmware that would allow more features.
Oh man, you just gave me flashbacks of custom firmware for CD & DVD burners, like the Lite-On and Pioneer. Setting DVD+R booktype to DVD-ROM, or enabling special burn features and certain disc types & speeds. Great memories.
My guess is that the drive is sticking because there's either crud down in the nylon gears of the eject mechanism and/or the belt is stretched/deformed, the belt probably has enough tension to move the drive once it gets going but when it has to overcome the upper spindle magnet it slips, although sometimes just cleaning the gears and maybe putting a little teflon dry lube on them helps.
@@UnitSe7en A simple image search will show you that yes, in fact CD-ROM drives do use a belt. One purpose is to avoid gear breakage by providing some give if it meets resistance.
The eject mechanism I've seen the desktop drives I've taken apart do, they have a motor with a small pulley on them that drive a pulley to a gear train that ejects the drawer.
@@gblargg I assumed they used belts because they can slip if the tray is stalled and they don't do permanent damage like those old floppy drives in Macs with the electronic eject mechanism that used a softer shear gear that requires replacement if the mechanism ever got jammed.
Thanks for this Dude! Although I am fluent with most CD drive functions and uses, this video has answered a number of questions that I'd forgotten needed answering.
You could use forward and back to present power point files, I actually had one in my first PC and when it stopped reading CDs I considered keeping it because of the controls but one bay and power consumption was an issue back in the day
I do know that creative's modern sound cards are mostly made as a DRM for EAX, it's all done in software but instead of releasing the program or charging for it, you have to use their sound cards. I own one of the USB cards too. it requires you download a program to make it usable because by default it comes set for low ohm rated, which is useless for anything except the most sensitive of earbuds. (this part is almost completely unrelated to the video but I thought this could be useful to someone) their desktop cards are also outpaced by true "audiophile" dac amps for the same price as the "sound blaster". audiophiles these days will say that the best sound card you can buy for under $100 is the apple dongle. turns out it's actually really good, but the volume is too low on android phones because of some volume conflicts, not to mention that android in-line remotes/mics are not supported.
It's done in software because MS removed hardware accelerated audio support in Vista, specifically because Creative (among other companies) were pretty awful at making properly coded drivers for their hardware lol
Another great surprisingly high quality USB-C dongle and much less trouble than the Apple one is the Samsung one. I have had audio drop out constantly in Spiderman Remaster on PC on the Apple one but Samsung works fine, and is more robust as well. And tends to wok on random Android phones without issues - didnt work on my Redmi with Android 11 but Android 12 upgrade fixed it.
@@SianaGearz problem is that after about a year ago the Samsung dongle has not been sold and it's all counterfeits. Also even the official one is not as good sound quality as the Apple dongle still.
@@JessicaFEREM I can see several retailers who get supplied by Ingram and thus cannot possibly be selling counterfeits still stock them; but i wonder then if they're running low and i should maybe stock up :D Whether it's as good is hardly the matter, because it's good enough and close enough. Between that and how weird behaved Apple dongle can be, i'd rather choose that. The EU version of the Apple dongle is also pretty limited in output, more so than Samsung. I wonder what other alternatives there might be.
@@Aquatarkus96 As someone currently using an original Audigy 1 soundcard on a Windows 10 PC, can confirm. Fortunately there's a dude out there by the name of Daniel Kawakami who does all the legwork of hacking the old drivers to keep them working and stable in modern Windows. Kind of a bit of a chore to get it running initially and it took me *way* longer than it should have to figure out how to keep Windows Update from overwriting it every 6 months when it did it's full update, but I got there in the end.
u have to be the best digital historian on this platform i love it when a new vid comes out by you. I've been watching for years now. I'm really glad u are on this planet. You rock! Live long and prosper :)
As someone who sold creative products in the 90s I can tell you specially the modem was one of the best on the market. Modems by then had gotten cheap using software emulation. We had dozens and dozens of clients with flaky internet due to these winmodems being in everything. The creative was a legit old school hardware one and worked flawlessly and peak speeds always. Also I hade a creative cd and later cdr and while you stated they are probably all Panasonic or matsushita anyway the more expensive name brand drives would consistently reach their peak speeds of 12, 24 or 52x while cheaper brands wouldn't. Don't you even dare try burning a cd past 1x on a cheaper burner. Creative was THE brand to have for non pros who didn't want to splurge on Roland kit. Later wave table cards added a dimension to audio than you just had to be there to appreciate.
ir receivers are surprisingly easy to make, 1 diode, 1 resistor, a 7805 5v regulator and capacitor(literally looking at a cable I made many many years ago to describe it; worked with winlirc).... will work on serial port; they could likely hodge podge it in without too much effort; the other option is possibly through cd audio or similar but not sure if you had hooked that up or not ** fun fact one of the first purchases I made on ebay if not the first, was a IR usb receiver
All diodes are IR sensitive? Didn't realise that. (Edit: I think I'm just not caffeinated and you're discussing adding to an implied receiver module..)
there's still a 3 lead receiver involved; least in the earlier i2k's could get them from a load of devices(radios, vcr's, fans, etc)..... with a bit of toying could guess the leads, majority of the receivers worked that I tried(this was maybe 15yrs ago)
a quick google search shows me a diagram that uses 4.7muF, 7805 4.7k, 1n4148, tsop1738; I'm guessing this or similar would've been the diagram I based off of...
I had a Sony 48X CD burner drive that would normally only run at 40X speed unless you pushed the eject button immediately after loading a disc. The manual said this was because the full 48X speed might cause an unbalanced disc to shatter. But it was just a rebadged Lite-On drive, and when I reflashed it with the original Lite-On firmware, I got the full 48X speed without needing to push the button.
I can definitely understand the voice program letting you know what type of disc you've entered in for accessibility usefulness. And I fully support these features being turned on for all devices out of the box. You have eyes, you turn it off.
Also, when he described how painful it was to browse the web. Blind and people, people with hand coordination issues, and many others, have to use that painful method for everything....
I have the exact same card, bought it from b-stock sale. When I first listened to music through it, it was mind-blowing. And the best thing is: it works without issue under Linux (with exception of required ALSA/pulseaudio/pipewire shenanigans).
I felt so seen when you described the process of making your own crummy pseudo stereo system with fabricobbled parts... I did that in the back room of a PC store where I worked and was assigned various repair and inventory duties. 😊
YEEAAAAHHH MORE CRD!!!!! Edit: I actually use an Audigy 5 as my main soundcard. I make music and that thing has a really, really low noise floor, can handle extremely high-impedance headphones, and has a pretty quick ASIO. Also, while not audiophile grade, the Creative Pebble 2.1s (the little ball speakers with an external subwoofer) are actually pretty damn good for the price, if you need something that sounds good to play music and videos with. I personally use Eris 3.5s because I needed something tuned for music creation, but they're not bad for listening to music casually.
@@kaitlyn__L I've never used a Focusrite, so I'm not sure. It's low enough though that I just run it at 100% and control my volume via the headphone amp in the Eris 3.5s, and even when everything is at max (which is way too loud), I can't hear any noise. This also depends on your external cables, they have to be well-insulated, but even with my current cables the built-in realtek sound chip in my PC is really noisy and likes to buzz sometimes. There is probably a measurement somewhere online, people tend to measure the noise floor of amps when they test them, so you could probably find that information somewhere online. Edit: the creative website states a 106dB signal-to-noise ratio, which appears to be identical to the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2nd gen.
