Sony's Internal PC MiniDisc Data Drive: MDM-111
[proprietary format jazz music] [computer buzzes, beeps] - Greetings, and welcome to "LGR: Almost Oddware," sort of? Really this is more of a follow-up to an old episode, where I'm looking to wrap up some loose ends. Specifically regarding the Sony MDH-10, which was an external storage drive for personal computers that used MiniDisc as its storage medium. Not audio MiniDisc, though it could play those, but MD Data, a special sub-format of MiniDisc meant for storing files instead of audio. Now I went into more technical details and history back in that episode of Oddware, but one thing I left out was that there was also the Sony MDM-111 in 1995. This right here, an internal 3.5-inch drive bay version of Sony's MD Data drive.
And while the external MDH-10 is already a rare beast, the internal MDM-111 is on another level of elusiveness. So when I saw one on eBay about two years ago, I immediately bought it, with the intent to tie up some loose threads. First I wanted to show this internal MD Data drive in action on video, cuz as far as I know, no one's done it yet.
And second, my previous MD Data drive never actually read... data. In fact, I don't even have that anymore! I shipped it off to a viewer who asked for it, and I'm like, "Sure, I don't even know if it fully works. So have fun."
So I'm really hoping this one does. 'Cause I'd also love to see it going on its original intended PC operating systems, MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Since, I don't know about you, but the idea of playing MiniDiscs through a DOS prompt and writing data through the old File Manager sounds like a good time, especially if I can get games copied to a disc and play 'em straight off there, as was certainly never intended by Sony. So yeah, let's take a closer look, get it installed, and try playing PC games on MiniDisc! Yeah, let's just take a bit of a closer look at it before we get it put into a PC.
This is the Sony MDM-111-00, from March 1995, is when it was manufactured. And it seems that it was at the same price as the portable drive from some of the articles I found. $699 US in early '95. 30 bucks for each one of these. And can see here we have this 50-pin, SCSI-2 interface four-pin power connector, and then audio output, which is just a standard connector like you'd see on a CD-ROM for instance, four pins. And yeah, this one did have a bit of a dent on there.
I was not sure if I should even get it cuz I saw that, but I took a chance anyway and I'm glad I did, because it does seem to work in my brief testing. Also, I have this section of jumpers for adjusting the SCSI ID and terminator. And it's just the tiniest little jumpers. I mean... so easy to lose!
And then, yeah, on the front here we just have a little eject button, little eject hole in case your MiniDisc gets stuck in there, like that, cuz it will not eject without power. Indicator LED for activity and a three and a half mil audio headphones and the tiniest, just tiniest little volume wheel. Much smaller than you saw in CD-ROMs back then. So yeah, it is just a fascinating thing. [chuckles] Let's get this installed in a PC and test it out. So yeah, to put this thing to the test, I'm gonna be using the LGR Megaluminum Monster build.
It might not be completely ideal for the color scheme. You know, this is all silver and black and this thing is beige, but it's what I have here. All my beige stuff is in storage after the storm still and it's got the right SCSI-2 interface.
And to get things all unscrewed and screwed back into place, I am using the E1 Max Precision Pro screwdriver here from Fanttik, this video's sponsor. You might have seen one of these on here before. I actually bought this one myself a year ago. So when Fanttik got in touch about sponsoring this episode, I was glad to do it since I already knew the E1 Max is awesome to use.
Really just the overall design of the thing is what drew me to it in the first place. That aluminum case with its magnetically captive screwdriver that pops out when you push it in, then sliding out the inside to reveal 50 different bits that meet a huge number of different project needs. Plus handy tweezers and a little crowbar spudger in here. Yeah, the whole thing is just satisfying to use. And convenient, with a built-in USB-C port for charging its built in 350 milliamphour battery, giving you a solid two plus hours of use.
Then there's that handy LED light for seeing stuff you can't see and two different torque settings, a manual driving mode and it's just good stuff. Little wonder, the E1 Max earned the 2023 IF Design Award and 2024 Reddot Design Award and has remained the number one best seller on Amazon for six months. And on that note, Fanttik is currently selling the E1 Max on Amazon at a discount. Just click the link in the description, select the Amazon coupon, and use my code LGRE1MAX for a total of 45% off.
