I eliminated CD swaps FOREVER. [Nakamichi MJ-5.16]

Back in the day, playing games that came on multiple discs could be SO irritating. 20 years later, I fixed it.
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Chapters:
00:00 Sketch (Disc Swap Hell)
02:00 Background
11:06 The Multi-Drive Concept
13:10 Nakamichi Demo & Mechanism
19:19 SCSI Concepts
22:05 CDROM Overdrive (Bad Attraction)
25:24 SCSI Express Tower
28:55 The Windows Problem
31:33 Game Support
35:17 This Is Awesome (So What Happened?)
41:24 Conclusion
Corrections:
18:53 I learned some FASCINATING things about this after the video was done. CDROMs connect to the IDE/ATA port, but they do not speak the same language as hard drives; they use ATAPI, which is generally described as "SCSI over IDE." This I knew, but I thought it was a limited subset. I never imagined that it supported LUNs, but it does. So an "IDE" CDROM can absolutely appear as two, five, or even seven devices, with no special software. This has actually led to bugs! Some CD-RW drives do not check the LUN field before responding to a command, so when the OS scans the bus, the drive can appear as seven separate drives. This happened on both Windows XP and Linux, at least. Linux received a patch that uses a heuristic to avoid this situation, which is probably why you've never seen it.
22:05 I don't know how I did this, but the album name here is wrong. that's a Jeff Rosenstock album. I haven't even thought about Jeff in weeks. the correct album name is I Don't Know What I'm Doing. To be fair to myself, both of these names / artists are highly self deprecating.

[@zednotdead]

CRD: Moves out Another family moves into his house Someone from that family: "Honey, do we own 15 discs for a game called "Riven"?"

[@thumbwarriordx]

The thing about retail games back in the day tho... when they got a couple years old they got CHEAP. Casually replacing them with a new copy was a no-brainer. None of this 20% off 10 year old games on Steam. 3 year old game? 10 bucks at your local big box.

[@tekvax01]

busted! :)

[@trundlesaurus9681]

@@thumbwarriordx Back when you could find bargain bins overflowing with Maxis, EA, Interplay, etc. games at every office supply / chain bookstore.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

LOL, that game was multiple DVDs if you were fortunate enough to have the appropriate drive. I think the CD version only existed because they couldn't afford to leave those users out, and couldn't count on people buying a new drive just for the game.

[@julian-sark]

Rather than putting "Riven" in quotes, it is actually rather mandatory to quote the word "game" when talking about Riven. :p

[@raytaylornz]

Put all 5 discs in slot 1 of each drive so you dont have to wait for it to mechanically swap the disc. In slot 2 of each drive would be a different game.

[@mal2ksc]

This also scales better, if a game is more than five discs. Even though CRD only has five Nakamichi drives, the sixth one could be the ordinary ATA drive left in the system.

[@AdrianWoodUK]

That sounds great for games where you can specify which drive to read from or read the titles, like Riven, but absolutely awful for games that check each drive sequentially for the disc, which many did. For those, going from disc 1 to disc 2 of a game would mean it swapping through every disc in the first reader before finding it in the second. Going to the 3rd/4th/5th disc could mean swapping through dozens of discs before getting to the right one. There is a sneaky workaround that could avoid that somewhat: change the drive letters, so D: is reader 1 disc 1, E: is reader 2 disc 1, F: is reader 3 disc 1 etc. Then you'd get the effect you want... For the game/s with discs in the first slots. Discs in later slots would mean swapping through each drive for each disc change (which isn't really any worse, or better, than this setup).

[@sigilbaram]

@@AdrianWoodUK also make sure that games that use labels are latter in the alphabet since they aren't scanning every drive anyway vs in the video the label using Riven was at the front. Could maybe even launch games with a little script that touches the relevant drives to trigger the physical switch before the game even wants the disks or maybe even reletter drives as each game launches to minimize scanning, cut down on letter use, and bypass the 26 letter limit.

[@blendpinexus1416]

would be an interesting method

[@ericbsmith42]

@@AdrianWoodUK Nah, the physical layout of the disc drives is not connected to the Windows Drive Letter Assignment. If you have a game that goes sequentially you simply reassign the drive letters so that they appear sequentially in Windows.

[@andrewpalmer208]

16:56 "The drive knows exactly where the discs are because it knows where they arent" By subtracting where the disc is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The disc changer subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the disc from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the disc is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the disc changer. However, the disc must also know where it was.

[@magnopere]

*cue video of a disc just continually being ejected from the tray*

[@nitehawk86]

I believe the drive uses a retro encabulator for this mechanism.

[@SirRigbyBaconKaiser]

This is how a cruise missile works.

[@dvargas3553]

What in the absolute hell did this man just say LOL.

[@Uranthos1]

@@dvargas3553 kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIvIZn1uiLt2j7M

[@thebluemarauder]

26:00 Technically SCSI still exists in the enterprise space in the form of SAS. Just as IDE/ATA was replaced by Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI was replaced with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). I don’t doubt the old parallel version is still used for some niche purpose, though.

[@alext3811]

My HP Envy 2-in-1 laptop that's maybe half a decade old has a SCSI SD Card reader, so some consumer devices still use it to this day.

[@unicodefox]

@@alext3811 USB hard drives use UAS (USB attached SCSI)

[@alext3811]

@@unicodefox Heh, forgot about that. I actually have an enclosure for laptop HDDs (currently has my 2-in-1's old 1tb HDD, after it was replaced by an SSD).

[@prodbyfaith]

There's also iSCSI!

[@windows8.1proforthewin]

​@@prodbyfaithahh yes, SCSI over network... I remember using that

[@FooneTuring]

I didn't believe you were going to really do it. I'm sorry my faith wasn't true.

