**A Journey Through Various CD-ROM Drives**

The speaker is excitedly going through different CD-ROM drives to see what they can do. They start by flipping through various games and CDs, eventually settling on Caddiehack from Micode Developments. However, instead of playing the full game, they decide to take a demoversion that includes most of the gameplay.

**Caddiehack: A Demoversion**

The speaker is impressed with the shareware aspect of Caddiehack, which allows players to access the majority of the game for free. They select one player mode and add sounds to enhance the experience. The game controls are similar to other golf games, but this version has a few unique twists. For example, if the player hits the ball with full power, accuracy is not guaranteed and the ball will slice or hook, depending on where it lands.

**Lucky CD-ROM Drive**

The speaker's luck seems to be with them as they try out different CD-ROM drives. They start by betting on a 16, but quickly switch to a new drive that yields an 18. They then decide to stay in the game and hope for the best, eventually winning 600 points. The speaker remarks that this is their lucky day and wonders if they should buy a lottery ticket.

**Mixed Games and CD-ROMs**

The speaker discovers that some games come with CD-ROMs, which offer a unique experience. They run a mixed game on the EGAGolf category, which allows them to play straight from the CD-ROM. The speaker is delighted by this feature, as it's a novel aspect of the game.

**Caddiehack Controls**

As they play Caddiehack, the speaker comments on the controls, noting that the caddy is automatically selecting the right iron or wedge for each shot. This feature takes some pressure off the player and allows them to focus on their gameplay. The speaker also mentions that it's possible to change this setting if desired.

**Audio Discs with CD Play**

The speaker explores audio discs using a program called CD Play, which came with some older CD drives. They play a compact disc audio player for DOS, showcasing its features and capabilities. The player can select tracks, shuffle music, and even run commands in the background. This software is still functional despite being old.

