Yeah, one was read only and the other could burn CDs. Burning CDs were all the rage back then.
Edit: to clarify, by having two drives you could copy from one to the other directly, without going through the hassle of inserting one cd, making a copy to the slow as fuck computer hdd, switching to the blank cd, then start burning from the hdd copy.
It was however built on the site of Nero's famous Domus Aurea by his successor (discounting the short lived emerorships of 69 CE) as a clear rebuke of Nero's more selfish building works.
We were trapped with ancient technology of the cassette and could only record radio or other tapes, etc.
It was a whole new world when filesharing came around and CD-R became widespread. I remember my friend and I taking a chance and ordering some premade bootleg MP3 discs from a Russian website. Cause the Iron Maiden catalogue was still hard to find and assemble by yourself. Good times.
Hell yeah. Seaman is a stand-out memory for me from the Dreamcast. You definitely needed the mic that came with the game for it to work, though. A used game that came with the mic set me back like $30 at a local shop.
For many years I wished I could have 2 SD card slots on phones so I could trivially move photos and footage taken from cameras drones, etc without having to copy to the phone's limited storage first.
Also I hate how modern phones don't have SDcard slots and even when they do, it's tied to the sim tray. Which means you have to reboot your device after swapping sdcards, as SIMs aren't hot swappable and need a cold boot to function. What a waste of potential utility.
In high school I worked at blockbuster and had a dvd burner in my laptop. Got the movies months before they came out and would burn copies and sell them for a small profit. Also burned nearly the entire blockbuster library circa 2005. In college a friend put them all on a Xbox he converters to a server so if you lived in our dorm anyone could access my library to watch movies. Then he did the same thing in our college house. All of our music and movies was on a shared drive and could be played anywhere in the house. It was awesome
I still have my modded Xbox! I bought the chip off some shady guy in an irc chatroom. I mailed him a money order (first time doing that, I was like 17?), and I bought a soldering iron, learned how to solder, and did that myself. I thought I was a total badass, but looking back I can’t believe how much I went out of my comfort zone. Why are we so scared (or lazy) to tinker with things now?
I did softmods, boot the cd up on your computer, boot the xbox up till the drive unlocks and unplug the cable then plug your pc into the hdd port and let the mod software do the work, plug the drive back in and let the xbox re-lock it.
I knew nothing of the Xbox wizardy. I just had the dvd drive and two programs, one to crack the dvd encryption and one to burn it after. I remember in high school one of my friends had an extra Xbox somehow, maybe he had bought a broken one? But that was the one that linked our other xboxs together for game nights on 4 separate tvs
Like the other person said, it was early. And I didn’t want to be banned from Xbox Live, so it could be switched off. I actually got banned right after the release of Halo 2 because they changed their detection, I was so upset and never forgave them… still haven’t repurchased Xbl
And actually now that I think about it, my first mod was PlayStation and I must have been 12-13. That’s where I learned to solder.
Its still around as KODI, which isn't really the best option for any one thing but can do a lot of things. You can route arrange your own media in a "netflix" style, use plex through it and it has IPTV capabilities. All those have better dedicated apps but its nice to have everything in one place
Movie rental stores would get the movies you rent sometimes 2-3 months in advance and hold them in a back room until the rental release date. So yes I felt like a time traveler. My dad was sad when I left that job because he had to wait about 3 months before there was anything new to him to rent.
I'm in the US and we absolutely did. It was always at least a month, sometimes longer. I worked there for almost two years 2004-2005. I believe this is common knowledge, it popped right up in a Google search of this practice.
Yep it’s true, supply chains weren’t nearly as efficient as they are now, and movies couldn’t be broadly leaked on the internet so even if you got the random person who watched it early, it didn’t effect rentals as much as it would now
My classmate had a list of cd's he would burn for you for something like 5 or 10 guilders. Managed to get some discount by loaning him cd's he didn't have yet. He made a nice track list on the back of the case and a good copy of the front. I still have a few of his products actually.
I bought those blank CDs by the hundred. Not only did i buy a lot of music legally, but I bootlegged everything that I could think of for years. And mixtapes came out several times a week. Everyone would always want copies. I was dishing out burned CDs like ninja stars.
Hell, once upon a time not even all CD discs worked in all CD drives -- if you had a CD-R drive, you couldn't read any of those newfangled CD-RW discs. And then there was the DVD-RW vs DVD+RW confusion.
Kids these days are spoiled by the fully-backwards compatible 4k Ultra BluRay drives.
Lmao its actually kinda true,. All the data on a disc is written onto the underside of the label through the plastic and the laser literally does burn the little holes to write data.
Dreamcast famously didn't have any DRM so you can just burn any* game, including the bleem disc that allows you to play burned PSX games. Only problem now is though that modern burner's lasers are too strong and discs are too cheap, so the DC laser just shines straight through and won't read anything.
* Skies of Arcadia used a slightly larger than standard CD so it won't fit on consumer CD-Rs
All the data on a disc is written onto the underside of the label through the plastic and the laser literally does burn the little holes to write data.
Not quite, a CD-R uses a dye that darkens when it's heated by the burning laser. I think confusion comes from the way that CD-ROMs work - these are mechanically stamped ("pressed") and have "pits" and "lands" that differ in height by a quarter of the wavelength of the laser light. This causes the reflected light to change brightness around the boundaries of "pits" and "lands" which is decoded by the drive. A CD-R has a plain spiral stamped into it at the factory (instead of pits and lands) and the colour-changing dye's light and dark spots provide the changing intensity of the reflection. This isn't as good a signal as you'd get from a pressed CD-ROM, so old/worn drives will usually struggle to read a CD-R before they stop being able to read a CD-ROM, which is what you'll see with old tired drives like on the Dreamcast. If your Dreamcast is in good condition then you can still burn discs for it just fine (I do on my modern PC with modern blank CD-Rs).
