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External SCSI CD drive on Macintosh Plus

H

habibrobert

6502
Just out of curiosity, could you use an external SCSI CD drive with a macintosh plus? I know there would be no practical use for this on a macintosh plus but I was just wondering if it could work? Could it work for a macintosh LC?

Cheers!

 
So long as its a SCSI drive, and you set the SCSI ID, termination, etc correctly as per usual, no reason why you can't.

 
They made a few - the AppleCD 150, AppleCD 300, AppleCD 300e and AppleCD 600e, as well as the PowerCD (if you can find one).

 
Well I might as well ask you another question I had! Did the external SCSI CD drives get far enough into the 90's to become having CD burning capabilities? Imagine burning CDs on a macintosh LC or a performa! That sounds pretty cool to me.

 
There were external CD burners in the 90s, but burning a CD, even at 1x speed is way beyond the capabilities of an LC.

The first CD burner I came across cost megadollars and burned at 1x speed. It had quite an exotic suspension system to prevent vibration affecting the operation of the burner. The burner was connected to a PowerMac 7100. To burn a disk reliably, the 7100 had to be started with the bare minimum of extensions loaded and the network unplugged. Failure to do this would result in a failed burn and a $50 disk turned in to a coaster.

CD burners with inbuilt buffers and much faster computers have made this sort of trouble history.

 
I had a CD burner in the early 1990s. Cost $1200. Loved it, Everything on all my HDs would easily fit on a CD. I quickly learned that when I started burning a CD, I couldn't touch the computer at all or I had a coaster. Disks were $2.50.

The Mac plus should have no problem reading CDs as long as the format is compatible. I once hooked a CD drive to a SCSI card in a 1977 Apple II and it could read CDs. Trouble was the CDs had to be in ProDOS format and there were only a few of those made. The ProDOS CDs I burned on a Mac worked though

 
Not exactly. The old optics and laser diodes have a lot of trouble I find with burned media as opposed to pressed discs. You may find a lot of the time that a disc will simply be rejected by the drive because it has no clue what to do. A lot of Toshiba's SCSI CD drives have this problem.

The CD SC on the price:useability ratio is awful. Unless you badly want the drive you're better off using anything else out there because it's dreadfully slow and barely capable of handling classic games such as Myst.

 
Honestly, one of my intentions was to be able to install dinopark tycoon on my macintosh LC. I only have the CD version of it and not the floppy. My second reason for getting one would be to back up the OS on to the CD so if at any time the floppies (for compact macs not the LC) didnt work, I could just create another floppy disk from the information burned on the CD. I know you can download the old OS versions on the internet, but since none of my 68k macs have ethernet ports, it proves a challenge to be able to create a floppy disk on a modern mac that would be compatible with 68k macs. I know there are some software out there that are able to get around this loop, but they seem to not always have a 100% success rate or so I've been told by others.

But that really is amazing how you can hook up an external CD drive to a mac from 1977 and have it read the disk!!!!!!

 
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