To answer the question right at the start of the video: I bought a modern Sound Blaster card to go with my brand new motherboard I bought only a couple years back because the built-in Realtek chipset on the motherboard worked fine for just VERY basic audio support, but was paired with licensed DTS entry-level crap which was HEAVILY cut-back on features unless you bought into the DTS ecosystem of software. ALL of the built-in Realtek features were hard-disabled and replaced with the cut-back DTS features which were near useless, such as an equalizer which didn't have a way to adjust equalization from a flat base curve. D:
Nice video -- you brought back a lot of memories. The last time I was in a Re-PC store was around 2000... nearly 25 years ago. I can't help but think that those drives you picked up recently could have been on the table even back then. :)
Command & Conquer is interesting, it actually doesn't have the tracks as redbook audio but instead stored in a .mix archive, scores.mix. Scores lives on the CD because it's a huge file full of 1995-era compressed audio that then plays back in software. I don't know why they do it this way, track count maybe, the disappointment was real when I put the C&C disc in a CD player and received no tunes back in the day
@@Nyerguds Aw, I never thought to try with the Covert Ops disc! And you’re right, they did! I remember wanting them through the little merch catalogs that came with the games (along with the pins, still want those pins) but could never get permission to order them. Oh well, MIX tools and a CD burner a couple of years later fixed one of those burning desires
@@ackartRed Alert's Counterstrike expansion also has CD audio tracks, but strangely, they messed up with the second expansion; the Aftermath disc just contains the same tracks as the Counterstrike one. I bought the physical big box of the remasters, so now I got absolutely all of the music as CD audio :)
Many of the "two button" CD-ROM drives _did_ have more functions via button combos! For example, pressing and releasing Stop/Eject would stop playback, but holding it and then pressing the Play/Fwd button would skip back a track. Also, holding the Fwd button or the Back button combo would seek within a track. I think some also supported pause via a quick press of both buttons.
I had one of these drives for my families windows 2000 pc. I think the remote was probably used 1 time before it noclipped out of reality and was never found again.
This video may just be about a slightly fancy CD ROM drive, but honestly, your videos are some of the most interesting, highly researched, long form, well put together presentations of technology like this on TH-cam. Even with ~15 years of content like this on TH-cam, you still manage to find stories untold and unknown to talk about, and pack an hours long video with actually interesting facts and hypotheses about the products.
I am kind of disappointed it didn't announce every mouse movement 😅 Edit: Also, the Zen Vision:M is their best product Creative ever made! (Although, maybe not as game-changing as the Sound Blaster)
I love how this channel both celebrates and hate 90s technology. As a side note, the IR remote's cursor function isn't actually much worse than the horrible on-screen keyboard inputs for smart TV apps like Netflix. It is agonizing having to use a remote to navigate to a letter, number, or symbol, press enter to select, then navigate to a new letter, number, or symbol. So things haven't improved all that much.
What makes for a far superior UI is an air-mouse. Looks a lot like a remote control, but uses an accelerometer (like in a smartphone) to move the mouse cursor and has a little keyboard on the back and appears to the PC as a plain old USB keyboard and mouse (even uses the same kind of wireless dongle that's barely bigger than the USB port). The one I've got does lack an Escape key, though, which is a bit of a problem for some programs, or getting up the GRUB menu when something's not working properly (and getting the timing on that right without accidentally leaving the menu to the GRUB prompt is hard enough with an actual keyboard, anyway, so maybe it's just as well).
There's a small rubber band near the door of the drive. You can see it if you shine a flash-light inside. You can pull it out and replace it with a new belt or the kind of rubber band they use to hold USB cables together.
Whenever you have a CD-ROM drive that won't open on its own you can insert a straightened paperclip into the small hole under the tray on the right side and it will push on the release mechanism and manually open the drive without risking damaging it
@@CathodeRayDude when you insert the paperclip in the hole, you're rotating a gear. You can repeat the operation as many times as you like to get it open as needed
Genuinely impressed that they didn't use the cursed method of showing/hiding tiny files in a hidden drive while the software keeps scanning for file changes and reacting accordingly.
Jeez that triggered a flashback
Ah yes, back then being ESL that was when I finally fully grasped the meaning of the word "elegance"
Damn we both thought of the same cursed hackjob...
Sounds exactly like the kind of solution me or any of my co-workers would come up with during a last minute prototype delivery crunch, then look at the other part with the most devilish, cartoonish evil smile, the other involved part would instantly reply with "...no" knowing precisely what the idea was without any words being spoken, and then at the end do exactly that.
Not going to lie, this is EXACTLY what I was expecting as well.
Dear goddess, who did this? Names must be named!
I can't believe it; when I was a child at roughly age of 7. I remembered my parents having a PC with one of the Creative Infra drives. When I watched your video I felt like I went back in time as we had the exact same remote. And I thought I imagined as a good the machine saying "Audio CD, Media is Program CD etc" and hearing it again made me realize we had that. As a child it was awesome and magical; now as an adult it sounds annoying. Thank you for making this video and reminding me I didn't dream all of this as a 7 year old! Sadly I don't know what happened to the PC.
Had one as well haha
I only ever used the play pause and basic buttons
Ф
Plot twist: it was the same computer. It's sentient and has chosen a new owner. That's why Gravis had such good luck
I used to work for Creative Labs technical support back in the early 2000's in Stillwater, Oklahoma. That darned sound bastard >:0
Side note: internally we referred to the 52xMX drive as the "might not explode" drive lol
There were actually 2 versions of the 52x. The original one would sometimes fail to spin down the disc when ejected, so the disc could fly across the room. It was resolved with the 52xMX from what I remember
The commend two below this (at least at the time of writing) is literally about exploding disks (albeit not with 52x drives). I've had some loud DVD drives (I was born post Y2K, so I'm too young for DVD and Blu-Ray (I wasn't even in middle school when Blu-Ray PC drives failed to become mainstream).
You should've changed the model # to '2xMNX':)
do you happen to have a copy of voyetra's "digital orchestrator" floating around maybe?
Oh yeah I remember those. Quite dangerous if you had a multidrive burner machine on a bench at eye height! I will admit us techs in the office DID hold cd launching tournaments the first time we discovered this great feature.
lmao, good times xD@@techlifebio
Just a correction here, while a lot of other games used CD audio tracks, C&C was actually not one of them. The music was compressed in a .mix file, it was loaded from the CD iirc, but it wasn't CD audio.
of all the games to do something different with the way they play their music, it had to be the game with the soundtrack memorable enough to come to the mind first...
@@razgar02 Had to save that space for the cut scenes! :)
This is correct. In fact, in multiplayer, music was disabled because it had too big of a performance impact when playing online.
@@allideni836 I remember that. And putting in Rammstein when playing Total Annihilation on Mplayer ;)
Haha I came to comment about this. Warcraft 2 which is contemporary to C&C did use CD audio but C&C used somewhat inferior quality PCM music (IIRC 22Khz mono, because back then something like mp3 was too much for the CPU to decode during gameplay) so the composer had to remaster everything for the recent remaster of C&C.
I love everything about you, but let me tell ya, Creative CD-ROM drives were anything but little known back in the day. Thanks for a great video! Thanks for a new perspective on the these drives! EDIT: HOLY SHIT THAT WAS MY EXACT DRIVE! I had the remote and everything. The remote was great in college, when I discovered the amotivational power of booze and weed. But to a sober mind, it sucked. But I absolutely did use the remote to browse the web. You just needed to be really lazy to the degree that pressing the remote button a million times seemed like less work than getting off the dorm room bed.
Really? The only time I saw a creative CD ROM drive was in I think in circuit City. I didn't know anyone who had one.
