Then you get a drive, but the game you loved is no longer playable since the server it is using to confirm its license has been offline for years.
That’s when you go find the 2002 keygen/crack.
Yeah, but then it’s easier to download the whole game rather than buying a CD/DVD drive.
Yeah but you didn’t know that before buying the drive!
Pro tip: if you have a physical copy of a game and it’s also available on Steam, try registering the CD key. (Obviously doesn’t work if the game doesn’t have a CD key. Or if the publisher is a dick. looking at you, EA)
I never did it on steam but years back I contacted origin support and they let me register all my old ea games keys and still have them on the ea app. Not great but I thought it was cool.
They let me do all of them except battlefield Vietnam. They said they didn’t have that one available to download at the time.
Drives are cheap
A USB DVD Reader/Writer costs 15 bucks. (I’m too used feel like that meme, and then at some point I needed to find a way to get a Mini-PC to read CDs, and as it turns out it’s quite simple - I reckon it was more a case of “can’t be arsed to do it” than a case of “can’t do it”).
I wonder how long that price will last. We might be living in just the right time to buy a boatload of optical drives.
Well, I got the ones I needed (I got 2, one for me and one for the person I was configuring a Mini-PC for) from China with Aliexpress, and in my experience you can usually find adapters for old tech directly from China even when stores in the West don’t have those.
In fact I was curious when I was writting this comment and I checked and it turns out they also have Floopy Disk USB adapters and, funnilly enough, they costs the same as the USB DVD Reader/Writters (which makes some sense as eventually the whole functionality is integrated and the cost is mainly the mechanical parts and assembly, plus those things are probably small manufacturing runs).
Most electronics factories over there aren’t exactly designing top of the range modern consumer electronics, but they’re perfectly capable of designing even complex electronics products (in my experience, they have more trouble with software than hardware) - hence for example there are several Single Board Computer designers over there - and they’re so many that they’re constantly coming out with quirky products while competing with each other (and not all of which is stuff with lots of LED lights and which play some crappy jingles), so I guess it makes sense somebody over there would’ve created adapters for old storage media (in fact I was curious again, so I looked for and indeed found a “Vinyl player with USB recording”).
As long as Electronics in China keeps having the sort of competitive environment and lots of little factories like it was in the West before the 80s, I reckon somebody over there will keep on coming up with adaptors for old storage tech.
I have an external DVD-RW on a shelf just in case. Every once in a while I need to bring it out and I wonder if a giant boulder is going to start rolling at me when I grab it.
I actually have a SATA cable and power plug discreetly tucked in a spot in my PC case and have just taken the side off and plugged in a drive on occasion. It’s normal purpose is troubleshooting other hard drives, but it works for that too
I just bought an external cd/dvd drive so I can convert my DVD library into a digital one for convenience and to preserve the dvds longer.
I’m having some issues with the speed of conversion, but my biggest problem is quickly becoming storage space.
Also, I dug up some of my old games like Caesar III and installed a no-CD “patch”.
Good times.
There’s an adapter or replacement for everything
If you out the CD in the microwave for 15 seconds you can shrink it down to the size of a SD card, the SD card slot will read it.
You know that this answer will be mashed into an “AI” training set somewhere.
I remember back in the day when people were literally baking their nvidia GPUs in the oven to fix some solder issues, and cutting the PCI-E connectors to fit in an AGP slot. Can’t wait for AI to bring that shit back.
I mean, the first one is a valid temporary fix, just don’t use the same oven you use for food.
The piano PS3 has this issue with the same workaround
I accidentally went 18 seconds and got a microSD, just be careful of microwaves with different power for the correct parameters, but this is known to work
External cd drive is so cheap it’s almost free.
USB external optical drive with read and write capacity costs like 20€ where I am.
I keep the C&C Tiberian sun and the original Far Cry box for nostalgia.
Tiberian Sun! I haven’t thought of that one in forever.
Black and White
🏴☠️
What is this meme from? It looks so familiar
Iron man.
I think the third one?
That’s Tony’s dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.
Iron Man 2.
My bad, it’s been a while.
Ironman 2
There’s some slight benefit to having games that are just a sticker with a license number in the box. Probably, the only one benefit though.
Until they remove it from the store.
I have an internal DVD-RW drive, but I disconnected the cable to use it for a new HDD I bought a few weeks ago
You unplugged a DVD drive to plug in a hard drive?
What does it feel like still living in 2010?
Yes. I didn’t have extra SATA cables
LOL I hope you have at least one NVME SSD to run the OS at least.
I do have that. I have been through the pain of running the OS on an HDD with my old computer and ever since I got an SSD, I can’t return.
I technically have a DVD drive/burner still. It’s just not in the computer because the case didn’t have any drive bays for it and I couldn’t find one I could afford that had even one when I built this machine. I could just run it outside the case but… Nah.