[@patangaha]

Hey Foone

[@unicodefox]

how do you outdo foone of all people

[@bluecollarmage4512]

@@unicodefox imo he just did it about 10-15 later in era than Foone usually putzes around in

[@hypercalcium]

It’s almost… obscene

[@soli-ethd]

Honestly Foone, if Gravis hadn't done this himself I'd absolutely expect something like this in a huge Twitter thread from my favorite monarch of insane but also lovely tech projects

[@dataterminal]

It's worth noting that it was only narrow/fast SCSI that was limited to 8 devices, with wide/ultra SCSI supported up to 16.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

I knew one person who had not one, but three of these. In his tower PC. He ran a BBS (well past BBS' "sell by" date) and used them for his file library, boasting the biggest file library of any BBS in town. (with a dozen shareware/shovelware CDs loaded.)

[@JesusKristov]

The Bad Attraction part woke something inside me I'd never felt before. Thank you for this journey of discovery

[@gregdaweson4657]

Certainly was woke.

[@310matt310]

Song rips 28:24

[@soli-ethd]

This is the perfect Gravis video: A completely out of nowhere montage with excellent production values, "of course I got two of them, and when I say I got two of them I of course mean I got three of them, and when I say I got three of them I of course mean I got seven of them and a bigass SCSI enclosure shaped like a mini tower," and being 100% on board with you owning Riven until you insisted a suspicious amount of times that you definitely own it legally and they just are in your storage unit in Canada

[@brhfl2812]

Despite all the cool stuff on display here, the thing that floored me was he revelation that Riven just scans for the appropriate disc title. I agree/it makes sense that it's because they were a Mac house first, but it still shocks me that they were handling it that cleanly on a PC at that time. Loved the music video!

[@CathodeRayDude]

Right?? Fact: I had to rewrite the script when I found out that it scans for the right disc. I was CERTAIN it made you type in a path - and possibly the VERY first release did.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@CathodeRayDude I know the game LGR showed for this device was coded to use the same disc path for every swap and defeated the purpose. But I don’t recall which game that was, heh. This way seems way better.

[@philipc4272]

@@kaitlyn__L I'm pretty sure it was Phantasmagoria

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@philipc4272 that sounds right! Ah, if only I CBA to take five seconds loading a video to check :)

[@nickwallette6201]

When I was playing this game, I had a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM, so I would just load two discs at once. (Arguably, this is better than a changer -- no delay. But, if you have five changers, why not load one disc of each game into each drive?! :-D Anyway...) So, AFAICT, Riven has always been cool about finding the disc on its own. It was pretty seamless. Later, I just used Alcohol, and then even later, got the DVD release (and loaded THAT into Alcohol), and that was that.

[@joshuahorton-campbell3554]

HottTTtTtTTTtttt - I never thought I'd see an accurate representation of what it would look like if a SCSI tower assembly was crossed with a pole dance. So creative and funny!

[@Ben79k]

Im rarely speechless and in awe at a youtube video these days but i really did not expect you to just assemble ALL THE DRIVES. that was an insane turn.

[@christianhunt7382]

I remember in school year 03 talking about the theoretics of scsi, and chaining drives together and what you could possibly do. Here almost 20 years later I'm watching someone do those pipedreams IRL and I'm loving it. Lol

[@Bobbias]

I didn't learn about it in school, but yeah, I recall learning about SCSI in the late 90s or early 2000s, and thinking about the crazy things you could do.

[@TheGrinningViking]

Oh you got me. That musical montage. The buildup of the completely factual interesting info and then the payoff of the KZbin title being correct was just chef's kiss, awesome.

[@wolfsatyr]

Check out Brad Sucks's stuff, he feels bad about himself the same way i feel bad about myself, and maybe you too

[@bradsucks]

@@wolfsatyr I feel bad about everyone else also

[@vwestlife]

I have a NEC "4X4" (4-disc, 4X speed) CD-ROM changer. It is IDE and shows up as four drive letters. And personally I think of the jumper settings on IDE drives as M for Main and S for Secondary.

[@iceowl]

i had one of those too. it was very useful for several years until it stopped working.

[@joeo6378]

Genuine belly laugh when you got to "Z" drive. I was watching with GREAT anticipation at how you were going to get past Z lol. Fantastic.

[@AndyDo]

The 5 bay tower + Robocopy were how we created all of our dogfood distributions at Microsoft for MSN Explorer back in the day. A poor PM would just be locked in the duplication room for 2 hours making tons of discs.

[@zymurgic]

Blimey. I remember similar internal Microsoft CDROM distributions. Was that the same part of Microsoft that shipped IE3 on a bunch of CDs to ISPs? (I was at the time at one of the receiving ends of that very sneakernet CDN).

[@der.Schtefan]

SCSI was very exotic for PC users. Only "the rich kids" had it. When CD burners came out some people invested in SCSI because of less likely buffer underruns, but when CD-ROMS got buffer underrun protection that advantage was gone too.

[@scottlarson1548]

I remember a bunch of Macs used SCSI even in the late 80s.

[@MacPhantom]

@@scottlarson1548 SCSI was the Macintosh standard, both internally and externally, for hard and CD drives from the Mac Plus in 1986 until the beige Power Macintosh G3 of 1997. Only after that (iMac and G3 Blue and White from 1998) would they use IDE internally (FireWire externally) and S-ATA (from the PowerMac G5 in 2004).