It was either my first or second CD-ROM drive. I had it hooked up to a Compaq that I upgraded with a Soundblaster AWE 32 and a 486 DX/4 100 mhz overdrive. It was a beast of an end-of-life machine.@@ax14pz107
Creative drives were everywhere, at least for me in the UK.
reminds me of browsing the web on the wii but I guess that was a big improvement with the wii remote...
and now sing with me 😅 „..insane in the membrane..“
Exploding CDs were absolutely a thing. I vividly rememer that moment when CD with a bunch of goodies that I borrowed from my schoolmate who in turn was borrowing it from his friend, just freaking exploded in my drive. It was very awkward to explain and I had to ask my father to disasemble the whole thing to pull out all the pieces.
jepp and the reaon was if you dropped a cd on its edge or bumped it into yor drive or cady it took microcopic damages who formed a strespoint for cracks
more so on the inner ring where cd caddys you put them in was snapping on, cd drives was grabbing with metal clamps, the spindle you bought your rewritables from got trugh and so on.
the noise and the exploding discs and reading errors was such a big thing there was specific software out there and settings in winamp and so on to slow down your cd speed
The Acer 54x were notorious for exploding cheap CD-R s
I only ever had one CD explode in the drive but it was terrifying, I think the CD wasn't laying completely flat or maybe it was due to it being slightly worn down from all the use but that thing shattered with an extremely loud sound, opening the tray was hard and it had was just shard central in there
Never saw that but at least a half a dozen trays launched at me lol
Just wanted to say that your videos are highlights of my weekends whenever you upload. Thank you for your work so much, you are a joy to listen to
In case you missed my video on the topic, it's a misnomer that pressing the turbo button slows down a PC (unless you wired it up wrong). The turbo button slows it down if you _don't_ press it. This is according to Intel's 486 datasheet: "turbo mode" is officially defined as the full speed of the CPU.
I was going to mention this about the Turbo button, and how VWestlife made a video about it. But the real VWestlife beat me to it. :)
Intel can define it how they like. I turned the PC on and it defaulted to full speed. If I press a button for the fir t time and it slows it down, that's what the button does, so to me, it be the slow button 😂
the soft-spoken british woman wishing you a nice day when you turn off the computer is exactly the kind of thing you'd see in a "home of the future" concept video from like 1965, i kind of love it?
Using those side-rails for mounting 5.25" devices was actually relatively common in a lot of cases. I had a *lot* of computers back in the day and I'd say maybe 50% of then did that (instead of making you screw the device in from the sides.) Super handy, I always appreciated that design.
Even now it's pretty common, but every case manufacturer has their own incompatible design for them so it's still pretty odd that CRD managed to stumble upon a matching setup like that.
Really? Half? I worked in a computer store in the 90s as a tech and maybe 10-15% of them had rails. To this day I am going through a skid of systems I had accumulated over the years and rails are quite rare. Packard Bell and IBM (into the 2000s) come to mind.
@@the_kombinator @aqualung2000 is showing his age :) . In the 80's and early 90's there were ONLY railed drive cases made -- up to when the 386 came out -- IBM PC/AT Clones... Should we mention full height drives (10M woot!) sometimes needing four rails?
@@seanfitzgerald5385 I was a tech in 1996, so I guess most of the 386s were gone by then, but I seem to remember that the store I worked at (Brampton Computes) did have a LOT of them still. Most of the retro gear I get now still doesn't have rails, even turbo XTs ;)
He didn’t mean he’d never seen rails. He meant those specific rails.
Just gotta perpetuate the urban myth about exploding CDs here - I was in the room when my sister's copy of The Sims™ 2: University shattered in her drive and took the entire drive with it. I will never forget the terrifying noise it made, especially right after the disk tore apart and the motor still tried spinning at full speed.
Opening the tray to find a bunch of The Sims™shards was pretty funny though.
Oooff!! I had the exact experience while trying to save a cracked audio CD... I told Nero to copy it at 1x. After clicking the button, it immediately spun it at 52x anyway-
Tinnus time :'D
Was pulling massive shards of Harlej from the old Asus burner for half a year afterwards hahahaha (it still works and burns tho, somehow! Albeit with wonkier door opening now, it blew up a piece of the plastic xD)
Edit: Fact check. Info in the replies!
That is one of the sounds that once you hear it, you'll never forget it. Ironically the strangest failure mode of a CD drive I've ever personally seen goes to my original Playstation, which suffered a bizarre mechanical failure:one of the springs connecting the arm that the laser was on broke, and somehow ended up sticking out of the drive through the laser lens slot. The sound was unpleasent, and having Final Fantasy IX disc two get genuinely *donut'ed* was even less pleasent. Hilarious in retrospect. and I kept both pieces for years.
Yep, I've experienced same thing in middle school with my "legally obtained" copy of Windows XP that I brought to my friend to install it. As soon as I heard this bizarre and scary sound I immediately turn off the power strip with a PC. I don't remember if the drive survived, but at least I've cleaned it. Check for cracks on old discs before trying to read them)
i experienced 2 exploding CDs in drives in early 2000s, the first time i was just the witness as it was my freind pc's drive to suffer the explosion, iirc it was a demo disc.
The second time happened a couple years later to my own pc drive, i was installing the usb ADSL modem drivers after a fresh windows install.
Both were worn and abused discs tbh, i'm pretty sure both also had one of those tiny hair cracks in the spindle hole aswell
my friend disc drive was 48X at best if not just 32x, mine was 100% a 52x. Both drives surprisingly survived, my friend drive just suffered wonky tray since then but that's it (both explosions forced trays to partially eject)
I had a customer report a bang, and that his cd had disappeared. When I went to investigate, all the fragments were sitting on the floor of the drive interior, not a single shard had remained on the tray. To the customer it was like he put the cd in the drive. It went bang, and the cd was gone.
That's how much I love your videos! 😉
The "Special" feature might be intended for ripping audio CDs! If I recall correctly, ripping CDs was done by reading digital audio instead of reading the data as such. Lower speeds would improve possible jitter and error correction results. Also, when playing CDs you don't need high reading speeds, so this feature would keep the CD drive quieter for a better listening experience. Makes total sense to me!!
Have you heard of Alphasmart Neo "typewriters"? They are making a comeback as "distraction-free" writing devices. They use IR for transferring/printing files, and also do have a very particular way of transferring files to your computer. Can be connected straight to a printer via USB as well. I just bought a used one for my 90 year old grandma! She missed her Olivetti electronic typewriter, and she's too old to learn how to use a computer! She is so happy now that she can type her "letters" on a device like this!
And last... what's the joke behind the "AMOGUS" t-shirt design available on the CRD store? 😂
I'm months late, but the Amogus shirt is styled after the classic Amiga logo.
Disks exploding definitely happened, I suspect the disks were damaged before being put in the drives, but cannot be sure. I did tech support in my high school in the early 2000s and cleaning out drives that were full of plastic shards from exploded CDs was not exactly frequent, but happened at least 3 times during that year. And a stuck disk that was being held together by the label but folded such as to block the tray happened once as well. Surprisingly, once cleaned out the drives seemed to be undamaged by these events.
Yeah, I hadn't considered damaged discs.
Reminds me of the crazy 100x CDROM drives of 98-99. I actually witnessed one explode into polycarbonate glitter.
There seemed to be certain CR-Rs (and perhaps Eastern European bootleg disks...) that were more prone to cracking around the center.
@@sivalley The >52× drives used multiple beams at a lower rotation rate reading multiple tracks simultaneously. A lower spindle speed meant less vibration so the drives were quieter and less error-prone. The fastest one I'm aware of was the Kenwood 72X True-X which had 7 beams and an average read speed of 72×.
Edit: A polycarbonate CDROM disk will shatter at ~100× rotation speed. Running at 52× thus gives a safety factor of about 2 (this is an oft-used factor).
I had a disc explode into a thousand little parts for me once. It was a Laurie Anderson CD I had borrowed from the library. Rather than having to explain this to the librarians, when I didn't really understand myself what had happened, I opted for quietly ordering an identical CD and returning that one instead.
