You have it way easier these days, but back in the day, when you wanted to play a game on your PC, you had to take a similar ...

A mildly annoying trend over recent years has been for USB hardware devices to expose a CD-ROM drive containing their drivers for Windows users. Of course there’s no real CD in there, instead the ...

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance produced pages of breathless gossip columns ...

These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a desktop or laptop. This has been the ...

The ScummVM community has just made the early CD-ROM gaming era more accessible. For five years, multiple people have worked on making Macromedia Director games playable on modern hardware, and today, ...

Retro gaming has made a comeback with systems like the NES Classic, but none of them will do you any good if you have a stockpile of game CDs from yesteryear that you want to play. What might, however ...

In 1994, multimedia discs—from encyclopedias to magazines—flooded the market, and felt like the future. It was fun while it lasted. At the time, it was the CD-ROM that had captured the imagination of ...

Replay: The battlefields of the audio visual world are littered with the corpses of dead formats, none more so than the fight to put moving images on to discs. With the exception of LaserDisc, none of ...

Meghan is an associate editor with EdTech. She enjoys coffee, cats and science fiction TV. For students attending a university in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the experience was vastly different ...

Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.