Video: The only CDROM with a Turbo button!

I absolutely had a CD explode on me. It was a 56x drive and the disc was Worms: Armageddon. Probably 2001-2002. The disc wasn't damaged to my knowledge (before exploding, that is). Fragments of the disc shot out the front; one hit my leg and left a mark (didn't break the skin). I had to take the drive apart to get the rest of it out. I got the publisher to send me a new copy of the disc.

Evan

It still makes my brain skip a beat every time I see it.

Brad Sparks

I had to tell you, I really loved this video. It's so interesting to look back on a product that had features that seem to make NO SENSE AT ALL to a modern eye, but back then were absolutely wonderful to have. SO MANY times in the late 90s and early 00s when I used any game or software that needed to have a CD in, I wished I could slow down my drive so it wouldn't be so loud. Pretty much the ONLY thing that benefitted from full speed was copying bulk data off burnt CD-Rs. Most games, etc. by then copied their most critical data to the hard drive and didn't need high speed CD access. So yeah, keep knocking it out of the park. :)

Zorin the Lynx

Very amused that Brad Sucks has become the defacto music to showcase things with. I've listened to his stuff for damn near a decade and am happy to hear it whenever it pops up

Tyler Kurth

Youtube seems to have silently eaten my comment there, and as a game controller collector I wanted to share some info on that gamepad shown early on. I don't think it's actually a Creative product per se - the exact same thing was also sold as (at least) the Agiler Joypad, and by Suncom as the SFX Plus for Mac. (If you search for these on eBay you'll see the similarities!) I'm like 80% sure it was actually a rebadged Rockfire product; you might never have heard of them, but Rockfire made those dark green USB to gameport adapters that are all over eBay, and they also made a ton of early gamepads for other brands - including Trust, Panova, Radio Shack, Speedlink, and possibly (I think) Dexxa and Genius. Creative did actually make their own gamepad: the Gamepad Blaster... or the Creative Cobra... the box had a lot of words on it, and second hand listings these days feature some mangled mix of those. It was a pretty ordinary digital gamepad with both gameport and USB versions, and a Cobra II that added a thumbwheel in the middle. The gameport versions also had an extra gameport socket on the back, I guess in case anyone was silly enough to buy two of them and wanted to daisychain them off a single port on a PC. They're not super comfortable, if your hands are big enough to reach all the buttons then the giant blob of plastic that houses the gameport socket on the back will definitely get in your way. That's true even of the USB versions - they didn't update the shape to get rid of it, they just blanked it off and left it there. At least they're relatively rare - I've only ever seen them on eBay in Europe, so it sounds like Creative were definitely picky about what markets they bothered selling in.