**Conclusion**

Throughout this journey through various CD-ROM drives, the speaker has had an entertaining experience playing Caddiehack and discovering other games. They've also showcased different types of CD-ROMs, including audio discs, and demonstrated how they work. The speaker's excitement and curiosity are evident as they explore these new technologies.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings, and this time on LGR it'sall about vintage compact disc read only goodness.This is the Hitachi CDR-1503S, a CD-ROM drivefor IBM PCs and compatibles that sold for$884 in the US when it first hit store shelvesin 1987. Yeah, 1987! While this was by nomeans the first CD-ROM drive, it’s certainlythe oldest I’ve owned myself. Old enoughthat it predates the publishing of ISO 9660:1988,the international standard defining what aCD-ROM’s logical layout should be. WhenHitachi began manufacturing the CDR-1503S,many CD-ROMs instead used the High SierraFormat, or HSF, to store retrieve and data.But seeing as ISO 9660 is a direct evolutionof HSF, the 1503S does pretty well readingnewer CD-ROMs. Heh, I mean, “pretty well”in the sense that it performs the task, albeitreally, really slowly. Being from 1987, the1503S and its contemporaries only have a sequentialtransfer rate of up to 153 kilobytes per second,and spins discs at a leisurely rate between200 and 535 RPM. About the same as a standardaudio CD player, a speed that retroactivelybecame known as 1X, or single speed, aftermultispeed CD drives came along years later.But this solemn slowness and overall obsolescenceis precisely why I wanna dive deeper intothe experience today. Yeah I know, CD-ROMsthemselves are an obsolete format these days,and I’ve done a whole video rambling onabout the excitement of games and softwareon CDs already. But the only thing more excitingthan obsolete media? Is even more obsoleteobsolete media! Particularly since this drivehails from a time where IBM format HD floppydisks stored 1.2 or 1.44 megabytes, and mostPC hard drives topped out at 30 or 40 megs.Then came this thin plastic disc offering550 megabytes or more, accessed using radiation-emittinglasers, ah! Cutting edge leaps in tech thismassive only come around once in a generation.So let’s take a look back at a technologicalfuture that has already come and gone, a timewhen CD-ROM drives were bigger, slower, harderto use, and far more expensive.Although “expensive” didn’t exactlyequate to “failure” in this case, sincedespite costing almost $2,000 adjusted forinflation, the CDR-1503S was one of the morepopular drives at the time. First announcedin April of ‘87, it was actually one ofthe smaller, lighter standalone drives onthe market, and one of the first to includeboth CD-ROM data storage and audio CD capabilitybuilt into the same unit. It was followedshortly by the Amdek Laserdrive-1, also in‘87, a drive that was practically identicalother than the front faceplate. It was evenblatantly listed as being a rebadged 1503Sin some catalogs to make this clear, and fromwhat I can tell, certain retailers agreedto sell Amdeks and others sold Hitachi. Withtechnology chains like Computerland beinga primary retailer for Amdek Laserdrives,and Radio Shack being one of the largest storesselling Hitachi drives, often alongside Tandy1000s. These drives were also quite popularwith software developers, notably Microsoft,who were often seen using Amdek units in late80s promotional material showing their dedicationto CD-ROM software development. Somethingthey followed through on in the coming years,with programs like Microsoft Bookshelf beingone of the earliest pieces of commercial software distributed exclusively on CD-ROM.“A bookshelf on a compact disc,” ooh imagine that!“It hasn’t been done yet, but all this information could fit on a CD.” Can’t wait.Though, unless you were loaded, most peoplehad to wait, since Microsoft Bookshelf endedup costing $295 when it released in 1987.Yeah, that’s nearly $700 for a single CD-ROMdisc in today’s currency. For a time, CD-ROMswere a legit status symbol, just imagine rollin’outta your local Radio Shack with one of theseboxes in-hand, solidifying your status asan absolute baller of a computer user. Andwhen you opened the box, inside was an assortmentof goodies ready to make your CD-ROM experiencecome to life. But before setting everythingup, ya gotta take a moment to admire the laser-poweredbeast itself. Measuring 12½ inches acrossand weighing 9 pounds 4 ounces, this thingcould practically pass for a miniature desktopcomputer. Miniature for the time anyway, asit looks positively petite compared to themonumental machines it was designed to workwith. Apparently it was impressive enoughto win the vaguely-named “Electronic IndustriesDesign & Engineering Award,” whatever thatwas. And I mean, if you like quadrilaterals,it is quite the pleasing design. There arethree LEDs indicating power, disc