Regarding the speed and pegging out the CPU issue you were having on the older systems. Most of the time in windows 95/98 used PIO mode as the default (slower and used more CPU). You usually had to manually enable DMA mode on CD-ROMs under the CD device properties in Device Manager. From what I remember, Windows used PIO mode on CD and HD drives as the safe setting on most if not all PCs. I can only remember a handful of machines that refused to operate in DMA mode, resulting usually with a BSOD.
Pretty sure the Windows 9x installer had no way of detecting if DMA was supported and so always defaulted to PIO mode on everything and left it to the builder to turn DMA mode on by hand. It was a common optimisation recommendation to check this as numerous systems in the late 90's were shipped with UDMA66 hard drives bottlenecks into using PIO. There was also a bit of poor UI design here in that if trying to enable DMA had failed there was no warning of this, the only way you could confirm enabling it had worked was to go back into the setting following a reboot and see if it was still enabled. This was fixed when Windows 2000 was released as that could usually autodetect the correct setting.
@@chriswathen9612 You enable DMA, it works at first, then a few weks later something happens and it's not on any longer. :( especially if you have an ATAPI and an IDE device sharing a bus.
@@SianaGearz This never happened to me, but then I did always make a point of putting hard drives on the primary channel and ATAPI devices on the secondary.
This was the first thing I thought of too when he got to that segment of the video. Without DMA enabled you're capped at 16.6MB/second as a theoretical maximum speed for IDE (PIO Mode 4). As you pointed out PIO modes really like to chew up CPU cycles as well.
@@chriswathen9612I kind of remember setting that from the BIOS :thinking:
Addressing some comments I'm already seeing:
1) Accessibility is important, that's why I mentioned it. My assertion is that none of these functions improve accessibility. Perhaps that's what they imagined, but I don't think hearing "pause" out loud tells you anything more than you knew from hearing the track pause. That said, I think I should have chilled on this subject entirely, it's not my wheelhouse and I should stick to what I actually know.
2) I didn't mention the adlib because it isn't a general purpose sound card. It did not solve the problem that the PC did not have quality audio. The overwhelming majority of people, then and now, would not agree that the adlib card gave the PC "sound." It was explicitly sold as a "music" card, and that's the only thing it was good at: producing one, extremely specific style of music. The sound blaster was the first device that put a decent DAC in people's PCs, and if you aren't just being nostalgic, general purpose audio is obviously the gold standard.
3) Command and Conquer didn't have CD audio. I just flubbed that one. I had no idea it had its own audio format!
4) I was kind of vague at the beginning when I said that they hadn't really made anything since the early '90s. I didn't mention their mp3 players because I was talking about PC peripherals, which was the whole theme of the video, so I didn't really think about people hearing it in terms of their entire product line. And while they were of course making sound cards and whatnot, the significance of their later ones, no matter how much we may have liked them at the time, was minimal compared to the impact of the original sound blaster. Yes, they made good cards, but they weren't so special that they represented unique functionality for the PC the way that the original sound blaster, or these drives did. Sometimes that illusion of transparency just gets me and I forget to write down the preconditions in my head when writing a script, so, oops.
Yea, Westwood Studios were pioneers in digital video and audio compression. The proprietary compression algorithm they used in most of that (LCW) still holds up fairly well to modern standards, which is pretty surprising given the fact it's basically an RLE extended with some extra commands to copy previously-decoded snippets.
Some game discs of C&C games do have CD audio on them, but those were extras. The only C&C game that uses CD audio is the Sega Saturn port of the first game.
Question...what is that keyboard!?
If Creative ever figured out how to pair this stuff with CD-Video I bet these would have been the hottest computer product in most of Southeast Asia for years.
Love this thing. I will keep saying on every video that your editing and pacing is so much better with a giant weight off your back to drive the point home, because it's true, and you should be proud of what you've been doing.
Those drives were pretty popular in Germany as well. When they were at their peak, I worked at a small computer store that custom built PCs. One of the upcharge options we offered was replacing the standard CD-ROM drive with one of these, and a lot of our customers wanted them.
While the software has its flaws like you discovered, at least they were quite reliable as I don't recall getting too many of them back to be replaced. Needless to say that I had one in my own PC at home as well. 😁
I remember that some applications such as games with FMVs would skip if they were played by CD-ROM drives that ran too fast. When I was in high school, the IT teacher would send us to the old computer lab downstairs to play one of those educational games because it had CD-ROM drives with 16x rather than the 32x and 52x drives in the computer lab upstairs. I don't remember the title of the game, but the explanation he gave us made perfect sense. I imagine that a Turbo button to toggle between slow and fast mode could have mitigated those problems.
Both Apricot and Packard Bell offered IR remote controls for their PCs in the mid-90s with media controls (including CD playback). The PB remote was called the Fast Media remote
I also had some noname 2x cd-rom with audio controls, 5 or 6 buttons (they were at least twice as wide), that occupied most of the lower half of the front panel
And used it as cd player for “garage system”, after its retirement ))
By the way, most of the drives, that had only eject button on the front also had play button hidden under face panel
My Dad's first computer was one of those Packard Bells. A name I always thought was derived from neither the prestigious company Hewlett Packard, nor the Bell Telephone company and was just a name thrown together to sound like it may have industry cred. But I learnt later my assumption was incorrect and the company actually dates from 1926.
Anyway it was a pretty decent computer with a lot of cool multimedia features for the day.
The Packard Bell remote, or PBR
@@llMarvelous yes I came here to make the same comment, quite a few white box ones tried media buttons, though still in the minority and no fancy software like the SB.
They also made excellent MP3 players back in the early 2000s. I still have very fond memories of what they offered.
Lots of MP3 players and lots of MPEG players. Some people bought MPEG decoder cards. Some people bought DVD and MPEG decoder card comboes.
MPEG decoder chips and H264 decoders are now part of the GPU.
The channel DankPods is a sort of retro review of early 2000's pocket tech and he's reviewed a few Creative devices. You'd probably enjoy it if you enjoy Cathode Ray Dude!
I had a SoundBlaster AWE32, DVD drive and DXR2 in my P400 back in the late 1990's. I watched The Matrix on a 14" Sony Trinitron TV attached to the PC. I still own that TV. :D
You got me thinking about the golden age of visualisers. They used to be a big deal to the extent you could even buy collections of them and see if your new PC could run them at full resolution. Or maybe that was just me. Anyway, I think they'd be an interesting topic for a video.
Up until the end I had my money on the IR functioning via out-of-band signalling on the analog audio line. But custom SCSI messages over ATAPI makes more sense -- while being much less jank. Which may or may not be a good thing depending on your perspective.
I can imagine them doing something worse, but as soon as he mentioned that it's just IDE so there's no way to communicate with the drive other than IDE... I happened to know that CD drives use ATAPI which sends SCSI commands, so it seemed obvious what the outcome would be.
yep I was assuming it was via the IDE interface by the end.
Soundcards and Soundcard accessories. Damn it, hank hill.
I have a Thunderboard to play with one day, gotta find another ISA board
I was expecting either the correct way (that it actually does) or something extremely cursed (simulating a hard drive whose contents change when you press buttons).
My first thought was special IDE hackery maybe with the status port, then I remembered: It's a CD-ROM drive, it uses ATAPI and is packet oriented, probably just a custom packet type
Back in the day of TV tuner cards, I had a Pinnacle systems one, which came with a full size remote. The receiver for it connected to the serial port instead of the card itself (usually they connect to the card directly). It also had a separate software for the IR, in which you can redefine all of the remote buttons to any key or combination. I mapped Alt-Tab, arrow keys, Enter, Alt-F4 and some other keys, so i can wander around in TotalCommander and select the next episode, or music I wanted to consume. I kept the remote and receiver long after I stopped using the tuner, since the card was not required for it to work.
This is a feature from the people above, and the people below begrudgingly made what they were told. The massive icons scream of "These icons are too small on my screen", so the developers make them massive and say "Ship It™"
A real programmer would offer the option to choose between large, medium, small. It's called scaleable GUI.
