[keyboard clicking]
[soft jazz music]
Greetings and this is kind of a monstrous LGR thing.
This is the NEC MultiSpin 4Xc quad-speed
external CD-ROM changer.
And this holds seven CDs inside
of one beefy piece of 90s hardware.
This is the model number CDR-C302,
and was released at a suggested retail price
of 350 US dollars in the summer of 1995.
This is something I have wanted to mess with
ever since I was a kid and saw them
in various electronics stores.
I mean, at the time I didn't even have a CD-ROM,
so the fact that there were these
gigantic CD-ROM changers
(laughs)
talk about forbidden fruit,
holy grail kind of material
at least for 10-year-old me.
Now, sure, audio CD changers are nothing special.
In fact, every time I go thrifting
I'm seeing all sorts of different CD changers,
like those that load from cartridges
and have gigantic spindles where you can fit
hundreds of CDs like these from Pioneer
or even those with spinning trays.
But a CD-ROM changer, now that is
not as common, at least in my experience.
I don't know. I just didn't see these as much.
I've never used one of these external ones,
and it's not to say any of these things
are rare necessarily, but they're not
the most immediate thing that you might go for
if you're wanting to install a CD-ROM
on your retro computer nowadays.
I mean, seriously, this is just silly.
However, silly 90s hardware is kind of my forte,
and even though I don't cover them super often,
so are CD-ROM games with tons of CDs in the box.
Games like Black Dahlia, Ripper, and Phantasmagoria
pretty much sold themselves on being multi-disk games.
Phantasmagoria in particular is the one
that comes to mind with this,
because the game was famous for having seven disks.
Let's go ahead and get this brand new one unboxed,
because, yeah, it's still sealed.
I happily bought this quite a while ago on eBay,
and was just like: one of these days I'll get around to it.
And this is that day.
(plastic tearing)
Oh yeah.
(plastic tearing)
All right, got some more information here.
It does store up to seven CD-ROMs.
And look at all these other things.
This is a quad-speed unit, by the way,
and it uses SCSI-2 to connect.
They did release...
NEC that is, released a whole bunch
of these different disk changers like this
for PCs back in the day.
And this just happens to be the largest one
that I'm aware of, so that's why I wanted it.
Oh, that's a...
(laughs)
That's a comforting note.
Look at this.
Caution: use of control of adjustments
or performance of procedures other than those
specified herein may result in hazardous radiation exposure.
I mean...
All right.
We got some cables here.
There's a SCSI cable, 50-pin.
It looks like SCSI-2.
We got a power cable, and the drive itself.
Look how neatly that is taped up.
Man, it's like a gift-wrapped present.
Whoa! Look at that.
It looks so good.
That is a fine-looking piece of hardware,
brand new, not yellowed at all, which is great.
I was wondering if it would hold up nicely.
This part is, feels like painted metal.
This plastic on front could very well yellowed.
I've seen some yellowed units online.
This one didn't.
Oh yeah.
(laughs)
This just screams greatness.
I don't know.
Something about these industrially designed
kind of CD-ROM units, it reminds me of much older CD-ROMs.
This was manufactured in June 1995.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
That's awesome.
Little rubbery buttons, they feel okay.
Volume wheel there,
3 1/2-millimeter audio jack for headphones.
I cannot wait to use this.
We've got a note here on some very neon paper.
"Attention. Read me first!"
Let's see. What do we got?
Some notes here for Macintosh Quadra users,
other Macintosh users, and Corel's SCSI-2 diskette
does some things that don't really seem to pertain to me.
All right, I'm not gonna be installing this on a Macintosh.
We're gonna be going with Windows 98, because I want to.
Actually, maybe Windows 95, I don't know yet.
This is cool.
What is all this?
Oh, that has pretty much lost every...
(rubber band snaps)
Ooh, yep, that's just a very gummy rubber band.
Even after 23 years those can perish.
Apparently their own interface didn't have
the 50-pin high-density connector,
which my Adaptec card does have that.
So let's see here.
A Macintosh driver on a disk.
Got a warranty card here, or really a registration card
for warranty and other such things.
This is an interesting form factor for instructions.
It's more like a calendar.
Okay, so Windows drivers are installed
through the Corel driver kit.
Okay, well...
Aha, I feel a disk in here.
Corel SCSI Version 2.
(disk thumps)
There we go, (laughs) a very nondescript
3-1/2-inch high-density floppy diskette right here.
Welcome to Corel's SCSI.