[@PileOfEmptyTapes]

The big advantage of SCSI in the olden days was that it used bus master DMA transfers by default, while IDE drives were still stuck in PIO. The ability to use multiword DMA was included in Intel southbridges from about 1995 on (PIIX), but it took until Win95 OSR2 for DMA to become a standard OS option, so 1996/97. SCSI did remain the best option if you wanted the fastest harddrives (there weren't any ATA 10k RPM drives until the WD Raptors years later, and 15k always remained SCSI/SAS exclusive) or a fancy scanner.

[@deusexmachina5769]

But as he mentioned at 39:50, there was an ide version of it.

[@Shatter415]

@@MacPhantom I got a Mac SCSI drive to work on my Apple ][e using the Apple ][ SCSI 2 adapter. Original scsi wasn't compatible because, SCSI. Having a 30meg drive on my Apple ][ was awesome. Also ran a 5.6MHz accelerator, and has a 1meg ram card which I had set up as a 512k ram disk on boot that loaded off the HDD for most commonly used apps. Such a fun system way back.

[@kazzle101]

Back in the day we had a multi-cd thing like that in the college where I worked, it was connected to the network to allow students to view encyclopaedias and other dull but worthy content. It got abandoned when they found that a class of 30 students all accessing the same CD was a poor learning experience.

[@rougenaxela]

20:03 Fun fact: It's incorrect that this couldn't be done over IDE. All standard IDE CD-ROM drives do their business over ATAPI protocol, which is a wrapper protocol to allow sending SCSI commands over ATA/IDE, and multiple SCSI LUNs over ATAPI was absolutely a thing that the protocol permitted. If you search "multi-LUN ATAPI" you can find some references to this being done out there. Nakamichi made an IDE version of this very drive in fact! (EDIT: Made this comment before getting to the part where you mentioned Nakamichi's IDE version. In any case, even if the Nakamichi device didn't do it, from what I can find, it looks like true Multi-LUN ATAPI IDE devices definitely existed, though finding specific models is trickier at least with the search terms I know to use. Mostly finding mailing list posts of several different Linux kernel developers attesting to their existence back in the late 90s and early 00s. It wouldn't surprise me if some OSs had ATAPI implementations that didn't support this however, which might be why Nakamichi's IDE drive didn't do that.)

[@adcurtin]

I've got an NEC multispin 4x4 IDE. the multiple LUNs are natively supported in like windows 95 and newer, it shows up as 4 drive letters.

[@D3M3NT3Dstrang3r]

@@adcurtin Had some brand 4 disk changer in like 97 ish that was IDE and showed them just like this in Windows 95.

[@makomk]

It looks like at least some versions of the ATAPI standard require multi-disk changers to act like a single disc drive but with extra commands to query the number of slots and switch discs. (See section "9.0 Changer Model".) That's probably why they act that way rather than reporting multiple LUNs. Of course, the driver could still present multiple virtual drive letters and handle switching between them despite that.

[@hieyeque1]

Seems to me if you loaded a game, like Riven, "vertically" - meaning a single disc of Riven in each of the drives (each disc 1 slot) - you could press button 1 on the front of all the disc drives and load a single 5-disc-game at once. This would eliminate disc swapping mid-game. Great video - enjoyed it.

[@blendpinexus1416]

great idead but this unfortunely wouldn't work unless the game was programmed to specifically take advatage of that and even for a disc swapping game it normally wouldn't work as the game is looking at the disc drive it's currently in and would add a headache layer to make it work.

[@hieyeque1]

@@blendpinexus1416 Hi, thanks for your reply. But isn't it the case that the multi-disc changer already applies a unique drive letter to each of the discs that it has stored inside? When the user selects a disc #, you're not swapping a disc to the current drive letter, you're selecting a different disc, on a different LUN, which is a different drive letter. I agree, there probably are some games that expect a single drive letter, but it looks like his solution for Riven, specifically, was just having a enough discs loaded all at once that he doesn't have to change CDs. I'd hazard a guess that most games look at the disc volume label rather than drive letter.

[@christophers707]

@@blendpinexus1416 are you sure @ 31:40 of the video its explained that it searches all available drives so I think if you loaded all 5 disks into slot one it would be almost instant to load disks

[@TheAceWolfe01]

I wanted to say exactly this. That was my first thought when he put all the Riven discs in the same drive

[@blendpinexus1416]

@@christophers707 it might, but at the same time he does mention that many games wouldn't switch the used drive on the fly

[@jameslangridge8849]

the montage was actually perfect. music choise, cinematography, synchronizing movement beats to the song. perfect. chef's kiss. 😘👌

[@ichemnutcracker]

I think the "ban you from my channel" thing might be a funny thing (even if true) to say a maximum of once per video. But saying it multiple times makes me feel a little bit unwelcome, even if I weren't going to behave in the way you describe. It feels like the "broken windows policing" of comment moderation.

[@mal2ksc]

Having had an incident of triggering someone just by invoking a meme, my first thought was "fine, you don't need me". I understand the need for safe spaces, but the anxiety I feel about transgressing exceeds the benefit of the social interaction, so I just walk away from all but the most concise, businesslike responses.

[@RadikAlice]

God, the montage had me smiling from ear to ear. Damn near the best part of the video

[@Echin0idea]

Moving the plant pot to make room for the inset - yes! I don't know why I loved that so much but it's just so damn good Edit: also love that you went to the effort of chroma-keying off the paint colour so the other plant appears on top in the tiny bit of overlap. That utterly unnecessary attention to detail and craftsmanship is kinda badass.