I have a lot of applications, even Win 10, where a text doesn't fit inside the button.
Just as a side note: software solutions existed to slow down CD drives. I vaguely remember having a tray icon to set the CD drive speed and using it to manage the noise.
I can confirm (by reading the source code of LIRC which is compatible with your drive/remote) that it indeed uses ATAPI to talk to the IR receiver. In particular it (ab)uses the generic mode_sense command to get a byte at a time from the port in some reserved fields in the response. LIRC ends up polling the drive every 40 miliseconds to not miss any codes from the remote, i wonder if the Creative software uses the same polling frequency...
Wow, thank you! I tried pulling apart the EXEs and DLLs with what limited tooling I had, but didn't think to look for compatibility with open source software. Terrific to have confirmation!
Oh oof, that's a bit nasty, though hopefully doesn't have a meaningful CPU or IDE bandwidth hit. Is there no way for the drive to send actual non polled notifications that would cause the controller to raise an interrupt or whatever? (like, is the OS continually doing that to sense ejects and suchlike anyway?)
As you were saying, "only drives ever made that went beyond these two buttons" I started shaking my head and thinking about those NEC multispins and then your correction graphic popped up and it really made me smile! Those NEC drives were the "best" drives you could buy when they were new so whenever I saw a PC that had one equipped I was so envious! Wonderful nostalgia right there! TY :)
Those were super popular in Brazil in late 90s, specially in the form of multimedia kits: a CD-ROM drive, soundcard, speakers and the little remote control. I had one bought in 1997 and the software was exactly what you showed here.
There were also Creative branded PCs, with the aforementioned plus a webcam and fax modem.
These things weren't unheard of in Australia. My university (an institution with over 30,000 students) had Creative branded optical drives in all their student PC machines from the late 90s until at least the early 2000s
For a time, they were a pretty common sight in second hand institutional computer shops.
I hadn't thought about it in years, but the teal screen print and the IR window triggered a memory.
I believe there was a specific portable Discman CD-Player which could be used as a PC CD-ROM, which could have been an alternative to this. It did not have a remote, but transport control. But i only have very little information about thi and believe it was an USB device or used something proprietary. My dad worked at Siemens as an engineer at the PC devision (when they still had one) and knew people which had weird shenanigans.
Edit: i did a bit of googling. I do live in Germany and found an old local news article from 2002 about the Discman MPD-AP20U, which i believe is the device. It was a Discman which could connect to a PC as a CD drive and burner which could also read DVDs. It came out in 2002 tho, which fits the time frame.
Lots of external SCSI CD-ROMs were designed to function as very chunky Discmans. They could be powered by batteries and had playback controls and often an LCD display. Even the Sega CDX console would do it.
That might have one of those inline controls, although good luck finding it if you don't already have it with your unit. Not IR, and Sony made dozens of different incompatible inline transport controls because that's what they did.
I love that running gag attaching the PSU, pulling out the speakers, hooking it all up... All with a stoic impression. Genius!
I owned this drive, which came with an AWE64 multimedia kit. It was the 2400 (16x), I think. I hated how Creative adopted this terminology 1800 (12x), 2400 (16x) etc., which was essentially duping the customer, because they made the first two digits bigger, making everyone think those were 18x and 24x drivers.
You're running v2.0 of the software, by the way. The drives came with v1.0 on the installation disk, which had a much smaller status widget. About the height of the a Windows title bar, so not as obtrusive.
Speaking of drivers that didn't do its job, my worst drive was probably the first 4x drive ever sold, the Teac 55a that came with a Diamond multimedia kit. Made terrible noises trying to seek and Teac never launched proper, non-beta Win 95 drivers for it. You could make it work with the beta driver, but it required a Creative card with the Panasonic interface and wouldn't work on the Diamond one. Total crap.
the drive speed numbers are the KB/sec read speed of the drive. it's not some kind of dupe. Even Apple used that type of nomenclature in their original 1x, 2x and 4x drives (CD150, CD300 and CD600)
I had a muuuch later prosumer sound interface from Teac (us800), amazing card, shitty drivers, so...
OMG, had one of these for years and did not know I had to install software to use the remote. Well, the remote now works! Thank you!!!
CREATIVE really did *creative* things to PC interfaces... The "ProdiKeys" driver tunnels MIDI data *through the PS/2 keyboard port*, which is totally bonkers and, of course, super non-standard (I know that, because I reverse-engineered the protocol and created an Arduino based USB adapter so I can still use it 🤓🎹⌨ )
Wow! Now you got me curious. Instant star to your GitHub repo :)
That's super cool! 💪
I remember seeing PS2 in an AT motherboard with a DIN connector and thinking that could run MIDI data, its kind of electrically compatible with some diode and resistors. I wonder.
lo, and behold. someone did it.
Yeah, @@monad_tcp Creative Labs was like "DIN - Mini-DIN - it is the same picture!" 🙃🤣
Contents been fire lately Gravis. Thank you
The lack of PC IR remote thing boggled the mind at the time. It was the reason that many of us simply built our own remote for PCs. It's the reason I learned to program my first PIC Microcontroller.
I was more lazy back then and just used winlirc + it's diy instructions on building a cheap ir receiver for my 486 and P75, using a cut of serial cable from a crappy old mouse, ir diode, resistor, capacitor and some electrical tape, oh and a voltage regulator it seems (looking up the old page) but i don't remember using that...
Did the Original Xbox force you to have a remote to access any of the DVD functions? The PS2 on the other hand allowed you to use the controller.
@@bok.. IIRC that was because the dongle was not only the remote receiver but also a license key because a small indie company like Microsoft couldn't afford to pay to have DVD playback enabled out of the box.
You're maybe the only person in the world who can make a video this long about a CD player and make it a great watch
Command and Conquer didn't use cdaudio. The music was mono 22khz compressed and needed to be decoded by the cpu. There just wasn't enough space on the cds for uncompressed 44khz stereo Audio with all the FMVs the game had. On low specced pcs (like a 386) the game ran a lot faster if you stopped the music. The expansion has cd Audio tracks but the game didn't play them. The cd tracks are a noticeably higher quality than the compressed versions the game plays. Only with the recent remaster could the full Quality versions of each track could be heard in game.
My question is how tf does one use the “surround sound” jacks on motherboards? None of my speakers have those jacks on their ends, and my AVR doesn’t have opposite jacks either, and the only way this could be utilized from what I’ve seen is to get 3 pairs of those computers speakers with a 3.5 jack and USB for power, and plug all three sets of those in to those jacks… but I’m also confident that doesn’t make any sense and I’m just missing something.
No, you really are supposed to just buy lots of sets of speakers and just plug them straight in. Creative themselves (or at least Cambridge Soundworks, one of the brands they consumed in their ravenous quest to regain dominance over PC sound) sold a few sets of surround speakers that were just a normal left+right+subwoofer setup but also included an extra pair of monitors to be used as rear speakers.
@ Oh geez that’s weenorium!
The pioneer slot load was a cool looking drive, and Kenwood made a high speed drive with multiple read heads
I think I know the Kenwood you're talking about, if it is what I'm thinking about Clint (was that his name?) from LGR made a video about it, it had several sensors to detect the laser, but a single laser that was spread across several tracks at once, and all went through the same lens.
Read at like 60x or more and spun a lot slower, extra silent. Quite a remarkable device.
I still have my Kenwood multiread drive. I believe it was only 40x but it copied games faster than my 52x drive in the same machine. I only stopped using it due to it's lack of compatibility with Windows Vista. It was noisy as heck though while it searched for files on a disk.
@@Beaut2013 it was marketed at 72x using 3 simultaneous readouts and ran at 24x
Notoriously unreliable - I had several slot loads when they were new-ish, and recently in retro builds. Not one survived. Hell, I have a Sony 2X in a 386 and a bunch of retro machines running CR-562x drives just fine.
