LGR - Massive 7X NEC CD-ROM Changer From 1995!
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
LGR
Receiving lots of questions and confused comments about how this works, so here goes: )
Yes, the drive is working as intended. Each time you press an eject/load button it will eject the disc tray so you can load a disc for that specific drive number. Tech reviewers mentioned this a downside in the '90s too and this functionality is also made clear in the documentation.
This means that discs cannot be internally swapped to another drive letter, they will stay in their respective letter/tray until you physically eject and swap them. And each time you navigate to another disc through software, it switches to that drive letter, but the discs themselves will return to the same internal tray when you're done. This also means you cannot access two discs at once, only one at a time with each of them having a designated drive letter at all times.
As for Phantasmagoria not being smart enough to look for other drive letters when disc-swapping: yep! As mentioned briefly in the video, there were programs and games that _did_ look for other drive letters (Under A Killing Moon is one example) but Phantasmagoria was just my chosen example of the majority of DOS software that _does not_ look for CD-ROMs elsewhere. Windows 9x software frequently made better use of CD-ROM changers in this respect, but since I wasn't able to get that working due to missing software I wasn't able to demonstrate that.
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Receiving lots of questions and confused comments about how this works, so here goes: )
Yes, the drive is working as intended. Each time you press an eject/load button it will eject the disc tray so you can load a disc for that specific drive number. Tech reviewers mentioned this a downside in the '90s too and this functionality is also made clear in the documentation.
This means that discs cannot be internally swapped to another drive letter, they will stay in their respective letter/tray until you physically eject and swap them. And each time you navigate to another disc through software, it switches to that drive letter, but the discs themselves will return to the same internal tray when you're done. This also means you cannot access two discs at once, only one at a time with each of them having a designated drive letter at all times.
As for Phantasmagoria not being smart enough to look for other drive letters when disc-swapping: yep! As mentioned briefly in the video, there were programs and games that _did_ look for other drive letters (Under A Killing Moon is one example) but Phantasmagoria was just my chosen example of the majority of DOS software that _does not_ look for CD-ROMs elsewhere. Windows 9x software frequently made better use of CD-ROM changers in this respect, but since I wasn't able to get that working due to missing software I wasn't able to demonstrate that.
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TheSteelRodent
CD changers are great, but on DOS/Windows they all work the same way - you get a drive letter for every logical drive in the unit. There's no way around that because MS designed the OS so it can only access the drives that way. On NT you can in theory access drives without a drive letter, but programs have to be designed specifically for it, and that's generally not done.
It's a pity Sierra went lazy with Phantasmagoria and didn't expect people to have CD changers, but most multi-disc programs and games actually have a config file where you can set where to find each disc, or it'll ask when it needs the disc where to find it. I remember with Under a Killing Moon I'd use both my CD-ROM drive and the CD burner and had the game look for half the discs in one drive and the other half in the other drive (believe UAKM is only 4 discs, though, and it meant for most the game I didn't have to change discs because it'd automatically hop back and forth between the two drives, and that game is optimized so you don't need to swap discs except at specific points in the game.
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CD changers are great, but on DOS/Windows they all work the same way - you get a drive letter for every logical drive in the unit. There's no way around that because MS designed the OS so it can only access the drives that way. On NT you can in theory access drives without a drive letter, but programs have to be designed specifically for it, and that's generally not done.
It's a pity Sierra went lazy with Phantasmagoria and didn't expect people to have CD changers, but most multi-disc programs and games actually have a config file where you can set where to find each disc, or it'll ask when it needs the disc where to find it. I remember with Under a Killing Moon I'd use both my CD-ROM drive and the CD burner and had the game look for half the discs in one drive and the other half in the other drive (believe UAKM is only 4 discs, though, and it meant for most the game I didn't have to change discs because it'd automatically hop back and forth between the two drives, and that game is optimized so you don't need to swap discs except at specific points in the game.
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mwiz100
So I'm late to the comments on this but my brother and I discovered upon a Nakamichi 6 disc changer years ago. It was basically obsolete at that time we got it but we still gave it a go. Now mind you this was on MacOS, (almost certainly macOS 9) but I do recall each disc you inserted would be read and then mount on the desktop. So as for games, which we did test it with a multi cd game, it would actually work as you described. I think that has more to do with how there's no fixed drive letters in MacOS so the game would simply query for -I want a disc named xyz- and since it was already -mounted- on the desktop it would access it which would cause the changer to swap discs.
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So I'm late to the comments on this but my brother and I discovered upon a Nakamichi 6 disc changer years ago. It was basically obsolete at that time we got it but we still gave it a go. Now mind you this was on MacOS, (almost certainly macOS 9) but I do recall each disc you inserted would be read and then mount on the desktop. So as for games, which we did test it with a multi cd game, it would actually work as you described. I think that has more to do with how there's no fixed drive letters in MacOS so the game would simply query for -I want a disc named xyz- and since it was already -mounted- on the desktop it would access it which would cause the changer to swap discs.
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Derek
I remember CD-ROM changers like this (and, maybe even this one) used in school libraries to host JSTOR and other multi-CD, academic databases. Since each one was attached to a dedicated, single-user workstation, the only-one-active-at-once nature of the beast didn't matter. I remember a couple of these still in use in my university into the 2000's, even though the university had a massive network infrastructure, perhaps due to the age of the database on those CD-ROMs or perhaps due to some strict licensing issues that prevented them ripping the contents to a networked hard disk. Dunno.