[@misophoniq]

I had three of these (although I think another brand name) in my BBS server in the late 90s. It was great to host an incredible amount of files on my BBS. Everything ran smoothly for months until a dreadful moment when two different users tried to browse through 2 different CDs in the same disc changer. My server did nothing besides non-stop CD swapping from that moment on. Never found a good solution for that scenario, but larger harddisks made CDs obsolete pretty soon after that incident and then came the internet that basically made my entire BBS obsolete! :-P

[@MeriaDuck]

Oh those days of (CD based) BBS 🤣

[@CabeButler]

I had a similar setup for the exact same reason except mine was more of a single CD autoloader the size of a stereo that supported 15 CDs vs a 5 CD changer drive. I remember MajorBBS had a request queuing system that'd change CDs as you needed. I want to say I saw a few ProBoard BBS with a request tool that'd act as a door (how games and other external apps were launched) for you to get what file on what cd you wanted. Once you selected it, you could go back and play another game. It'd alert you through the BBS that your request was ready and you could start the download. Those were the days.

[@mal2ksc]

I remember a BBS that had to implement a system where there was one CD always online, and another that rotated daily to provide access to the others that had suddenly been yanked due to hardware problems. You might have been that guy.

[@matthewrease2376]

Bro, another user in the comments described their friend or something as doing this? I think your long lost neighborhood friend is in this comment section haha.

[@misophoniq]

@@matthewrease2376 LOL, found the comment. Thanks for pointing it out. I was indeed boasting to be the largest BBS in town back then, because I was. :-D

[@andreasklindt7144]

The most painful game I ever played in terms of disc swapping was "The X-Files" from 1999. It came on 7 (seven!!!) CD-ROMs! I mean, it was totaly worth it, I loved the game. But a CD-ROM changer would've been *gold* to me back then. Great video!

[@solarstrike33]

Wait ‘till you get to Black Dahlia with 8 discs.

[@jakublulek3261]

The original Mafia did really annoying, you boot it up with DISC 1 but when you wanted to choose anything in the menu, you need to insert DISC 2. And for some bonus modes, DISC 3. Baldur's Gate 2 wanted you to swap between disc 2 and 3 and for later parts of the game, disc 4. No, I don't miss it.

[@Colaholiker]

I worked at a small computer store in Germany specialized in building custom PCs around the time this drive came out. And you are correct, people didn't want to add SCSI unless they really "had to". Because you either went with a cheaper controller, risking a lot of compatibility issues, or you went with Adaptec which worked... if you were still able to buy any drives after forking over the money for the controller. I'd estimate in hindsight that something between 1 and 2 percent of the computers we sold had SCSI. Mostly people who had high performance scanners wanted SCSI, as USB wasn't a thing yet, and parallel port scanners were pretty bad, both in their scan performance and in their data transfer speeds. This is in fact the first time I heard about that particular drive. But I don't recall seeing any Nakamichi branded drives at all when going through our suppliers' catalogues, which makes me wonder if they were sold here at all. Probably not. I'm not going to comment on the name that was used at that time to tell apart the two drives on an IDE channel (so please don't ban me), but I don't think your suggestion of "primary" and "secondary" is a particularly good choice either, for a technical reason. All controllers that I remember, no matter if they were standalone cards or integrated into the mainboard, used these exact two words to tell apart the two channels the controller had. So to indicate the complete address of a drive, you'd have to call it the primary/secondary... or wait, is it the secondary/primary? So maybe just calling them drive 0 / drive 1, like on SCSI, only limited to two options, would work better. The same term to differentiate two channels and two drives on these channels is confusing imho. And for a time there was, at least on some controller models, even a difference between the primary and secondary channel. When the faster (I think it was called UDMA-66, the one that used the higher wire count ribbons but still 40-pin connectors) variant of IDE came out, many controllers only supported the faster standard on the primary channel (for fast hard disks), while the secondary channel only supported the slower variant, which was well enough for your average CD-ROM at that time. When assembling PCs, this made it especially cumbersome, as slow CD-ROMs would have slowed down a faster hard disk, so we usually went with both drives set as "drive 0" (yes, that name works) on each of the two channels. But that of course meant two of these unwieldy ribbon cables to be squeezed into the case.

[@tituslafrombois1164]

My god the production standards here are outstanding, I can totally see why you're so proud of this one, it's worth being proud of! The opening sketch, the music video that makes setting up a SCSI box look like a montage tuning up a classic hot rod, it's all outstanding. You keep outdoing yourself with each successive video, my only fear is that you'll burn yourself out with your own standards 😅

[@CalebFrey]

"CD ROMs were a Game Changer" I see what you did there Great video as always!

[@TheRepairLair]

The SCSI tower was unexpected and super entertaining to see, thank you for the effort!!

[@buranflakes]

I was in awe the entire time you put together that SCSI tower of power; you absolutely went mad with power there and it was glorious

[@atkelar]

I recall one of these towers used with normal drives as a "network CD sharing center" in our company back then. All the Corel Draw cliparts as a network share, ready to use for all licensed users instead of copies and CD drives per workstation was a huge benefit.... and it avoided people like that one guy who used sticky tape to tape a CD ROM to his office door so he wouldn't forget to return it and then he peeled off the reflective layer... Nope, CDs won't work without that.

[@graygraygraygraygraygray]

You are the only human being that would ironically own an “I ❤️ DRM” t-shirt

[@trondmm]

I've got a similar shirt, that says "DRM - No one admitted", in an MPAA rating style.

[@razgar02]

he should be the only human being in general; i think anyone owning that unironically should be punched in the gut

[@guywith_dog]

well... nobody's gonna own one unironically

[@AlexWard94]

Excellent acting in this video, definitely one of your most engaging yet! I spent so much of the video thinking ‘but hang on, there isn’t a game that was clever enough to search all disk drives…’ and then bam, there’s Riven! Strangely, I still miss optical media - there was always something exciting about picking up a game on several discs and waiting in anticipation for half an hour while the game installed one disc at a time!