I love that you say "CDROM" instead of CD-ROM drive in the video :-) refreshingly immune to pedants, plus somehow gives me "vibes" of the era... when we were all kids and couldn't care less about details: "how big's your CD-ROM? Whoa 32x awesome"
I would guess the audio cues are exactly that; meant for when you're away from the screen so you know it actually registered the button press. If you're across the room, and can't see the screen, this let's you know it's doing things.
While living in Japan I bought a Toshiba laptop that had a built in media remote that stored away in the PCMCIA card slot, it also had a touchpad with an LCD surface that played a dragon animation or other animation of your choosing (behind the scenes it was literally cycling through about a dozen B&W images in a loop). Man I miss that computer! But honestly, I think I used the remote less than a dozen times during the ~4yrs I used that machine. Turns out it was an "International" model from Toshiba, meaning it was most easily available at boutiques in airports or "skymall-type" catalogs. That made finding one nearly impossible unless you lived in japan and frequented akihabara (look it up if you don't know and keep the drool off your keyboard), it also made warranty repairs insanely complicated.
Dude, CRD, once again, I thank you so much for doing such a fantastic job of carving out a niche where, if you make a 1 HOUR VIDEO about a Creative Disc Drive, that you have us eager fans that have already given ya 850 upvotes in 2 and a half hours waiting to hear all about it hahahah
Thanks for making me remember my Creative Infra 1800 drive from around 2000! I didn't use the remote much, but I had fun ejecting other people's drives at LAN parties, so apparently I wasn't the only one who had one here in Europe.
I had one of these (US). Specifically, one with the blue turbo button but with a white remote and it was neat. I remember you could modify how the remote sent controls to the PC. I don't remember how anymore though. I think maybe there was a text editable file you could change.
We setup the PC directly to a TV and the only things we used on it was the remote and controllers for our um... our backup verification software for game cartages and CDs.
was the remote better? with rubber buttons or anything?
@@dextrodemonNo, it was the same credit card style plastic remote. It was a long time ago so I'm probably overly rosy in my recollection. I do remember navigating around icon to icon on the desktop and opening programs without using the mouse function.
I love this channel because I keep discovering new old tech I was not familiar with before. Some of which I want now
Also, concerning the rebranding thing with CD Drives. I believe creative used to rebrand Panasonic DVD-ROM Drives to put with their DXR2 line of DVD packs and mpeg decoders. At least those drive sure looked like rebrand of Panasonic ones.
Yeah, I would be really surprised if they actually made any of these drives from scratch, they're almost certainly all panasonics with modifications, given that creative had the history of selling Panasonic compatible drives with their sound cards in the early '90s.
I would believe it. Panasonic is a common top shelf white label provider for other brands. Not something you see very often anymore, other than super flower and seasonic. Most white label providers offer low end stuff now.
I have seen BTC and Samsung drives rebranded by Creative.
I worked programming for CDROM drives BITD and consequently saw quite a lot of them (but certainly not that one!). Early CDROM drives respected the flag on the discs that said audio tracks could not be read as raw data, and so this was a big part of the reason that playback occurred on the device itself and the presence of the internal audio connection to the soundcard. I suspect the music industry were keen to uphold that design decision, but it didn't last. While at that early point it wasn't so practical for various reasons to stream data digitally to the soundcard, that changed quickly. As discussed, the earliest CDROM drives were also SCSI, but I remember receiving a preview drive from Plextor that had their first implementation of ATAPI and, as you might reasonably expect, it was just a SCSI drive with a small converter board plugged into the SCSI port with an ATA port on the other side.
These would've been dope for people doing budget car stereo swaps in the 90s and 2000s. One of these, an amp that was more powerful than anyone needed, some cheap speakers on the dash, and the most expensive subwoofer the rest of your weed money could buy and you'd be the most tubular dood that worked at the Taco Bell on the corner of 25th and Lake St
Not sure about these specific drives but the general problem that makes PC drives not a good idea for that is they normally don't have an anti-skip buffer for CD audio playback.
@@JeremyLevi if you're the person I'm proposing, that's an acceptable price to pay to have the loudest bass on the block
@@JeremyLevi tons of people used portable CD players in cars and put up with skipping, or demanded a friend try and hold it steady in order to get a ride in the 90s
Tack!
imagine if every one of your components had some audio greeting when you boot... all overlapping and whatnot. seems like something that should have been a thing back then. lol
It'd be chaotic as hell
Imagine datacenters after a prolonged downtime.
[Windows startup sound]
Hello!
Welcome!
You have mail!
[Ding sounds]
🤔 And what about the modern version: "voice assistants". I really don't like them, but for some people are a thing nowadays...
Now add voice recognition to the PC and let the chaos begin!
Thanks
One of the main differences between CD-ROM drives from various manufacturers was how well they read CDs that were scratched or otherwise damaged. I remember Teac drives being pretty good in this regard. As for Creative, they still make pretty decent budget speakers like the T20 line.
Had the one with the orange button, Don't recommend putting discs in it you wish to not have scratched. It liked to drop the disc on the tray while it was still spinning when going to eject and was responsible for alot of scratched discs in my collection. I also use a Creative sound card to this day a ZXR to be exact, sorry but onboard sound is still VERY bad I've gave it a shot on every new gaming PC i've built in the last decade and I always end up back with the Creative cards. Onboard which is almost always realtek, sounds like its being muffled even with EQ adjustments and I can't stand it for very long.
I still use a 9 year old sound blaster Z, bought it new in 2014. Even my £600 ASUS board has crappy onboard because they shoved a compressor on it and ruins everything. It’s decent otherwise, which is a shame.
Totally agreeing about onboard audio! I can't stand it either! Have a SoundBlaster Z with the external volume control accessory and I love it! I will still buy dedicated soundcards in my PCs until they stop making them in the future.
Mine didn't have any problem with spinning down the disks before ejecting, but mine also had the turbo button work the other way around (eg defaults to slow mode, turbo speeds it up). Probably just a little bug in the firmware which they fixed on later models.
Even when the power output and the noise are okay, there seems to be latency or something which cuts off the high end. IDK maybe it's just a crappy hardware low-pass/band-pass filter. Even very easy to drive headphones sound "crisper" in the high (and low) end on a proper external audio interface.
Thank you for bringing back good memories of this drive, and always appreciate your way of explaining features and reasons like the special mode button
They could have just named it the "silent" button, that's a positive term whose meaning is obvious. But personally I like the sound of my old 50x CDROM reverberating in the case, that's just a sound my brain associates with "real computing," specifically bootable CDs.
Here in Brazil, there was a computer launched in 1996 called Itautec Infoway RTV A96, it had remote control and multimedia capabilities, despite having a common Intel Premiere motherboard, AT, which had an ATI Mach64? 1MB onboard, but no atx capabilities. However, this company developed a power supply combined with an electronic circuit board (which was installed in place of the Hard disk), which was responsible for making the computer act like an ATX. It was possible to connect via the remote control, and it had inputs to connect a home alarm, which was connected to this circuit board which, in my understanding, was a kind of standby for AT. The on-off button was soft like ATX, and activated this same board. The remote control could change TV channels, radio, volume, and other things.
PCEm has a configuration for Socket 5 exactly for this machine, people who have the restoration CD can use it on PCEm, to emular this computer.
I knew ATAPI was an extension of IDE but never realized until now that it tunneled SCSI!
By the way, the SCSI command set is still alive today as it is used by the USB mass storage class.
SATA and SAS also use the SCSI Command Set.
Which would explain the way Linux labels things! I plug in a USB drive and it shows up as, say, /dev/sdg and my blue-ray burner is /dev/sr0 (presumably for "SCSI Removable 0").
