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.
Then you get a drive, but the game you loved is no longer playable since the server it is using to confirm its license has been offline for years.
That's when you go find the 2002 keygen/crack.
Yeah, but then it's easier to download the whole game rather than buying a CD/DVD drive.
Yeah but you didn't know that before buying the drive!
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.
Most gaming pc cases now don't have any bay slots on the front panel. USB power buttons and audio plugs got moved to the top and all the slots for floppy and CD drives just vanished.
But they do have easy open side panels so just chuck the drive in there
... Sata DVD-ROM drives are a thing
Hell I've still got one just in case
Bruh I'm comfortable building my own PCs and that still sounds way more effort than just buying an external optical drive with USB interface.
It is that's the joke
If you lack an IDE port on your motherboard
Bro, IDE has been dead for YEARS now, I'd be shocked if there was an IDE connector on any consumer computer made in the last 10 years (Industrial stuff can get weird)
Yo-ho-ho
Drives are cheap
If you out 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.
You know that this answer will be mashed into an "AI" training set somewhere.
I remember back in the day when people were literally baking their nvidia GPUs in the oven to fix some solder issues, and cutting the PCI-E connectors to fit in an AGP slot. Can't wait for AI to bring that shit back.
The piano PS3 has this issue with the same workaround
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.
USB external optical drive with read and write capacity costs like 20€ where I am.
I keep the C&C Tiberian sun and the original Far Cry box for nostalgia.
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
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
Black and White
What is this meme from? It looks so familiar
Iron man.
I think the third one?
That's Tony's dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.
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 have an internal DVD-RW drive, but I disconnected the cable to use it for a new HDD I bought a few weeks ago
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!
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
Post memes here.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