[@UpLateGeek]

OMG that drive montage killed me! I'm currently dead. Humour-wise at least. Anyway, I was one of those weird consumers you talk of who had SCSI drives in their computer in the late 90s. I might have even had one of these if I knew they existed! I switched to a SCSI CD burner when I got sick of buffer underruns while burning CDs. That was before they figured out how to make drives that could recover and resume burning after an underrun. Eventually I bought a SCSI DVD drive (a slot load Pioneer model, and later DVD burner - also a slot load Pioneer model), but my 400MHz celery CPU was too slow to play back DVD movies without dropping frames. So obviously I had to buy a MPEG decoder card. (It was a second-hand card, so cheaper than buying a whole new CPU at the time.)

[@mhyzon1]

I’m also not too surprised this “just worked”. IDE cdroms used ATAPI (ATA Packet Interface) which basically encapsulated SCSI commands inside of the crummy ATA protocol (this is also what USB does). So a “native” SCSI “interface” is what the OS is pretty much always taking to, and thusly what the software developers would expect to deal with. Also, looking forward to the next video if that’s what I think it is. I remember external media carousels back in the day (SCSI, USB, or FireWire) targeted at libraries, universities, and extremely wealthy people who didn’t want to have to swap their music or DVD libraries around, they just wanted to press a button and listen/watch a thing.

[@GenericSweetener]

This is the realization of so many dreams of mine. I laughed, I cried, I acknowledged that you legitimately own at least one copy of Riven. 10 out of 10.

[@bryanteverett8421]

I think this is my favorite video of yours so far! Exactly enough information covered on topic that I don’t feel like I have to go research more info, and just the right kind of topic that makes me reminisce of years past where hardware ruled supreme over software! 😯

[@juanmacias5922]

This was such an amazing video lol how cool are those drives tho!

[@tombuck]

Those “ka-thunk!” disc changing noises are really something special. Phenomenal work on this one!

[@ahensley]

I definitely broke a friend's Riven disc back in the day when I thought it would be a good idea to keep the unused ones in a bizarre CD holder that was built right into the plastic of the tower. That thing had a death grip on disc 2... This would have been so much better to have had instead!

[@peasedustin]

this is my first video of yours and i loved it! thank you!

[@RedRamzor]

I think this is my favorite video from you dude! I had no idea these things existed!

[@nkronert]

Speaking of Nakamishi - when I was a kid, one of my neighbors had a cassette player of that brand. For audio quality reasons they didn't believe in bi-directional read/write heads, so their technical solution for auto reverse was to have a mechanism that would physically push out the cassette, rotate it 180 degrees and pull it in again. I thought that was insane but fascinating 🙂

[@mal2ksc]

I believe the justification was that the tracking would never be exactly the same in both directions... so don't even try. They came to this conclusion after trying a lot.

[@sethlopato8554]

That would be the rx-505 great deack

[@siberx4]

The funniest part of this video to me is the fact that the very first DVD drive we got at our house came with a pack-in game to show off the extra capacity and it was; you guessed it, Riven, so I never experienced the particular form of suffering demonstrated in the intro. That aside, amazing video and I absolutely loved the tower assembly montage. Windows pathing has always been (and seemingly always will be) incredibly stupid, and there's so many layers of abstraction and compatibility all woven into each other at this point that I don't think they'll ever get themselves out of the mess. I still need to step away from my computer and take a few deep breaths every time somebody suggests using NTFS junctions as a solution to a particular problem, because anybody saying that has clearly never tried to actually use one in real life and run into all the weird broken behaviour you encounter months down the road now that your filesystem isn't following the standard "drive letter equals one disk" conventions that Windows is built on.

[@tsotate]

That may be the first dramatic SCSI connecting montage ever filmed.

[@noinktechnique]

Your best work yet, categorically satisfying. I want a crunchy tower of these so bad. . . The montage was just icing on the cake

[@serenity1378]

"It's not unheard of ... or even to crack a legitimately purchased copy of a game." that's still not unheard of. I know it's a lot less common, but there are some publishers who still use really nasty DRM software, and a lot of people will refuse to install it even if they're willing to buy it, and will just, pay for it, and then pirate it, because it's literally a better, cleaner, and safer experience. I say if you've already paid for it, why not? It's also legal to break DRM if you own the product, in the EU (and as such, still also in the UK unless we change the laws we have on the books). Precedent set with DVDs so I'm not sure how well that would hold up with anything modern. But our right to backup things we paid for is definitely stronger than some other places.

[@cybernet3000]

It's also the only way to play the original disc versions of... well, almost every game from the late 90s through the 2000s on a modern PC, since Microsoft stopped supporting all those disc based DRMs years ago. I have a whole bankers box full of games that I can only play now if I use a NO-CD crack or repurchase them on Steam or GOG - assuming the game is even available to repurchase on a digital store front, which a good handful of them aren't (looking at you, Freelancer).

[@serenity1378]

@@Cooe. Tell me you don't understand DRM and the issues people have with it without telling me you don't understand DRM.

[@QuintusCunctator]

@@Cooe. Why are you talking in past tense? Denuvo is still in use today, and people still have issues with it, and not only for ideologic reasons - it is known to impact performance negatively. Do a quick search on steam pages if you don't believe me.

[@renakunisaki]

@@Cooe. SecuROM, StarForce, and Sony XCP come to mind.

[@solarstrike33]

@@renakunisaki SafeDisc too.

[@francistheodorecatte]

gravis this is the best fucking video you've ever made and I'm not even done watching the full thing. holy shit, bravo.

