Those old CD games that have been sitting on your shelf for eternity? Linux can run them.

Analogue’s consoles use a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip, which can, in simple terms, simulate the original hardware accurately and without software-based emulation. The Analogue Duo, the ...

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 approach to consoles. Go to a physical store, get a disc, then pop it into ...

Being an early adopter is great if you enjoy showing off new gadgets to your friends. But any new technology also brings the risk of ending up at the wrong side of a format war: just ask anyone who ...

A cable used to send audio CD sound to the computer's sound card. When playing audio CDs, CD-ROM drives output analog sound to both a headphone jack and external connector just like a CD player. This ...

Sometimes in the never-ending progression of technology, people take wrong turns. They pursue dead-ends they believe represent a bright future, often in spite of obvious indications to the contrary.

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.

On October 1, 1982, Sony ignited a digital audio revolution with the release of the world’s first commercial compact disc player, the CDP-101 (above), in Japan. It signaled the dawn of a new audio ...

Although the company eventually released a PC with a CD-ROM drive in 1991, the Commodore 64’s heyday was long before CD-ROMs became popular. But that didn’t stop Rainbow Arts from releasing a ...

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 ...

If you find yourself missing the simple excitement of your old Sega or Nintendo machine, you need this game. PC Gamer's got your back Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to ...

We're rerunning Richard Cobbett's classic Crapshoot column, in which he rolled the dice and took a chance on obscure games—both good and bad. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...