31 Jan
2006
31 Jan
'06
5:02 p.m.
On 1/31/2006 at 11:58 PM ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk wrote:
You don't want ot know about the CD-ROM drive I
have on this machine (a
much-hacked PC/AT with most of the original bits). It's an external
Philips unit, and it looks like a converted audio CD player. Darn it, it
_is_ a converted audio CD player. Most of the bits, including the
mechanism (CDM-4), decoder chips, case, etc are the same as those of a
contemporary Philips CD-plauer. They added an ASIC to grab the data
stream after the decoder and send it to the PC, and re-programmed the
microcontroller to accept comamnds from the PC.
I used to have a couple NEC CD-ROM drives like that--still had all of the
holes in the case for plugging in the cigarette-lighter adapter and all.
They'd fitted it with a DB-25 for a SCSI interface. 1X speed.
What can I say? They were cheap.
Cheers,
Chuck