[@koozmusic]

Caching the disc label was definitely a good move on Nakamichi's part, but it would've been awesome to have it go a step further and cache the entire TOC.

[@salazarrumplestein3937]

Windows has always cached the label. All CD drives did this.

[@uomoartificiale]

Loved the attention to detail of compositing the plant over the magazine card in the last part of the video. Keep up the good work!

[@hbkirb]

I have a nit to pick - you actually can assign non-floppy drives to A: and B: now! Not sure how long ago it changed, whether that’s a thing that was always possible on NT or if it only recently changed in Windows 10. My 2 data HDDs are assigned to A: and B: on my PC because I just happened to notice those as an option while fixing the drive letter ordering one day and just knew I had to see whether it’d work. Disappointingly none of my apps seem to have raised any eyebrows over my 2TB A: drive. Love how obnoxiously unique the SCSI tower is. Fortunately/unfortunately (your choice) I grew up in the era when high capacity hard drives started becoming cheap and ethernet became just a normal thing every school has, so I don’t think I got a glimpse of the networked SCSI CD-ROM experience. Sure was a seemingly infinite list of Flash edutainment games to pick from though.

[@McDuffington]

This has been true for ages, "A:" and "B: " can be used like any other letter, no issues. You can assign "A:" to the primare OS disk, and have Windows run from "A:" but unfortunately some crappy software does use hard coded paths (which is evil)

[@goeland4585]

@@McDuffington (evil)

[@tomaszgasior772]

However, don't use A: or B: for swap/page file - this won't work.

[@tOSdude]

Can confirm, my old HP Omnibook automatically assigned any USB drive as A: with Windows XP.

[@McDuffington]

@@tomaszgasior772 The driveletter is irrelevant. Should be no problem having just one drive mapped as "A:"

[@panqueque445]

10:30 I remember I got a legitimate, brand new copy of Half Life 2 and it triggered the copy protection. I got to a point in the game where a character is supposed to get in an elevator with you and take you down, but that didn't happen. Basically I was unable to progress past that part. I went to every forum I could find and everyone said "that's just copy protection, that happens when you play a pirated copy". Eventually I found a little thread of people complaining that their legit copies of the game were triggering the copy protection just like mine. I ended up having to crack the game anyway.

[@Nuskrad]

iirc, Valve released a patch, essentially an official no-cd crack for the DVD version of the game shortly after release because so many people were having trouble with the DRM and it not being compatible with a lot of dvd drives. I remember the DVD drive in my laptop at the time had trouble with a lot of games due to weird incompatibility issues, Securom protected games would just refuse to run and Starforce and some others could be iffy. I had to get cracks for all the games I legitimately owned (and would often crack them just for convenience anyway)

[@renakunisaki]

I've had to download pirate copies of DVDs I had just bought because their protection made them unusable in my player. This problem still hasn't gone away either. If Google decides your device is too old to run the latest Play Store update, then you have no legal way to install the apps you've paid for.

[@hufficag]

@@renakunisaki Shouldn't you just keep the apks on a backup CD or SD card somewhere?

[@Bren0780K]

The amount of information and detail you've provided here is astounding! I would have loved one of these back in the day for Under A Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive. The third game in the series, Overseer, was also released bundled with both a multiple CD-ROM version and a single DVD-ROM version of the game.

[@GameplayandTalk]

OK, so the concept of a five-disc drive is awesome enough as-is, but you installing multiple drives at once had me rolling! Nice work, haha.

[@adamengelhart5159]

Love this one! Great work on making the music video/montage bit work within your format--it keeps the flow of the video going but it's still just egregious enough to be rad. Well done! 😄👍 Looking forward to the followup!

[@PositionLight]

Almost no everyday people had SCSI in the pre-SATA era. I remember having the conversation with friends. It was expensive and required a free card slot and extra cables. I got into some SCSI fun once they started turning up in my university's eWaste stream (especially 68 pin), but in the 90's internal SCSI was a commercial kiss of death.

[@intentionally_obscure]

This was incredible. You fulfilled a dream I didn't know I had. I was fuckin' giddy when I saw you go mad with drive-multiplaying power. It's been fun watching your production quality skyrocket.

[@ssokolow]

Re: your choice in terminology, I'd go for device 0 and device 1 rather than "primary" and "secondary", since those words are already used for the IDE *cables* and "primary primary", "primary secondary", "secondary primary", and "secondary secondary" is a bit confusing.

[@K-o-R]

Channel 0/1, device 0/1.

[@ssokolow]

@@K-o-R That works, but it's an unnecessary extra word. There's nothing wrong with "primary" and "secondary", so using different words for the channel and the device allows you to compact it down... even to "primary 0/1" and "secondary 0/1" if you want, which gets you as much brevity as the old way.

[@K-o-R]

@@ssokolow I guess I'm thinking of situations with multiple IDE controllers, where you could be fancy and say tertiary, quaternary, etc., but just incrementing the channel number is easier. Or say IDE device 0a and 0b, but that could get mixed up with hex numbers.

[@ajroach42]

That was, as always, excellent. Thanks for making this and for teaching us about more weird shit. I'm imagining the 7 users on one PC thing + the SCSI tower, and the results are giving me major commodore pet vibes for reasons that I can't fully explain.

[@Kiloku2]

I remember some games had the unfortunate assumption that your CDs would only ever be in drive D:, so when I had a second CD drive, I'd still be forced into swapping the disk manually.

[@wolfgangsanyer3544]

Dude: I've watched a LOT of your videos. Somehow I find this one the funniest (so far). nicely done, bravo.

[@ziggyinc]

I HAD THAT DRIVE! I was so angry when XP did not have drivers for that drive. So cool that you review stuff I used. that and the LS120 were my favorites when they worked.

