Hi all,

I recently got my 98SE system plugged in again so that I can more easily play some of the older games I have. The CD-RW drive that had become "iffy" before the system was unplugged is now not working at all.

I would like to replace it with a combo CD-RW/DVD-RW. Unfortunately, most of the listings don't specify the Os's supported, so I've had no success finding one.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Jema

Oooo... lucky girl! I still have 2 copies of 98SE and 1 or 2 copies of 98 in my CD cabinet.

As long as the drive has an IDE connection between the drive and the motherboard, I don't think they are OS specific. I just sold my last two old IDE optical drives and neither one of them were OS specific. Unless the "iffy" problem was with the ribbon cables, you should be able to reuse them on the new drive.

Like Draclvr said, you'll need a drive with IDE (PATA) connections for an older computer that came with Windows 98 because it won't have SATA connections.

One problem you might have with a new CD/DVD drive and older games is that many older games want to access off the game disc, and you have to wait for them to spin up every time you click. For that reason you may want to consider something like Daemon-Tools or some other Virtual CD type program so you can play off the hard drive.

Daemon-tools is a good option, especially combined with imageburn to create a .iso file.

Thanks everyone for your replies - the info is most appreciated.

Draclvr, thank you for mentioning the cables. I'll get my son to check them out before I buy another drive.

Jenny100, do you mean games like Dark Fall the Journal that play entirely from the disk? Or the ones that install to the hard drive but require the disk in the drive to play?

Jema

While Daemon Tools is quite good - I've found that using a combination of VirtualClone Drive and Imgburn work just as well, and both are free.

You can find them here -

Virtual CloneDrive
ImgBurn

All you need to do is mount the ISO created by ImgBurn in VirtualClone Drive. It looks and behaves just like a physical drive.

Thanks, InlandAZ.

Jema

Mostly the first -- the older games that have only tiny installs to the hard drive and are accessing the game disc all the time while you play.

Thanks for the reply, Jenny100. I think I only have 2 of the first - Dark Fall and Cracking the Conspiracy.

I haven't played Cracking the Conspiracy, but I don't recall Dark Fall being troublesome in any way when I played it years ago on this system.

Does the problem arise because any drive I buy today will almost certainly be faster than the current one?

Jema

No, it's because modern games install to the hard drive, and read from the hard drive during the game, which is much faster than reading off a CD. We're used to "near instantaneous response" to mouse clicks while playing games. When the drive has to spin up for every click, the game is laggier than what we're used to.

Nearly all early Windows games from the early-to-mid 1990's read off the CD during play. Usually hard drives were too small to hold all the game data in a CD-size game. Back in the 1990's we were used to an occasional lag when the game accessed the CD. But if you haven't played an old game on an old computer since the 1990's, it may seem sluggish to you.

Thanks for the explanation, Jenny100.

After thinking about a replacement drive some more, I realize I don't need a DVD-RW on this system. What I want to be able to copy are documents and other files that I want to keep, but not on the hard drive.

It has a DVD read only drive. So that together with a CD-RW drive should be all I need.

Jema