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.
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.
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.
Yo-ho-ho
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.
Drives are cheap
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
External cd drive is so cheap it's almost free.
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 external optical drive with read and write capacity costs like 20€ where I am.
I have an external DVD-RW on a shelf just in case. Every once in a while I need to bring it out and I wonder if a giant boulder is going to start rolling at me when I grab it.
I actually have a SATA cable and power plug discreetly tucked in a spot in my PC case and have just taken the side off and plugged in a drive on occasion. It's normal purpose is troubleshooting other hard drives, but it works for that too
I just bought an external cd/dvd drive so I can convert my DVD library into a digital one for convenience and to preserve the dvds longer.
I'm having some issues with the speed of conversion, but my biggest problem is quickly becoming storage space.
Also, I dug up some of my old games like Caesar III and installed a no-CD "patch".
Good times.
There's an adapter or replacement for everything
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.
Black and White
USB Blu-ray is how I got my media library… totally…
Someone else's DVD drive
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.
🏴☠️
I technically have a DVD drive/burner still. It's just not in the computer because the case didn't have any drive bays for it and I couldn't find one I could afford that had even one when I built this machine. I could just run it outside the case but... Nah.
I've got DVD-ROM drives in my desktop PC and my old laptop that I use for playing videos while I exercise and a USB Blu-Ray drive that I can use in anything else. You'll get my disc caddies when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
I still use a blu ray drive just to burn my M-Discs
My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there's no physical eject button. It Just Works!
There's some slight benefit to having games that are just a sticker with a license number in the box. Probably, the only one benefit though.
Until they remove it from the store.
Despite only having a few disc drive dependent games, this and the amount of USB ports is why I got the budget desktop I got around a couple years ago. Having a disk drive has been great, especially when I got a few CDs and don't feel like using the old Sony Discman I got because it sometimes just stops after certain songs.
With powered hubs and balanced tree topology, you can split a single root controller into 45 endpoints. Your motherboard being able to support that many devices and the shared bandwidth might be a problem, but it's theoretically possible to survive off of a single USB port.
Simgolf