[@mal2ksc]

I had an LS-120 and a CD-R drive at the same time in 2000. The idea was that I'd fill up five or six of the LS-120 disks, and then burn them out to a CD and re-use them. I never did need more than the box of 10 disks bought at the same time as the drive.

[@lauraiss1027]

For a second I thought: "no way he has several of these drives and will stack them, that's just too cool". I was wrong and You delivered. Marvelous video, thank You!

[@christopherdecorte1599]

We used those in the airforce similar to your setup. It held a parts catalog for the aircraft so it was easy to find the correct replacement parts gaskets orings seals basically every part nut and bolt of the aircraft. It was also accessible thought the local area network and yes it was an windows nt system windows 2000 then later 2003 I believe.

[@MrGridStrom]

Well done mate, super amazing video and really cool topic. This thing is crazy!

[@Wojnar33]

It really is your best video yet! I really love your content, please keep going :)

[@just_some_bird]

Hot damn, this video was a hoot. I could feel my teenage self burning with envy over the -thought- of having this kind of power and convenience, even tho my system has three optical drives. Incredible work as always. Also holy shit big ups for mentioning Heavy Gear 2. Still the best mecha game after all these years.

[@djackmanson]

I just spent 40 minutes watching an interesting, engaging video on...multi CD-ROM operations on vintage Windows PC's? Also, I enjoy seeing you set boundaries for acceptable comments. It keeps a welcoming mood for friendly people.

[@adintijerina7596]

Its so cool to see you having a set and like change in production value. Its awesome man

[@kyoudaiken]

29:16 - What about the POSIX notation? You should be able to access more drives this way. You can even "mount" a drive into a directory, even in Windows XP! For letters A and B, not sure about XP, but in Windows Vista and upwards I could always assign A and B to any volume no problem.

[@heirofdisa]

the commentary in the beginning is priceless 😂 "I read the books!"

[@manonthedollar]

I laughed out loud at that!

[@zaprodk]

Wow, such amazing production quality. I absolutely loved this presentation :) - In my 39 years i have seen the drive ONCE, and that was the IDE version - So it couldn't have been the "expensive" SCSI barrier stopping it, but why it never caught on, idk - i think it's freaking cool! - I remember that at my dad's old employer they had a 6CD Pioneer changer (external, SCSI) hooked up to one of the NT File servers, serving a range of CD's for all the employees, stuff like digital maps and "phone books" - This was at the time with a slow and expensive ISDN line at best :D - Oh wow, those were the times!

[@tithund]

I remember a classmate had one on their family pc back in the day, but when I talked to my dad about it, he saw no benefit in getting one for our family pc.

[@lasskinn474]

We had a 4 cd changer that had a small thing that had things like car cd changers had. Ide. It wasn't that expensive iirc, but playing most games it wasnt practical

[@LupoAndy]

Awesome episode!

[@DamianMontero]

Best video you've ever made. ANd I saw your amazing live stream tv show. which was awesome! excellent work! More music videos!

[@EvilCoffeeInc]

What an exceptional device. This is straight out of my dreams, like if you asked me to naively design a miniature disc switcher this is how I'd build it, but I always assumed it wasn't possible and never got made. I need to get my hands on one of these!

[@lasskinn474]

We had one 4 cd drive one that worked like a car cd changer. Ide too. Long term it sounded like a better idea than it was, it could be set every cd as different drive or manual change by button and show up as one drive. I dont recall how the setup was done, but it wasn't useful that much with most games

[@nkronert]

Glad to see someone who also admires brilliant engineering when he sees it.

[@glad2]

This was awesome. You had a lot of fun with this video and I really enjoyed the wacky parts. Superb and seamless blend of serious technical information and humour. Chefs kiss

[@Morgan.Gilroy]

love the montage, actually made me lough out loud, nice slow screwing there :)

[@lexbailey]

This video got so much better after the 22 minute mark. Was not expecting that, but I loved it 😁

[@nicolajelstedrasmussen955]

I remember at work in '98 we had a tower with 2x7 of these 6-disc drives that was accessable over LAN, with each disc corresponding to a sharename on the network server. It was a pain when you were in the server room to change a disc to a new version and had forgotten which drive and disc number to eject. But it held a LOT of discs 🙂

[@nickwallette6201]

18:00 AV nerd from the 90s reporting in on lived experience of this era. The magazine changers of the time weren't this clever. My Kenwood DP-M6650 had a 6-disc magazine that IIRC was exactly the same as (as in, compatible with) the common Pioneer units of the time, plus a single drawer-loading tray for quick exchanges. The magazine and the "Plus-One" tray had thin plastic carriers that were extracted by a claw mechanism and shuttled completely out and down into the transport. No space-saving disc shuffling there! :-) The Nakamichi method might have been typical of in-dash car CD changers, which weren't common until the late late 90s (except in large, double-size+ dashes), but the usual under-seat or trunk-mounted changers seemed to all use a regular magazine that loaded the entire disc on the carrier either out the back or side end. As for the carousel players being the "trash option" of the time, mmm... I wouldn't agree with that. I realize that was probably just a sarcastic jab, but, while I was proud of my 6 (technically 7!) disc changer, as it was clearly superior to the lowly 3- or 5-disc carousel 😉, the latter players really were a little more convenient. Changing out the discs was far more fiddly with those little plastic carriers. Kenwood certainly attempted to minimize that issue by letting you load discs into the drawer while a disc was playing from the magazine, but it was still clunky and slow and noisy compared to the carousel. It seemed like magazines were more ideal for carting collections between your home and car, if you had compatible players, or if you tended to keep the same six discs loaded most of the time. One idea is that you might buy more magazines and just keep your music categorized into collections, but they weren't cheap at around $35 apiece (90s money.) I pretty much left my most-often played CDs loaded and just used the single tray most of the time. I think I would've probably used the changer more in a carousel, particularly if it were one of the Sony types that let you exchange discs while one was playing.