You can use virtually any SCSI device and
ASPI-compatible host adaptor with Corel SCSI.
What is this?
We've got a mounting plate or something.
No, no, no. This is an adaptor.
Aha.
Inside the bag we get a smaller bag,
and inside the smaller bag, a three-inch CD-ROM adaptor.
How handy.
It did say we would need one of those
in order to use them in here so I'm glad it came with that.
I gotta see what's inside this though.
It's just so large.
Let's see what we got here.
Well, it's so colorful.
Wow.
It's a very pretty internal set of goods here
even though we're not really seeing a whole lot.
How appealing. (laughs)
Well, all right. Well that's that.
Let's go ahead and get this installed into the...
or connected to the Lazy Green Giant
Windows 98 PC and see what happens.
So as far as getting this connected, really it's just
a matter of plugging in SCSI cable to both sides.
And I'm needing to use one of my other cables
because the one it came with does not have
the proper 50-pin connector on the other side
to plug into the PC, but that's okay.
All the feature-selection switches
should be in the correct spots
for what we're gonna be doing.
So the termination is on.
Parity check is on.
SCSI ID number is default.
Power goes right here.
Got the correct voltage, of course.
And I decided to go with Windows 95.
So I've got that...
(card thumps)
Got that on an SD card right there.
So that's gonna go right there.
(thunky-thunk)
Just curious if I can power on
the drive before powering the PC.
Let's see here.
(drive clicking, clunking, whirring)
(yep, it just keeps going!)
Well that was quite an assortment of sounds.
(laughs)
So yeah, you just press the button.
It will eject the inner tray out
into the actual ejection tray thing.
And then you can press another one
and it'll swap the inner tray part and there we go.
Yeah, nice little labeling right there.
I was wondering how that handled things.
All right, well let's try some games out.
Yeah.
This is gonna be awesome.
All right, let's power it all on.
(whirring)
(rattling)
That's a good sign, I guess.
And it is detected.
(beep)
And Windows 95.
[Windows 95 startup sound plays]
So first order of business is get this
Corel software installed, I suppose,
although it might have detected something already hopefully.
Yeah.
(laughs)
It has seven individual CD drives.
Okay. Let's get this disk going, see what we get.
This looks ridiculous.
Come on now.
This appears to be largely for
getting this to work under DOS mode.
I don't know.
Let's just try it without doing anything else.
So I'm just going to try a single CD-ROM game at the moment.
I'm gonna go with StarCraft.
Okay.
Now I'll know how to run so just to try to refresh,
see what happens.
Absolutely nothing.
So chances are we do need that software.
Load it in high memory.
Why not?
Okay, I just restarted
and the drive started doing crazy things so...
(error sound)
Still got nothing.
I don't know.
Reinstalled it following all the instructions
in the manual, nothing.
So I'm gonna try Windows 98.
Rather annoyingly, a lot of the stuff it's referring to
in here does not come on the disk at all.
All right, once again we have these seven drives detected.
(chime)
Not accessible.
All right. So I've got the LGR Woodgrain 486 going over here
since Windows was not having fun with this drive.
And I don't know if you saw that
but the SCSI adaptor installed will actually
automatically see this as the other one did, but...
And this is what I'm going to be using
to get the drive working, this EZ-SCSI Standard Edition.
Thank goodness for things like this.
Honestly, this is gonna be way easier,
at least if it works with this drive.
It should. It has, in my experience
with other external CD drives.
Yeah. There is the host adaptor.
It found that on port 340-H.
And now it's gonna be scanning for anything plugged into it,
which it has seen this, which is good.
That's a good sign.
Here we go.
What is the first drive letter
you would like EZ-SCSI to reserve for your CD-ROM drive?
So I'm gonna start with...
Actually, I'm gonna go with E because
I have an internal drive as well
so we're gonna start there, make all the mods for me.
(beep)
And we're gonna do the same thing over here.
(beep)
Okay.
And we'll go ahead and restart.
(laughs)
Yup.
So we've got seven targets.
And yes, awesome, awesome, awesome.
So it has assigned drive letters
to each of the seven individual drives here.
And I've still got Gravis UltraSounds stuff.
I'm gonna go ahead and...
(typing)
change that really quick (laughs)
cause we don't have a Gravis UltraSound installed.
At this point we should just be able to
stick all of these CDs in here.
There's disk one.
And there's disk two.
And here's disk three.
Number four.
Yeah. That's looking better.
I've got the Sound Blaster Pro going now.
So we will have sound.
Disk five.