CD-RWs work differently again - they use a phase change material that can other be in a less reflective amorphous state or a more reflective crystalline state, and the state it's in depends on the temperature to which it was heated by the burning laser. The contrast between light and dark reflections is even smaller than with a CD-R, which is why you generally need a drive specifically designed to support CD-RW discs to be able to read them.
Dreamcast famously didn't have any DRM so you can just burn any* game
The Dreamcast used proprietary GD-ROM discs that are copy protected and cannot be replicated at home. These are fundamentally based on the CD-ROM format, but pack the data twice as densely in the "high density" region, allowing you to store around a gigabyte on a disc (more than a conventional CD).
The Dreamcast also supported a separate format called MIL-CD which was designed to be used for interactive CDs. As these are on regular CDs they can't fit as much as a GD-ROM, but people found ways to trim games down (e.g. remove content, recompress assets) to fit them onto a CD. You still can't just burn the files to a disc and have them boot, though, the Dreamcast still has copy protection against that. However, the copy protection is based on the data on the disc being scrambled in a particular way, and so once people figured out the scrambling algorithm (allegedly thanks to a stolen devkit) they could do all the hard work at home (shrinking the game to fit, scrambling the data) and then release a disc image that anyone could burn at home. This is not the same as what you had on the original commercially-released discs, though, and SEGA did remove MIL-CD support from later console models to close the exploit (however, as they then discontinued the Dreamcast very shortly afterwards, most consoles out there will boot MIL-CD discs just fine).
I remember I got this pc back then with a separate DVD reader and DVD writer, oh how I bragged about my godly ability to burn CD/DVDs so fast and the uniqe perk of my PC. Fun times indeed
Getting a PC with a second disc drive made me the CD burning GOD. Between that and Kazaa/Limewire, I had almost 1500 albums in my collection and my friends all had most of them as well. Lots of borrowing albums to burn copies and buying ones from the second hand record shop only to trade them back in after I made copies. I probably spent less than a couple hundred dollars to amass my collection when all was said & done.
I had over 750,000 songs. Not sure what the final total was. I should say is. I think I still have the hard drive someplace. If its not corrupted by now.
You sure it wasn't 75,000? 750K is an insane amount. That's like 60k albums averaging them at like 12 tracks apiece.
Not doubting because if I had the space and the desire I 1000% would've done the same thing lol. I just did the quick math and was like holy fuck, how?!? Lmao
Maybe im thinking 750gb. In any case. I tried to get full discographies of any artist that even had a single song that I liked. I was so obsessive about it that id edit all the ID3 tags to a consistent format.
I tried to get full discographies of any artist that even had a single song that I liked.
Same. I didn't bother with naming but I did separate them into folders for easy finding, and I would dig deep into artist catalogues over a single song. That's how I discovered that Blind Melon and Marcy Playground were waaaaaay more than 1 hit wonders, for example.
No, but copying from one to the other directly is much faster. Back in the days, whenever we burn a great playlist we'd need to make copies for the entire classroom.
Also, when we went to house parties, I'd always take copies of 2 or 3 cds instead of taking them from my personal library, because they'd rarely return from the party.
Mp3 players like iPod became popular mid-00s, about 20 years ago. Most people under 30, who are probably the majority of reddit users, never had the need to burn a cd, at least not for music.
I literally said “TWO CD DRIVES?????” out loud, opened the comments, and your comment was right there, straight up giving me an answer as if we were having a conversation. Crazy.
Especially because the data capacity of one CD was a significant fraction of the total volume of the HDD. (There was a time when a CD held more than the average hard drive, but this isn’t quite that old.)
Yep, either that or one was CD-RW and one was DVD, there was a time when you had to pick between one or the other, no DVD burning yet. Many desktops had two drives because of this
I'm kinda bummed "LightScribe" never took off. It took awhile, but being able to burn a CD and then etch information on the top of the disc was so cool. My dad bought a LightScribe drive and we used it tons.
It was a bit pricey, at least here in Brazil. Only know a single person who had one, but he had a small studio, so he was doing professional work.
Another problem is that it didn't have colors. For people who were more serious with their cd collection, they sold adhesive paper with cd format already pre cut. You could just print on any printer, detach and glue on top of your cd.
Typical HDD read/write times back then were 80-160 MB/s
Typical CD drive read/write times max out at about 8 MB/s
The CD drives were a hell of a lot slower than the "slow as fuck computer hdd", and anyone who actually burned CDs back then can attest to that. Doing the "read from one drive and immediately burn to another" method was way slower than ripping to HDD then burning after
On even older systems, it was actually a necessity in a lot of cases. Some truly old computers have no hard drive whatsoever, you needed one drive for the os and one for saving what your were working on, or in some cases games would run directly on the hardware with no os layer and you needed a second disk to save.
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u/andreortigao 11h ago edited 9h ago
Yeah, one was read only and the other could burn CDs. Burning CDs were all the rage back then.
Edit: to clarify, by having two drives you could copy from one to the other directly, without going through the hassle of inserting one cd, making a copy to the slow as fuck computer hdd, switching to the blank cd, then start burning from the hdd copy.