@@Roxor128 sr0 is scsi rom 0. For CD Rom. Usually not direct random block writeable compared to disks (and ssd)
@@rubberduck4966 Thanks for the correction!
@@Roxor128 I assumed sd stood for storage device, never had an idea what sr would have meant.
With your type of luck I would've bought a lottery ticket the day after recording!
Awesome find, as always super interesting :)
The "silent" button actually seems like a great feature; I would have loved to have it back then!
Concerning the bad performance on older machines: Did you enable UDMA or did you do the tests in PIO mode? Motherboards for Pentium II/III upwards do usually support it. That would explain the bad performance and high CPU load.
This Creative media player unlocked a childhood memory for me. My first computer didn't come with a soundcard, but did come with a CD-player. I was very pleased to get audio out of my computer thanks to the headphone jack and play button. After getting a Soundblaster soundcard my computer came with this media player.
I hung out in the alt cdr and cd-rom groups on usenet back in the day. I had the creative drive and mpg2 card you featured in this video, plus a plethora of other makes and models. My first cd burner was (pinnacle?) 2x ($1000) and SCSI II using an Adaptec card - that was the premium burning setup back in the day since the IDE chain was so busy and early burners had no cache, so if they had a bufferunderun, the disc was toast.
At the time, there were some brands that were better at copying discs that had copy protection (game, audio, etc), so sometimes the drives themselves mattered. The drives in the Xbox's for instance, the brand kinda mattered (Thompson drives were trash) and had issues playing some games.
If you were just a standard user wanting to play DVD's and CD's in your PC, the brand/manufacturer wasn't a big deal, but if you were a power user, it kinda mattered. There were times I would buy a drive based on the fact I could flash the drive with a new custom firmware that would allow more features.
Oh man, you just gave me flashbacks of custom firmware for CD & DVD burners, like the Lite-On and Pioneer. Setting DVD+R booktype to DVD-ROM, or enabling special burn features and certain disc types & speeds. Great memories.
This brought back memories…I owned this Creative CD ROM drive back in the day. Thanks for all your work into this video!
My guess is that the drive is sticking because there's either crud down in the nylon gears of the eject mechanism and/or the belt is stretched/deformed, the belt probably has enough tension to move the drive once it gets going but when it has to overcome the upper spindle magnet it slips, although sometimes just cleaning the gears and maybe putting a little teflon dry lube on them helps.
10:44 I'd guess teeth cracked off. I've see that before.
CD-ROM drives don't use belts. Stop watching so much Techmoan.
@@UnitSe7en A simple image search will show you that yes, in fact CD-ROM drives do use a belt. One purpose is to avoid gear breakage by providing some give if it meets resistance.
The eject mechanism I've seen the desktop drives I've taken apart do, they have a motor with a small pulley on them that drive a pulley to a gear train that ejects the drawer.
@@gblargg I assumed they used belts because they can slip if the tray is stalled and they don't do permanent damage like those old floppy drives in Macs with the electronic eject mechanism that used a softer shear gear that requires replacement if the mechanism ever got jammed.
Thanks for this Dude! Although I am fluent with most CD drive functions and uses, this video has answered a number of questions that I'd forgotten needed answering.
You could use forward and back to present power point files, I actually had one in my first PC and when it stopped reading CDs I considered keeping it because of the controls but one bay and power consumption was an issue back in the day
back in the day a friend of mine had one of these in his PC, i was very impressed that he could control his pc with a remote control
I do know that creative's modern sound cards are mostly made as a DRM for EAX, it's all done in software but instead of releasing the program or charging for it, you have to use their sound cards.
I own one of the USB cards too. it requires you download a program to make it usable because by default it comes set for low ohm rated, which is useless for anything except the most sensitive of earbuds.
(this part is almost completely unrelated to the video but I thought this could be useful to someone)
their desktop cards are also outpaced by true "audiophile" dac amps for the same price as the "sound blaster".
audiophiles these days will say that the best sound card you can buy for under $100 is the apple dongle. turns out it's actually really good, but the volume is too low on android phones because of some volume conflicts, not to mention that android in-line remotes/mics are not supported.
It's done in software because MS removed hardware accelerated audio support in Vista, specifically because Creative (among other companies) were pretty awful at making properly coded drivers for their hardware lol
Another great surprisingly high quality USB-C dongle and much less trouble than the Apple one is the Samsung one. I have had audio drop out constantly in Spiderman Remaster on PC on the Apple one but Samsung works fine, and is more robust as well. And tends to wok on random Android phones without issues - didnt work on my Redmi with Android 11 but Android 12 upgrade fixed it.
@@SianaGearz problem is that after about a year ago the Samsung dongle has not been sold and it's all counterfeits.
Also even the official one is not as good sound quality as the Apple dongle still.
@@JessicaFEREM I can see several retailers who get supplied by Ingram and thus cannot possibly be selling counterfeits still stock them; but i wonder then if they're running low and i should maybe stock up :D
Whether it's as good is hardly the matter, because it's good enough and close enough. Between that and how weird behaved Apple dongle can be, i'd rather choose that. The EU version of the Apple dongle is also pretty limited in output, more so than Samsung.
I wonder what other alternatives there might be.
@@Aquatarkus96 As someone currently using an original Audigy 1 soundcard on a Windows 10 PC, can confirm. Fortunately there's a dude out there by the name of Daniel Kawakami who does all the legwork of hacking the old drivers to keep them working and stable in modern Windows. Kind of a bit of a chore to get it running initially and it took me *way* longer than it should have to figure out how to keep Windows Update from overwriting it every 6 months when it did it's full update, but I got there in the end.
I HAD THESE DRIVES growing up and they ALSO jammed....ALOT! Thanks for the blast from the past :D
u have to be the best digital historian on this platform i love it when a new vid comes out by you. I've been watching for years now. I'm really glad u are on this planet. You rock! Live long and prosper :)
The Creative SB Live Platinum 5.1 with Live Drive IR had a great media remote and software suite. I got one when they came out in 1998.
We had one in our PC too. Way better remote than the one in the video
As someone who sold creative products in the 90s I can tell you specially the modem was one of the best on the market. Modems by then had gotten cheap using software emulation.
We had dozens and dozens of clients with flaky internet due to these winmodems being in everything. The creative was a legit old school hardware one and worked flawlessly and peak speeds always.
Also I hade a creative cd and later cdr and while you stated they are probably all Panasonic or matsushita anyway the more expensive name brand drives would consistently reach their peak speeds of 12, 24 or 52x while cheaper brands wouldn't.
Don't you even dare try burning a cd past 1x on a cheaper burner.
Creative was THE brand to have for non pros who didn't want to splurge on Roland kit.
Later wave table cards added a dimension to audio than you just had to be there to appreciate.
ir receivers are surprisingly easy to make, 1 diode, 1 resistor, a 7805 5v regulator and capacitor(literally looking at a cable I made many many years ago to describe it; worked with winlirc).... will work on serial port; they could likely hodge podge it in without too much effort; the other option is possibly through cd audio or similar but not sure if you had hooked that up or not ** fun fact one of the first purchases I made on ebay if not the first, was a IR usb receiver
All diodes are IR sensitive? Didn't realise that. (Edit: I think I'm just not caffeinated and you're discussing adding to an implied receiver module..)
there's still a 3 lead receiver involved; least in the earlier i2k's could get them from a load of devices(radios, vcr's, fans, etc)..... with a bit of toying could guess the leads, majority of the receivers worked that I tried(this was maybe 15yrs ago)
a quick google search shows me a diagram that uses 4.7muF, 7805 4.7k, 1n4148, tsop1738; I'm guessing this or similar would've been the diagram I based off of...