[@cheaterman49]

25:00 Aaaaah, proper madness. That's what we come to see, and you never disappoint!

[@SpinDlsc]

Having grown up in the 90s with disc swaps being a thing, I can testify that I would have absolutely LOVED to have one of these! It especially would have been nice to have for when you wanted to rip your entire music CD library.

[@ChrisHarringtonMinneapolis]

Your quality goes up with every video you post. Amazing. Great topic, great writing, you're nailing it CRD.

[@amarokorama]

Riven could always be played completely from HDD. I even released a small program that copied the necessary data files from the CDs to where they needed to be on the HDD. Problem was that back when the game came out, most people simply didn't have large enough HDDs yet.

[@Vexelius]

That was awesome! A trip down memory lane and learning about an interesting gadget that I couldn't even imagine. 40 minutes felt like a very short time watching this video.

[@wright96d]

One of the reasons I find your videos so rewatchable is that there is so much info jam packed into them, that I could never dream to actually take it all in on one or even two viewings.

[@OhNotThat]

17:04 The CD ROM knows where it is, by knowing where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance magazine system uses deviations to generate corrective commands to shuttle the CD ROM in the magazine rack from a position where it is to a position where it isn't and, arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation; the variation being the difference between where the CD-ROM is and where it isn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it, too, may be corrected by the CD ROM Drive's firmware. However, the CD ROM must also know where it was. The CD ROM guidance computer scenario works as follows: because a variation has modified some of the information the CD Rom drive CD manager has obtained, it is not sure just where it is, however it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice versa. And by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.

[@mickjt84]

k

[@kkuusk]

Back in the day 97-98 I was a high school kid and got first after school job in a computer company. Assembling and fixing pc's, workstations and servers etc. Saved all the money for a year and went all out. 10krpm SCSI hard drive, 128MB of ram, Matrox graphics with video editing, big Trinitron monitor, sb live, surround speakers and of course the hand picked Celeron from the inventory for maximum overclock. (it was faster than any PII) For CD I got Plextor SCSI CD and writer. I was aware about the changers but these were much slower than the top of the line single drives and that's why you didn't see them much even if you had the means to go all out. There had to be a specific reason you wanted one. Multi CD games were not the thing as all the software at the time was cracked and ran from hdd in this part of the world.

[@lemagreengreen]

I was trying to remember why we had SCSI cards on PC's and yeah, on the enthusiast side of thing it was definitely for those high performance burners which were just better than IDE for a long time. Some people ran SCSI hard drives too of course but the compelling reason to get a SCSI card for a Windows PC in the late 90s was definitely the fast burners.

[@joeym6976]

The installation/test montage was amazing

[@SpectraPrime]

I am fairly sure windows can do higher drive letters than Z, I cant remember how I found it out or which version of windows/dos i did it in but I remember exceeding the drive letter count somehow and it resulted in it moving to AA, AB and so forth though now that i think about it i may just be mis-remembering overpopulating an excel spreadsheet.

[@talibong9518]

I've seen this on Windows 7 so probably done from Vista and up.

[@SergioEduP]

yeah, I'm pretty certain that I also did this at one point but just don't remember when or how, maybe it's just a false memory but I'll have to do some experimenting :)

[@SergioEduP]

OK, just did a bit of testing with Windows 11 Pro on a VM and the drive letters only go from A to Z indeed, maybe we could have used more for a short period of time on only a couple of versions and this was removed due to compatibility and/or stability issues? anyway for most use cases NTFS mount points would do just fine.

[@DFX2KX]

@@SergioEduP .... it MIGHT have been a feature on Windows Server, 2003 I think? I just recall it being so jank as to be worse than not having it at all.

[@jp-ny2pd]

I had the NEC version of that multi-CD drive. I used to load it full of shovelware disks for a BBS I ran in the 90s. It was great for that. Wide-SCSI gave you up to 14 devices in the chain.

[@CullenCraft]

Lmao this channel keeps getting better and better great job Gravis

[@TheInfiniteEnd]

I really dig the cutscene part of this vid. I grinned like an idiot the whole time watching you assemble that thing to a jam.

[@FranNyan]

My dad's PC tower was a stack of drives, both hard drive and disc drives. The case was always open with extra drives stacked up on top of it. The assembly of the SCSI express tower was just a flashback to dad's basement staring at this set up. He very much could have used a case like that. (He eventually swapped to hot swap drives instead. I think there's still a tower of drive bays in the room that was my bedroom back there because he was a massive data horder.)

[@Niarbeht]

I remember games that were like 20 floppies to install or whatever. Or they were a single CD. With like a jillion demos and stuff. And added voice files. And added cutscene video files. It was HUGE! HUGE, I SAY!

[@Roxor128]

And in many cases even all that stuff STILL didn't fill the disc! Very much the case for Duke Nukem 3D, Terminal Velocity and Rise Of The Triad.

[@yaketyyakumo3315]

26:03 SCSI is sort of still around today in the form of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) which is mainly used for servers. It, too, uses a variety of connectors, though the most common one is essentially a SATA power and data cable connected together (so you can plug a SATA drive into a SAS drive bay, but not vice versa) It also supports up to 65,535 devices connected together.

[@CarletonTorpin]

Congratulations on your first music video, by the way. Super enjoyable.

[@100PercentJake]

I uncontrollably laughed at the sound of five Nakamichis powering up at once.