(laughs)
It's a ridiculous process.
Disk six.
Oh my goodness, finally disk frigging seven.
There we go.
We got all seven disks of Phantasmagoria installed
so we should just be able to go over
to each individual drive by letter, starting with E.
And this will be disk one.
So it'll switch over to that and read slowly.
(laughs)
And there we go.
It's actually not terribly slow.
I mean it is a quad-speed drive running over SCSI-2
so it should be relatively quick.
But yeah, switching is a bit of an ordeal
because of course it has to physically
take something from that internal caddy
and move it out into this loading tray up to the laser.
And then there we go.
So that's disk two.
And then G, of course, would be disk three and so on,
all the way through the alphabet up to disk seven.
This does lead to a bit of a limitation
in the sense that we're not gonna be able
to physically move one disk internally from...
Say if we wanted to move disk four
over to drive one or the E drive, we can't do that.
Disk one is always gonna be E.
So it depends on the software really.
Let's just ahead and load up Phantasmagoria here and see.
(typing loudly)
Straightforward installation for this,
it's only needing disk one in order to do that
so we're gonna actually have to run the game and...
(laughs)
What is that?
SIERRA/SCARYDOS?
(laughs)
Oh, I've never actually seen the
DOS version of Phantasmagoria installer folder.
That's...
(laughs)
That's wonderful.
(scary music)
(roar)
(laughs)
What a game.
(dramatic music)
Such dramatics.
I'm gonna go ahead and start a new game here
and get to the chapter selection screen.
So if we just started with one it'll continue on.
Each chapter is on each disk
so let's just skip to chapter two
and see if it'll figure out that...
(laughs)
No it doesn't.
I kind of suspected that just due to what I knew
about the way that this works internally.
In fact I think it was on the box.
All right, so you can kind of see here
there are these trays in the back
that each one of the CDs is inserted to
whenever you insert it into the drive.
But then this actual loading tray
will go and retrieve one of the disks
and bring it up to the laser.
The thing is, it only does that
whenever you're doing the eject and insertion process.
So in order for me to get CD two
to this game to be able to read it,
I'd have to physically swap it over,
which completely defeats the purpose
of having all these multi-disk games
on a multi-CD-ROM changer like this.
If it had some sort of other mechanism
which would actually take the CD
and then move it over to the laser assembly
so it would read it from the same drive letter,
then that would be ideal for F&V games,
multi-disk games like this that just swap out
and don't actually ask for another drive letter.
Since this is looking for the same drive letter
every single time a disk swap occurs,
then we're stuck with this limitation.
All right, let's get to some acting.
- In here, in the bedroom.
- What are you doing?
- [LGR] Role-playing, gosh.
- I'm starting my new book.
- So what?
Did you go buy the drain cleaner?
- [LGR] The drain cleaner.
Oh, this is a great scene.
- What? Drain cleaner?
- [LGR] And by great I mean terrible.
- Don't be coy with me.
I asked you several times to go buy me drain cleaner.
Now did you do it?
(LGR laughs loudly)
- Well, I know you said the sink was clogging your darkroom,
but you never asked me to go get you any drain cleaner.
I would have remembered...
- [LGR] Oh, it's just the most
endearing kind of terrible.
Put your laptop away.
You can check your AOL email address later.
You don't have mail.
Most unfortunate that I'm not gonna be able
to actually play through this.
I mean I could.
I would have to physically swap the disk out like a caveman.
What's the point of that?
Honestly, I didn't even think about that
when I picked this one out online.
I just remember seeing it back in the day,
saw it show up on eBay (laughs) and didn't think about it.
I'm like: "holy crap, it's great."
"I want this thing."
And plus it looks neat.
Doesn't it?
It just looks great.
But for multi-disk games it's kinda pointless,
at least if it's a game like this that is gonna look
in the same exact drive designation
every single time it's swapping a disk.
So if anybody has any recommendations
of a retro drive that would accomplish this...
I mean I know of a few myself,
but if you used one back in the day, do let me know.
I would appreciate any kind of recommendations
cause honestly, I would love to get
a six or seven-disk changer that actually lets me
swap between those and keep the disk
in the same drive letter every single time it swaps disks.
Kind of a shame we couldn't get it working in Windows
but we'd be in the same boat anyway.
It works the same, either operating system.
But hopefully you still had fun with the unboxing
and set up and everything else that we were doing.
I enjoyed it anyway.
And if you did, perhaps you'd like to stick around.
There are new videos every week here on LGR.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!