I had a Sony 48X CD burner drive that would normally only run at 40X speed unless you pushed the eject button immediately after loading a disc. The manual said this was because the full 48X speed might cause an unbalanced disc to shatter. But it was just a rebadged Lite-On drive, and when I reflashed it with the original Lite-On firmware, I got the full 48X speed without needing to push the button.
I'm interested in that trackball keyboard. Looks like it would be a more compelling product than these CD drives.
It's just a keyboard with a trackball in it. It's cool, I think unicomp makes it. Not much to say about it other than that though
I can definitely understand the voice program letting you know what type of disc you've entered in for accessibility usefulness. And I fully support these features being turned on for all devices out of the box. You have eyes, you turn it off.
Also, when he described how painful it was to browse the web. Blind and people, people with hand coordination issues, and many others, have to use that painful method for everything....
I had constant problems with RealTek drivers and finally got a SoundBlaster AE-7 and it actually was really worth the money
I have the exact same card, bought it from b-stock sale. When I first listened to music through it, it was mind-blowing. And the best thing is: it works without issue under Linux (with exception of required ALSA/pulseaudio/pipewire shenanigans).
@@krazownik3139 I love the surround sound for gaming, too
I felt so seen when you described the process of making your own crummy pseudo stereo system with fabricobbled parts... I did that in the back room of a PC store where I worked and was assigned various repair and inventory duties. 😊
I mounted one in a car - it worked well when the car was immobile ;)
@@the_kombinator hah, yeah... not a lot of vibration dampening on PC style optical drives, that's true!
@@DeviantOllam and a tiny buffer, if any.
YEEAAAAHHH MORE CRD!!!!!
Edit: I actually use an Audigy 5 as my main soundcard. I make music and that thing has a really, really low noise floor, can handle extremely high-impedance headphones, and has a pretty quick ASIO.
Also, while not audiophile grade, the Creative Pebble 2.1s (the little ball speakers with an external subwoofer) are actually pretty damn good for the price, if you need something that sounds good to play music and videos with. I personally use Eris 3.5s because I needed something tuned for music creation, but they're not bad for listening to music casually.
I didn't realise they made them with more than one input. Is it as low-noise as those omnipresent Focusrite 2 and 4 input boxes?
@@kaitlyn__L I've never used a Focusrite, so I'm not sure. It's low enough though that I just run it at 100% and control my volume via the headphone amp in the Eris 3.5s, and even when everything is at max (which is way too loud), I can't hear any noise. This also depends on your external cables, they have to be well-insulated, but even with my current cables the built-in realtek sound chip in my PC is really noisy and likes to buzz sometimes.
There is probably a measurement somewhere online, people tend to measure the noise floor of amps when they test them, so you could probably find that information somewhere online.
Edit: the creative website states a 106dB signal-to-noise ratio, which appears to be identical to the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2nd gen.
To answer the question right at the start of the video: I bought a modern Sound Blaster card to go with my brand new motherboard I bought only a couple years back because the built-in Realtek chipset on the motherboard worked fine for just VERY basic audio support, but was paired with licensed DTS entry-level crap which was HEAVILY cut-back on features unless you bought into the DTS ecosystem of software. ALL of the built-in Realtek features were hard-disabled and replaced with the cut-back DTS features which were near useless, such as an equalizer which didn't have a way to adjust equalization from a flat base curve. D:
The intrusion of Dolby and DTS into computer audio is really complete now, huh? That's a really rough description.
You should be able to get the SCSI bus logs from a live Linux environment.
Nice video -- you brought back a lot of memories. The last time I was in a Re-PC store was around 2000... nearly 25 years ago. I can't help but think that those drives you picked up recently could have been on the table even back then. :)
Command & Conquer is interesting, it actually doesn't have the tracks as redbook audio but instead stored in a .mix archive, scores.mix. Scores lives on the CD because it's a huge file full of 1995-era compressed audio that then plays back in software. I don't know why they do it this way, track count maybe, the disappointment was real when I put the C&C disc in a CD player and received no tunes back in the day
That did work on the expansion disc, however. And, y'know, they also sold soundtrack CDs :p
@@Nyerguds Aw, I never thought to try with the Covert Ops disc!
And you’re right, they did! I remember wanting them through the little merch catalogs that came with the games (along with the pins, still want those pins) but could never get permission to order them. Oh well, MIX tools and a CD burner a couple of years later fixed one of those burning desires
@@ackartRed Alert's Counterstrike expansion also has CD audio tracks, but strangely, they messed up with the second expansion; the Aftermath disc just contains the same tracks as the Counterstrike one.
I bought the physical big box of the remasters, so now I got absolutely all of the music as CD audio :)
I built my first computer in 1990, an 8086, and have been building computers ever since. I've never seen one of these drives, you are a lucky person.
CD's exploding? ..YES, happened to me.
Had a CD exploding in my LiteOn CD-Drive when i ejected the disc - pieces came flying out into the room
Many of the "two button" CD-ROM drives _did_ have more functions via button combos!
For example, pressing and releasing Stop/Eject would stop playback, but holding it and then pressing the Play/Fwd button would skip back a track. Also, holding the Fwd button or the Back button combo would seek within a track. I think some also supported pause via a quick press of both buttons.
Whoa, I had no idea anything did this. I'm going to have to try this out!
I had one of these drives for my families windows 2000 pc. I think the remote was probably used 1 time before it noclipped out of reality and was never found again.
This video may just be about a slightly fancy CD ROM drive, but honestly, your videos are some of the most interesting, highly researched, long form, well put together presentations of technology like this on TH-cam. Even with ~15 years of content like this on TH-cam, you still manage to find stories untold and unknown to talk about, and pack an hours long video with actually interesting facts and hypotheses about the products.
Thank you, I've been very lucky to have figured out a niche that hasn't been totally explored already, haha. Glad you enjoy!
Remember back in the day doing the CD/DVD shuffle to find the best one for my use. Usually speed for copying and loading games lag free.
WELCOME! Thank you for using creative infra 1800!
I am kind of disappointed it didn't announce every mouse movement 😅
Edit: Also, the Zen Vision:M is their best product Creative ever made! (Although, maybe not as game-changing as the Sound Blaster)
I did not expect to learn so much about SCSI at the end there!
I love how this channel both celebrates and hate 90s technology.
As a side note, the IR remote's cursor function isn't actually much worse than the horrible on-screen keyboard inputs for smart TV apps like Netflix. It is agonizing having to use a remote to navigate to a letter, number, or symbol, press enter to select, then navigate to a new letter, number, or symbol. So things haven't improved all that much.
What makes for a far superior UI is an air-mouse. Looks a lot like a remote control, but uses an accelerometer (like in a smartphone) to move the mouse cursor and has a little keyboard on the back and appears to the PC as a plain old USB keyboard and mouse (even uses the same kind of wireless dongle that's barely bigger than the USB port). The one I've got does lack an Escape key, though, which is a bit of a problem for some programs, or getting up the GRUB menu when something's not working properly (and getting the timing on that right without accidentally leaving the menu to the GRUB prompt is hard enough with an actual keyboard, anyway, so maybe it's just as well).
This was pure gold. Many thanks.
There's a small rubber band near the door of the drive. You can see it if you shine a flash-light inside. You can pull it out and replace it with a new belt or the kind of rubber band they use to hold USB cables together.
Thanks for sending me down the short rabbithole of NEC Multispins, various crazy enclosures.
Everytime the CD would play I would think the song would be "can't get you out of my head"
Whenever you have a CD-ROM drive that won't open on its own you can insert a straightened paperclip into the small hole under the tray on the right side and it will push on the release mechanism and manually open the drive without risking damaging it
That usually only pops the drawer open enough to grab it and pull. In this case the drawer is already open so the paper clip wouldn't do anything.
@@CathodeRayDude when you insert the paperclip in the hole, you're rotating a gear. You can repeat the operation as many times as you like to get it open as needed