activity,and tray functions, as well as a volume knoband 3.5mm headphone jack for audio playback.And of course, the clicky eject button andfront-loading CD tray.Rather modern looking, all things considered.So many other CD-ROMs back then utilized top-loadingCD trays, or even caddy-loading mechanismswhere you’d plop a disc inside a case beforeinsertion. But not here, this is the samekinda drawer loader that became the norm inhalf-height drives for years. Though it doeshave this springy little tray in the middlehere, with some nice velvety strips for CDsto lounge on before being mounted inside.Classy stuff right there. Sadly, this is oneof the many old drives that have sufferedfrom rubber degradation, so chances are it’llneed a belt replacement for the tray to properlyeject. Not a particularly difficult task,but an undoubtedly annoying one consideringthe placement of the belt and how fiddly thewhole mechanism is. And hey, while we’rein here, check out that main PCB! It’s adelightfully orangey thing, sparsely populatedwith an assortment of crispy clean components.I haven’t been able to find any schematicsor parts lists, and the manual it came withis zero help, but it’s an amusing thingto look at anyway. Check out this little blueboard sticking up, I like how they just stucka piece of plastic on there to kind of holdin place vertically. And this warning label,“Danger! Invisible laser radiation whenopen and inter lock failed or defeated. Avoiddirect exposure to beam.” Neat. I also likethese disc handling instructions in the manual,especially the cute little CD-ROM character.Poor little guy just wants to be handled withcare, but instead it’s subjected to screwdrivers,fingernails, bleach, ink pens, bending, hairdryers,jeez. This is a straight up CD-ROM snuff comic.Anyway, back to the hardware, where aroundback you have the power switch, a permanentlyattached power cord, two Hitachi interfaceconnectors, a drive select knob, and stereoRCA audio outputs for connecting to amplifiedspeakers. You may be wondering, like I was,why there are two interface connectors. Andwell, turns out that the 1503S supports daisy-chaining,with up to four drives able to be connectedto one PC. Heh, what a ridiculous sight thatwould’ve been back in the day. All thisfor just over two gigabytes of storage? Worthit! An alternative was the Hitachi CDR-3500tower, a monstrous four-in-one unit that offeredthe same functionality as four 1503s in asmaller footprint, and costing roughly $4,000.All this multi-drive capability is where thatlittle drive select switch comes in, withdrives 0 through 3 being part of the daisychain, or just select NDS if you’re a poorsap with only one lonely drive. As for connectingthis to a computer, a compatible Hitachi CD-ROMcontroller card and interface cable is required,something thankfully included in the box.Without these and the appropriate driversyou’re outta luck. This was before the daysof widespread IDE, and every major manufacturerhad their own proprietary CD-ROM interfaceto deal with. Once the card is installed ina free 8-bit ISA slot, it’s simply a matterof connecting the cable to one of the connectorson the rear of the drive. Doesn’t matterwhich one you use, both left and right functionthe same when a single drive is connected,and it’ll automatically terminate any otherdrives in a daisy chain. Finally, it’s timeto address the software side of things. Myparticular 1503 here came with two sets ofdrivers and software on 5.25” floppy disk,one for earlier PCs with older releases ofMS-DOS and the other for newer DOS versionsand IBM PS/2s. Since I’m using my IBM XT-286here with MS-DOS 6.0, I’ll be using thenewer release since it comes with MicrosoftCD Extensions 2.10. And with that, let’sgive our freshly-installed 1987 CD-ROM setupa restart and try out some classic software!All right now with everything all set up interms of software,you can see that it loads the CD-ROM driver right there,as well as the Microsoft CD extensions.That's doing that in the background here. Takes a moment,it is a 286. But once it gets that going,the CD-ROM should be ready to go. Becauseit's set up AUTOEXEC and CONFIG.SYS to justdo that automatically and start up, and therewe go! Got version 2.10 there and it has assignedthe CD-ROM to drive D, which is this righthere. Of course we don't have anything inhere right now. Let us install, or insert,a CD and install a thing. And for this, I'mgoing to go with this bit of history righthere. This is Microsoft Bookshelf from 1987.This is definitely one of the very earliestCD-ROM softwares that was released, so itseems quite appropriate. In fact, there'sa lot of references in old magazines, newspapersand everything to Microsoft Bookshelf beingpackaged with the Amdek and Hitachi CD-ROMhere. And yeah, check that out! We've gota directory reading. All those 1987 file dates,my goodness. It is pretty wild seeing a CD-ROMof this