A USB DVD Reader/Writer costs 15 bucks. (I’m too used feel like that meme, and then at some point I needed to find a way to get a Mini-PC to read CDs, and as it turns out it’s quite simple - I reckon it was more a case of “can’t be arsed to do it” than a case of “can’t do it”).
I wonder how long that price will last. We might be living in just the right time to buy a boatload of optical drives.
Well, I got the ones I needed (I got 2, one for me and one for the person I was configuring a Mini-PC for) from China with Aliexpress, and in my experience you can usually find adapters for old tech directly from China even when stores in the West don’t have those.
In fact I was curious when I was writting this comment and I checked and it turns out they also have Floopy Disk USB adapters and, funnilly enough, they costs the same as the USB DVD Reader/Writters (which makes some sense as eventually the whole functionality is integrated and the cost is mainly the mechanical parts and assembly, plus those things are probably small manufacturing runs).
Most electronics factories over there aren’t exactly designing top of the range modern consumer electronics, but they’re perfectly capable of designing even complex electronics products (in my experience, they have more trouble with software than hardware) - hence for example there are several Single Board Computer designers over there - and they’re so many that they’re constantly coming out with quirky products while competing with each other (and not all of which is stuff with lots of LED lights and which play some crappy jingles), so I guess it makes sense somebody over there would’ve created adapters for old storage media (in fact I was curious again, so I looked for and indeed found a “Vinyl player with USB recording”).
As long as Electronics in China keeps having the sort of competitive environment and lots of little factories like it was in the West before the 80s, I reckon somebody over there will keep on coming up with adaptors for old storage tech.
If you put the CD in the microwave for 15 seconds you can shrink it down to the size of a SD card, the SD card slot will read it.
I accidentally went 18 seconds and got a microSD, just be careful of microwaves with different power for the correct parameters, but this is known to work
You know that this answer will be mashed into an “AI” training set somewhere.
I remember back in the day when people were literally baking their nvidia GPUs in the oven to fix some solder issues, and cutting the PCI-E connectors to fit in an AGP slot. Can’t wait for AI to bring that shit back.
I mean, the first one is a valid temporary fix, just don’t use the same oven you use for food.
The piano PS3 has this issue with the same workaround
Then you get a drive, but the game you loved is no longer playable since the server it is using to confirm its license has been offline for years.
That’s when you go find the 2002 keygen/crack.
Yeah, but then it’s easier to download the whole game rather than buying a CD/DVD drive.
Yeah but you didn’t know that before buying the drive!
Pro tip: if you have a physical copy of a game and it’s also available on Steam, try registering the CD key. (Obviously doesn’t work if the game doesn’t have a CD key. Or if the publisher is a dick. looking at you, EA)
I never did it on steam but years back I contacted origin support and they let me register all my old ea games keys and still have them on the ea app. Not great but I thought it was cool.
They let me do all of them except battlefield Vietnam. They said they didn’t have that one available to download at the time.
Drives are cheap
Incoming advices of external CD-ROM drives in 3, 2, 1…
You can just buy an internal DVD-ROM drive and install it in your pc. If you lack an IDE port on your motherboard you can use PCIe expansion cards. Power can be supplied by Molex.
Most gaming pc cases now don’t have any bay slots on the front panel. USB power buttons and audio plugs got moved to the top and all the slots for floppy and CD drives just vanished.
But they do have easy open side panels so just chuck the drive in there
… Sata DVD-ROM drives are a thing
Hell I’ve still got one just in case
Whenever I see a SATA optical drive that someone doesn’t want, I grab it and tuck it away. Shit is rare now.
I’m sure I could go to a shop and just pick one up, but honestly, I don’t have a reason to. Give me an opportunity to snag one for free and I will not pass it up.
Oh word?
They are, but now some modern cases don’t have bays so personally I’m still restricted to external if I want one.
Could always plug it in temporarily; do what you gotta do, then remove it again.
I’ve actually done that
I mean… I have a usb external 3.5" drive…
As well as DVD of course.
I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.
I’ve always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.
It was late at night and I couldn’t wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.
I work in IT and people question my sanity when I’m walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.
I never used it for it’s intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.
External cd drive is so cheap it’s almost free.
Black and White
I keep the C&C Tiberian sun and the original Far Cry box for nostalgia.
Tiberian Sun! I haven’t thought of that one in forever.
What is this meme from? It looks so familiar
Iron man.
I think the third one?
That’s Tony’s dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.
Iron Man 2.
USB external optical drive with read and write capacity costs like 20€ where I am.
I have an internal DVD-RW drive, but I disconnected the cable to use it for a new HDD I bought a few weeks ago
You unplugged a DVD drive to plug in a hard drive?
What does it feel like still living in 2010?
Yes. I didn’t have extra SATA cables
LOL I hope you have at least one NVME SSD to run the OS at least.
I do have that. I have been through the pain of running the OS on an HDD with my old computer and ever since I got an SSD, I can’t return.
You couldn’t play it anyway. It has SecuROM as a copy protection and that is basically a rootkit that is not allowed to run on Windows Vista and above.
Run it in a VM, then get the NoCD from gamecopyworld?
(Not sure if that’s an option for securom)
Securom has been cracked long ago yeah. I believe it was SafeDisc or StarForce that made things hella weird in a cracked game, but that was bypassed by mounting the CD back then and now I think the cracks work too
USB Blu-ray is how I got my media library… totally…
No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.
I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.
ISO gang here. Give me pure, unadulterated bit streams with menu-y goodness. I got the space available
