I'm trying to build a PC for retro gaming - mostly Win98 and WinXP games, and also smooth DVD movie playback. There's a 6x speed DVD drive available in a nearby store that's compatible with Win98 as well (by I/O Magic ). Before buying I wanted to ask, is 6x speed good enough for the purpose? There are some games that run directly off CDs - will this speed be sufficient for that?
Probably a 6x DVD drive will read CDs faster than 6x, I would guess, but I might be wrong.
That said, I wouldn't want a too fast CD-ROM drive for games, as the spin-up time often tends to be a bigger annoyance than actual read speeds. And oh, the noise of those 52x CD drives are excruciating 🤣
Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀
Keep in mind a Windows 98 Era computer was CDs and that is probably a 32x CD reader. Once DVD readers came out I never thought about how fast they were for games. I'm not talking about the 1x ones that would come with mpeg decoder cards. If you building the computer on the early side of Windows XP it will be fine for sure. The gaming laptops didn't have top speed drives either and you never heard people complain about the drive speeds in them.
H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-17, 05:46:Probably a 6x DVD drive will read CDs faster than 6x, I would guess, but I might be wrong.
That said, I wouldn't want a too fast CD-ROM drive for games, as the spin-up time often tends to be a bigger annoyance than actual read speeds. And oh, the noise of those 52x CD drives are excruciating 🤣
This!
From what I can tell, a 6x DVD drive will often be either 24x or 32x CD. For a desktop it is probably 32x.
That speed is definitely well into the realm of "so fast it's slow" because of the long spin-up time.
I remember my brother having a 24x CD-ROM back in the day and it was so loud and and obnoxious it would cause the computer tower to vibrate and buzz. In games with FMV on the CD it definitely had issues with causing the system to freeze while the disk spun up. Once it's spinning it's fine, but getting there is the hard part.
I think the fastest drive I ever had in my own system was either a 52x or 56x... those are even louder and more annoying to use for games that access the CD often.
... come to think of it, I remember there being a post here a while back regarding a program or driver that limits CD-ROM speed so you don't have to try to locate rare mid-90s drives in working condition to get a good experience in games that stream assets from CD.
I think this is it:
Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS?
aapuzzo wrote on 2024-05-17, 05:53:aapuzzo wrote on 2024-05-17, 05:51:Keep in mind a Windows 98 Era computer was CDs and that is probably a 32x CD reader. Once DVD readers came out I never thought about how fast they were for games. I'm not talking about the 1x ones that would come with mpeg decoder cards. If you building the computer on the early side of Windows XP it will be fine for sure. The gaming laptops didn't have top speed drives either and you never heard people complain about the drive speeds in them.
Come on we are retro gaming on old hardware 😀 Hearing the drive spin up is part of the charm 😀.
Why are you replying to your own post?
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-17, 05:46:That said, I wouldn't want a too fast CD-ROM drive for games, as the spin-up time often tends to be a bigger annoyance than actual read speeds. And oh, the noise of those 52x CD drives are excruciating 🤣
Ah, the exact reason why I use ISO images for playing games whenever possible 😉
Win98 rig: Athlon XP 2500+/512MB RAM/Gigabyte GA-7VT600/SB Live!/GF FX5700/Voodoo2 12MB
WinXP rig: HP RP5800 - Pentium G850/2GB RAM/GF GT530 1GB
Amiga: A600/2MB RAM
PS3: 500GB HDD Slim, mostly for RetroArch, PSX & PS2 games
