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.

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 ...

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 ...

After over a year of on-and-off tinkering, the “Nintendo PlayStation” is fully operational. The unreleased console — which was formed out of an ill-fated partnership between Nintendo and Sony in the ...

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 ...

Unlike today, it didn't always seem retro to put a compact disc in a computer in order to find information — three decades ago, in fact, it seemed very cutting edge. As the CBC's Fred Langan reported ...

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 ...

Star Trek panoramas ripped from CD-ROM and presented on the web in accessible modern form. There are four environments to explore and pan: the main bridge of the USS Enterprise from the original Star ...

No more yellow box: The Rosetta Stone app for iOS is part of a digital lineup that also includes Android and web versions. (Rosetta Stone image) If you’re familiar with the language learning software ...