vintage. This is a bit different tosome of the later Microsoft Bookshelf things,which were kind of more of a standalone programfrom what I recall, especially for Windows95, 98 ones. But this? Well, it says “standalone”but it's more of a TSR. That's exactly whatit is. This runs in the background and actuallyadds Bookshelf capabilities to certain programs.We will just go ahead and install this here.The first thing is that it needs to know isif you have a hard disk, we do. So we willput this to the BKSLF directory on the C driveand it copies over a few of the files thatit needs. Love that little busy light, lookat that.Oh man, this thing is absurdly slow. But anyway.Needs a workspace in order to store your temporaryfiles, we'll put that on the hard disk aswell. And you could just run this straightout of a RAM disk, but we're not gonna dothat. We have a hard disk. Yeah, it's goingto add some things to AUTOEXEC to tell theprogram that there is a CD drive right hereand it needs to look for it. And there we go.So see, it's added thesethings here. SETCD path BKSHLF,and then some paths to the CD-ROM's software and book directoriesfolders. And when you actually run this, notmuch happens. It loads it into RAM and it'lljust stay there. So it puts up this thingand it's like, “it's running,” but it'sjust running in the background. You can tryto open it up again. Yeah, it's already loaded.So it’s here just kind of hanging out untilyou do something else. You'll need to runone of the supported programs and it prettymuch supports anything that was a text editor,word processor kind of thing. Microsoft Word,of course, WordPerfect. I think I have WordPerfect5.1 so we'll do that.That lovely sound you're hearing is the hard disk, by the way.The CD-ROM is seriously silent.It's so slow and accesses things so infrequentlythat you really don't ever hear it. Y’know,during normal loading of programs and such,it doesn't really make much noise. It's tryingreally hard to get those words absolutelyperfect. Okay. Yeah, so this is just normalWordPerfect here. You can type things likethis and such. So y’know whatever. But toaccess Microsoft Bookshelf, you actually holddown left alt and shift, and check this out.You've got this at the top that pops up! Andit says “unknown” because it doesn't actuallyrecognize this version of WordPerfect. Itwas designed for earlier ones, but it stillworks. You just press one of the uh, the thingshere, these little dropdown menus. And youcan access whatever you need to from the CD-ROMjust like this.For instance, if we were to open up the dictionary,we can have the most recently entered wordand look that up. And it'll search the CD-ROMfor it and find it. Look at that! Oh man.It is pretty exceptional for 1987. So muchinformation just streaming directly off ofthe CD. May not seem ridiculously impressivenowadays, but goodness, in 1987 you know itwas. It even was in the nineties having somuch information on just a CD. But yeah, this,in DOS and WordPerfect, this just adds somuch functionality. You got one of the, whatis this? One of the Chicago, something orother yeah, Manual of Style. You got the wholething right here, all this stuff. Look upabbreviations. Here's how to abbreviate things.Dude, just streaming directly off of that.Impressive. We've got a full almanac here.Which almanac is it? The World Almanac ofBooks and book of facts. Look at all these.Oh man, we can look up agriculture just likethat. Wow. Oh man. Extremely handy stuff inthe days before the internet. And you'd haveto have all sorts of reference guides andbooks out to look this kind of stuff up. Andthe fact that it takes so relatively longto stream in line by line makes it extra impressiveto me. It reminds me of looking into a reallyadvanced bulletin board. Yeah, check it out.You just select who you want here or searchfor who you want in the search menu. And you'vegot the famous quotes from these folks. Man,it's cool. All things considered, relativelyspeaking. Anyway, that's how Microsoft Bookshelfworks. And this is just one of many examplesof early CD-ROMs, which unfortunately, eventhough there were a bunch of them, all thesereference materials and educational thingsand such. This is the only one I have, theseare actually really hard to find. This tookme forever to find, I had to import it. Andit took like three or four months. I forget.Yeah, a long time to show up because of allthe things going on globally, shipping's allmessed up right now. But I was very happyto find this because this is the only copyI've ever seen. There wasn't even an archiveof it online. There is now! Games weren'treally a thing yet for CDs. You had more stuffalong this line. The National Telephone Directoryon CD-ROM. This is a bit later, I think thisis from 1993. But look at this nonsense.You have a CD for each region around the US and then one for businesses. But yeah, you canjust, you can search for -- this is effectivelya really glorified Whitepages. Just gonnalook up the South here. And each one of theseCDs is almost 600 megabytes of pure text datawith searching capabilities. Picked this upat a Goodwill a while back. And again, it'sone of those things where you do install it,but it doesn't actually put very much in yourhard disk. Really that was the whole point.A lot of these early CDs, like pretty muchall of them, you just have a basic littlething you'd put on a hard disk or floppy diskor RAM disk or whatever and it's just, ittells the program where to look for stuffand that's about it. Because everything wasmeant to stream off of that CD. Drive letteris D for this CD. So there we go, regionalinstallation complete. All right, so it putsome batch files for us here. Can just typein PROCD and it will open it up. Pro Phone1993, software version 2.2. Yeah, this isthe National Telephone Directory on CD-ROM.And there is, like I said, a lot of informationon here. Think they released these once everyquarter? And yeah. That's all this is. Youcan either just browse one by one here.It is amazing how many businessesstart with A1 or AA or AAA. There's so much.Look at all those A1s! This is just the Southregion here. Oops. Held down page down toolong. It's just going to keep doing this.Okay. But yeah, the other way of course, isthat you can do this is just typing in things.If we want to go to the Ks, there we go. Nowwe can just browse these. And that's prettymuch all this is. You can just look up thingsthat you would see in your Whitepages or whateverkind of reference would have this informationback then. Instead of going to your big bookthat you have at home or to a library or whatever,because this has a lot more than just yourstandard Whitepages or Yellow Pages. So it'sjust addresses, names and phone numbers. Andone cool thing you could do, of course, isjust print things out. A nice handy referencethere. Don't have a printer plugged in, butit would print things. And then you can pressF2 to dial local or long distance numbers.So if you had a modem installed that you coulddial out through the landline, you could dothat right here. You just set the COM portand whatever else. And it'll just straightup dial the phone numbers. You don't evenhave to figure it out. You don't have to figureit out, man! All those buttons on a touchtone phone are so confusing. You can justhave your computer do it. Honestly, just absolutelyfuturistic stuff. The fact that you're alsogetting it from a CD-ROM. All these radiostations. That's enough of that. So the finalthing I do wanna try out here are some games.I know I said there weren't really too manygames on CD, and there weren't when this cameout. But of course that definitely changedlater on. And this computer doesn't supportmost of the CD games you might think aboutfrom the early nineties, y’know your 7thGuests and Myst and whatnot. But it does ofcourse support the billions of shareware compilations,like Game Empire here. This one was a prettydarn popular one. And this one is a DOS CDso this'll run just fine. Not everything that'son here will run because this is only a 286with EGA graphics, no sound card. But yeah,it'll open it up at least. We can see somethings and check it out. There's a lot ofstuff on here, man. A lot of classics. Theadventure games, a lot of these aren't reallyadventure games, but you got the Hugo games.Hugo is always good. Last Half of Darkness.That was how we discovered that one was thiscompilation right here. Strategy games. Lookat that, Balloon Challenge is on here. Heckyeah, man. I could go for some card games.I'm in the mood for some Blackjack. So yeah,you can run it from the hard drive, it’lljust copy it over or run it directly fromthe CD. It'll pop up an error or a warningthat you might get an error because yeah,you can't obviously write to anything. Highscores and configurations won't be savingunless somehow the game knows that it's streamingoff the CD and it’ll put some configurationson the hard disk. But anyway, Blackjack! Thiswill take forever to render. It puts thiswhole rounded, just bunch of cards on thescreen. That'll take absolutely forever. Let'snot watch that. My bet. Let's just bet itall. I'm feeling lucky. I've got a CD-ROMdrive. All right, a 16. Great. Eh. I'll hit.Feeling lucky. Oh wow! Lucky CD-ROM. Wasn'texpecting that. All right, just go until Ibust. Got an 18. All right I'm gonna stay.Nice! Dealer busts. Let's go. Got 600. It'sgot a 20? All right. Fine. Fine, fine, fine.Wow. I am just winning today, dude. Shouldbuy myself a lottery ticket. Yeah. There'sa lot of, I'm trying to think what else ison here that would work straight away. I knowa lot does, but actually I know one thingthat'll be pretty cool. We've got, yeah, EGAGolf here in the mixed games. Some of thesecategories. And we'll run this straight offof the CD. There is something extremely novelabout the whole