1993: Broderbund Software releases Myst, a game for the Macintosh computer that becomes a record-setting best-seller and the killer app that sparks sales of CD-ROM drives. Brothers Rand and Robyn ...

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 ...

This article describes how to set up a virtual CD-ROM jukebox (VCDJ) using Samba and Linux. A VCDJ is a network server that provides access to the contents of a large number of CD-ROM disks, without ...

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, ...

In another case of digital rights management doing harm to paying customers, a slew of CD-ROM games are being rendered inoperable by a security update in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. As ...

If you want to buy an app for your Mac today, you can just go to the App Store, click a button and—pausing only to reflect that developers are increasingly abandoning it—within seconds it’s there, on ...

At the time, it was the CD-ROM that had captured the imagination of consumers and the entire publishing industry. The high-capacity optical discs enabled mass distribution of multimedia for the first ...

Since a prototype of the fabled, unreleased SNES-CD (aka the “Nintendo PlayStation”) was first found and disassembled last year, we’ve learned enough about this one-of-a-kind piece of hardware to ...

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 ...

A CD-ROM drive can be used as a stand-alone unit for playing digital audio CDs without interfacing with a computer. The stereo output of CD player available at the audio jack can be amplified using ...

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 ...