12 Jan
2005
12 Jan
'05
5:12 p.m.
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Kelly Leavitt wrote:
I have available for the picking, an external cabinet
with 4 Hitachi
interface CD-ROM drives (TCDR-4000). I also have the TCD-IF8P interface
card (from Todd engineering), the install and driver disks and
connecting cable. THESE ARE NOT SCSI DRIVES. It also comes with a bunch
of the cadies for the CD's. Copyright and dates codes are from 1992 so
this is on topic.
According to what I can find, none of this is supported in any of the
current PC environment, and it doesn't run on any of the classic stuff I
collect. Well, I guess I could get it running in one of the DOS machines
I use for emulating and testing, but I have no real desire to do so.
I'll add that I've used these and still have a single drive and controller
card packed away somewhere. From what I remember, those particular Hitachi
drives were sold directly to Todd engineering/(enterprise?) who then
packaged them in chassis and sold them with controller cards. I have some
literature from them filed away somewhere, but I don't think I still have
the DOS driver. IIRC, the protocol is really simple, and it shouldn't be
hard to hack up a *nix driver for one of these if someone was so inclined.
(I believe the only reason I kept the drive I have is that I'd planned to
do just this...but I've never gotten around to it.) Of course, the drives
are single speed and certainly aren't CDDA capable, but they would work
fine for text files or something ;)
Also, Todd *did* package and sell some early SCSI Hitachi drives, but the
drives mentioned above are most definitely *not* SCSI. I still have a
single speed SCSI drive that they sold packed away somewhere too. It still
worked last time I used it...
These days I have a Pioneer DRM-5004X that holds most of my cdrom
collection, so I haven't been using these older drives for quite some
time. (Yes, the DRM-5004X is actually on topic now...it came out in the
early 1990s and its drives are adapted from the DRM-604X, which came out
in 1991-1992 or so.) Geek points for those who remember these drives
without using Google ;)
-Toth