[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.