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I remember CD-ROM changers like this (and, maybe even this one) used in school libraries to host JSTOR and other multi-CD, academic databases. Since each one was attached to a dedicated, single-user workstation, the only-one-active-at-once nature of the beast didn't matter. I remember a couple of these still in use in my university into the 2000's, even though the university had a massive network infrastructure, perhaps due to the age of the database on those CD-ROMs or perhaps due to some strict licensing issues that prevented them ripping the contents to a networked hard disk. Dunno.
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CHRISMENENDEZ
I think the hardware is fine, after all, it's doing what it's designed to do, which is offer each CD a separate drive letter for you to use. Since you can't really read multiple discs at once, it's a pointless design choice, but that's what was intended. Software, on the other hand, shouldn't be bound by the same limitations hardware is, since you can pretty much do what you want as long as you know how to translate it into computer code, so Sierra had no excuse to be lazy and don't design a prompt for you to choose a drive letter if multiple CD-ROM drives were detected.
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I think the hardware is fine, after all, it's doing what it's designed to do, which is offer each CD a separate drive letter for you to use. Since you can't really read multiple discs at once, it's a pointless design choice, but that's what was intended. Software, on the other hand, shouldn't be bound by the same limitations hardware is, since you can pretty much do what you want as long as you know how to translate it into computer code, so Sierra had no excuse to be lazy and don't design a prompt for you to choose a drive letter if multiple CD-ROM drives were detected.
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Mikael
Seeing how this works with all the different drive letters I think this was primarily sold to bulleting board system operators. I would've loved to have one in mine. I think i had like a couple of HDDs just for storing files for my users and that in total was less than one CD had capacity, so 7 CDs of data would've been epic. How PCBoard handled CDs was that when a file / directory was marked as -on cd- PCBoard would copy the files over to a temporary directory on the HDD from where they were served to the users for batch download.
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Seeing how this works with all the different drive letters I think this was primarily sold to bulleting board system operators. I would've loved to have one in mine. I think i had like a couple of HDDs just for storing files for my users and that in total was less than one CD had capacity, so 7 CDs of data would've been epic. How PCBoard handled CDs was that when a file / directory was marked as -on cd- PCBoard would copy the files over to a temporary directory on the HDD from where they were served to the users for batch download.
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David
Young people won't understand why this was so useful. In 1995, this meant you could keep two different clip art CDROMS, a zip code directory, an Atlas, Shareware Mega Hits 2000 Volume 31, Corel Draw, a Photo CD, and an encyclopedia all in one drive with its own drive letter. Big deal.
Or you could serve a library of seven CD-ROMs to a whole computer library or office, saving the cost of equipping each one with a CD-ROM drive and saving users the hassle of swapping disks.
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Young people won't understand why this was so useful. In 1995, this meant you could keep two different clip art CDROMS, a zip code directory, an Atlas, Shareware Mega Hits 2000 Volume 31, Corel Draw, a Photo CD, and an encyclopedia all in one drive with its own drive letter. Big deal.
Or you could serve a library of seven CD-ROMs to a whole computer library or office, saving the cost of equipping each one with a CD-ROM drive and saving users the hassle of swapping disks.
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Spacelicious
I had a drive wich had 2 options. 4 drive letters or one. You could switch drive with a button or with a dos command. I gues there also was a windows program for this.
Clicking drive 4, for example, would simulate an eject and a an insert.
Ofcourse, Iopened it up. Broke the flat cable. And that was it. I was like 11 of 10.
This one didn't have a tray. Just ate the cd's like a car radio. I gues that minimizes the size of the unit.
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I had a drive wich had 2 options. 4 drive letters or one. You could switch drive with a button or with a dos command. I gues there also was a windows program for this.
Clicking drive 4, for example, would simulate an eject and a an insert.
Ofcourse, Iopened it up. Broke the flat cable. And that was it. I was like 11 of 10.
This one didn't have a tray. Just ate the cd's like a car radio. I gues that minimizes the size of the unit.
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PANTA
The issue of having to swap disks when playing the game could've been easily solved via hardware. Instead of pressing '2' to eject the disk, it couldve been used to press '2' to select the disk. So internally it's laser would allign with disk 2. So when the game is asking for Disk 2 it actually reads it. And double pressing 2 would make it eject. But probably would added another code or print which would make it too expensive.
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The issue of having to swap disks when playing the game could've been easily solved via hardware. Instead of pressing '2' to eject the disk, it couldve been used to press '2' to select the disk. So internally it's laser would allign with disk 2. So when the game is asking for Disk 2 it actually reads it. And double pressing 2 would make it eject. But probably would added another code or print which would make it too expensive.
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Frank
I'm pretty sure Nakamichi built the mech and rebadged it for NEC. I have a few of the different Nak models (externals like this and the excellent internal drives) and also a Pioneer CDROM changer that uses their standard 6-disc magazine. If you need Mac drivers for any of these drives, D2CD by Software Architects supports them all (though you can still download the Pioneer drivers directly from Pioneer's web site.
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I'm pretty sure Nakamichi built the mech and rebadged it for NEC. I have a few of the different Nak models (externals like this and the excellent internal drives) and also a Pioneer CDROM changer that uses their standard 6-disc magazine. If you need Mac drivers for any of these drives, D2CD by Software Architects supports them all (though you can still download the Pioneer drivers directly from Pioneer's web site.
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