There are a few criteria to keep in mind when purchasing a CD-Rom drive. First and foremost is speed: How fast does the sucker spin? Speed determines how quickly your drive can transfer data to the screen and how smooth your video will be, although, increasingly, speed can also be determined by software. The first CD-Rom drives transferred data at 150 kilobytes per second. This was adequate for text and sound but sucked for animation. Videos on single-speed drives were the size of postage stamps and played with a herky-jerky, stop-motion, Charlie-Chaplin-in-cyberspace effect.
Do not, repeat, do not let anyone unload one of these clunkers on you as part of an ill-advised value deal. And if you already own a single-speed drive, you're going to have to upgrade in order to appreciate the splendors of multimedia. Technology left 150-kilobytes-per-second drives in the dust three years ago with NEC's introduction of the double-speed drive, which processes data at the rate of, you guessed it, 300 kilobytes per second. This made full-motion video a real possibility, though it was far from fluid. Double-speed drives are the floor for multimedia applications. They're an inexpensive entry point for CD-Rom. But if you're going to use your drive extensively, you'll probably want to upgrade to the next level: the triple-speed drive. At 450 kilobytes per second, things start looking really cool. Video is smoother. Pauses, if they occur, are shorter. You have left the city limits and are cruising along the interstate, with the top down and your favorite song blasting on the radio. Life is good.
Quad speed is almost perfect, which is to say, almost television (television is, incongruously, the standard by which we judge all this technology that's supposed to make us smarter). By the time this article is printed, quad-speed drives will be the new standard, according to the Silicon Valley principle of More Better Faster Cheaper. If the automobile industry ran on this principle, we would all be driving Lamborghinis for the price of Geo Prisms.
You should be running a CD-Rom drive off a 386 or better, if you're using a PC; off a Mac II or higher if you're an Apple person. The rock-bottom RAM requirement is four megabytes. Eight will give you a bit of breathing room. Beyond that, it may not make a great deal of difference how fast your computer's CPU runs. When you start talking about Pentium versus Power PC chips, you're racing Ferraris on a golf course. It really doesn't matter. The speed of the CD-Rom drive itself and the software design are the limiting factors. If you own an Apple, the CD-Rom installation process is relatively easy: Buy the drive, plug it into your computer and off you go. PC-compatibles are more complicated. You can buy a CD-Rom drive that has just an SCSI interface card. This is adequate if you're a doctor or a lawyer using the drive for database searches. But it doesn't give you sound capability, so you won't be able to do most of the fun stuff, such as hearing yourself being blown to pieces by enemy spaceships as an orchestra swells in the background. If you want that, you have to buy a sound card (you'll want 16-bit or better).
Of course, CD-Roms are capable of putting out CD sound, so if you want the full-service Mission Control multimedia desktop, you can buy speakers for your computer. Apple makes a good set, as do Sony and Koss. If you're going to play combat-style games, you should also consider buying a joystick--it does wonders for Rebel Assault.
Once you have the hardware set up, CD-Rom is a fairly straightforward media toy: power button, volume control, eject, et cetera.
Run along and play.