experience here. Hope it'snot just me, but this is fun. This is a demoversion of Caddiehack from Micode Developments.That it is. It's basically shareware though.It's got a whole big chunk of the game youcan play. The price you pay for not payingany price. You gotta sit through all this.Isn't that charming?All right. One player. Play on the one coursethat it allows. Yeah. Add some sounds. Selectyour tree. You get to select trees. I'm gonnago with palm trees because, I don't know man,EGA palm trees. And so, yeah, it pretty muchcontrols like any other golf game, but thisit's a little bit different. So for instance,if I were to do full power and then you thinkaccuracy would be in the middle, but I justmissed the ball. You have to go up here andthen down here. Okay. And so that just slicedlike crazy, but I'm not in the water. I thoughtI would be in the water. Wow okay. So trythat again. That's pretty much what you wannado. Wow, I'm not in the water again. Thatis extremely lucky. Let's do right here. Rightin the water again! Oh, mink. Augh. Well.I just love the way this looks! Look at that.It's much different than something like WorldClass Leaderboard as much as I enjoy that,that has all those bitmapped kind of graphicsand this is just filled line art. It's gotthis pseudo 3D thing going on that's justfantastic, I think. And you have a caddy that'sautomatically selecting your iron and suchso you don't even have to worry about that.I think you can change that if you want. Buttypically the caddy's pretty darn good aboutchoosing the right wedge or iron or whateveryou need. I am just going to just completelytank. This is awful. Aw no, it got across!Sweet. Let's try this. Oh no. Anyway, thatis the CD-ROM at least in terms of runningCD-ROMs. One more thing that I wanna showthough is audio discs. Because yes, this doesCD audio. You got the headphones here of course.And then around back we have the stereo output,which I have hooked to some speakers. AndI’m just gonna play the CD here that wassent to me by Tame Impala, because I boughttickets to go see one of their shows thissummer and of course that got canceled, butthey sent the CD anyway. So this is the onlyaudio CD that I have right now. Anyway, um.I guess now that I think about it, I can'tactually play this because copyrighted stuff,whatever, I'll show you how it works in anyway. So there’s this program called CD Play.It came with a whole lot of different CD drivesback in the day. This is the Sony versionof it, but it still works with this.Look at that! Oh that's cool.Yeah this is a compact disc audio player for DOS. You got all your commands here that you'dexpect to see, your shuffles and you can programthings in and repeat and whatever you couldrun it in the background, as you've got otherthings going on. It'll act as a TSR if youneed it to. Pretty darn cool, actually. Soyeah, you can select a track over here. I'mgonna have to mute this because it's copyrightedmusic, but whatever. CD audio!Yeah, ya love that new sound of \"Tame Impala?\"They've really changed up their whole groove!Well anyway, yeah, you can have an eject button right here,software eject. For some reason that is reallyimpressive to me because it's DOS. It doesn'tactually go back in, but you know, whatever.It's cool. And about the only other thingI want to mention really quick at the endhere is does it play burned CD-ROMs? Or doesit read them? Yes, it does actually. So I'vegot one that I just wrote here, nothing specialabout it. Didn't actually even write it veryslowly. It’s just on a modern CD recordablethere. And yeah, so far I've had no problemsrunning burned CD-ROMs. That's nice. Let'sdig around in DOSGAMES\\ARCADE2\\GODMOM30. Aclassic of sorts that I remember from childhood.F. Godmom.Yeah, Good old Fairy Godmom from Soggy Bread Software.And yeah, just streaming right off a CD like everything else.These aren't necessarily really hard-to-run programsthat I'm pulling off the CD here, but still.It's just cool that you can do it, which isyeah, that about sums up the entire CD-ROMexperience with this particular drive. It'sbig, it's slow. It's ridiculous. Y’know,there’s no real reason to use it, exceptthat it's fun. And it's oddly fascinatingto be restricted like this, but yet at thesame time, so freed! And yeah, if you remember,what was the first thing that you ever rememberseeing on CD-ROM in terms of software? Especiallyif it was an application or something. I'malways curious to hear that. Because for alot of folks it sure seems to be somethinglike an encyclopedia or a reference materialof some kind.Oh no, am I gonna screw this up?Augh!I turned the exit into a ladder!Dang it.Well, that's that. I hope that you enjoyed this and if you did,why not check out some of my other videos on all kinds of retro computing topicsand other things that I post. New stuff everyweek here on LGR. And as always, thank youvery much for watching!\n"