But yeah, with that all screwed in place it's really just down to cables. So I already have this Adaptec SCSI-2 interface going there, which was running the hard disk solution. And this will be going in the middle of the chain here. That's gonna need to be extended just a tiny bit. Oh SCSI, it's nice but these cables are so wide. Then we have audio just for audio MiniDiscs and it's just your standard type of four pin thing that's connected to the sound card and the CD input.
And then four pin molex power. And here we go. That is that. All right. So unfortunately it doesn't really match anything else in terms of the silver and black color scheme I've got going on. But you know, it's just for this video, it'll definitely work. And yeah,
it's just a neat little thing to have in there. MiniDisc internal drive with a teeny little volume wheel and everything. All right, let's test this sucker out! All right, so I'm going to be testing it out on DOS 6.22
and Windows 3.1, not only because I think it'll be quite amusing to see a MiniDisc running through this, but also because I've tried it on Windows 95 and 98, various configurations, various drivers, and none of it has worked. [Windows 3.1 "Tada" sound plays] And here we go, it is set up with Windows 3.1. So we have MDplay which lets us play audio MiniDiscs and then MDformat which formats them, so that you can actually use it.
And not only that, but it shows up as its own dedicated drive, which I've already copied a few things over to just to test. But yeah, it's treating it as any other removable thing. It's that simple. Once it's formatted at least you are free to use it as a removable hard disk, effectively. I mean, it's awesome.
In fact, it seems to be working way better than the MDH-10 did for me. And we also have this right here, MDtool, which is just a built-in formatter for this. It's the same thing as that other program there, you just do a quick or safe format, which is a full format. This takes about 35 minutes.
The quick one is, I don't know, just a couple minutes. Yeah, let's go ahead and do that, because we're gonna start over. And yeah, it's important to do this not only to get the best results from your MD Data disc, but also because it uses the MDFS file system, with the idea being that it's platform agnostic so you can go between like a Mac and a PC, just whatever you have this connected to via SCSI, providing you have the right drivers and software going in order to read that file system. And that's where I was running into some problems with Windows 98. So let me show you that really quick.
So even though it was set up correctly, I mean, the same way that it is here, it's terminated properly, it's showing up at the start with the SCSI startup message saying it's there at ID number three. Windows even detects it straight away, with 98SE having drivers included. And those are what I tried first, just to, you know, see what was gonna happen. You know like I've tried this with the MDH-10 before and it'll allow you to see that the drive is there but it doesn't actually let you do anything like read files or format or anything, 'cause it relies on the MD File System.
So you need to install the Sony software and whatnot. And when I do that, that just makes the system blue screen, freeze up, and nothing works whatsoever if you try to access the drive with the Sony software that you need. And I've tried that with different drivers too, also the drivers that the Sony software came with, which is these 1997 drivers specifically for the MDM-111. I've only found this one version for the internal 111 we have here. So yeah, that's why I went over to Windows 3.1 and DOS 6, and this is running on the exact same system, same SCSI interface, same everything in terms of configuration.
The only thing is different is the operating system. There we go, completed successfully. 140-ish megs available. We're now free to copy over whatever we want. So let's get a couple of things here because why not and just copy them straight over that way. And it is about twice the speed of a floppy disk, more or less, like a 1.44 meg drive. And there we go, look at that.
We got chimes. [chimes chime] [chuckles] And Canyon.mid! [Canyon.mid plays through FM]
I not sure what kind of MIDI mapper settings are going there, this is an AWE64 Gold, should sound better than that, but anyway. You also have these other ones in DOS. Those are interesting. It's all like command line, just text stuff. It's very minimal and I find that fascinating, in combination with what feels like futuristic tech, you know, MiniDiscs are just such a cool little thing. It's still feels like cutting edge stuff somehow to me.
And combining that with a command line interface is just neat. But yeah, let's try this out here too, which just bypasses the SCSI and just goes straight analog-to-analog audio output. And I'm just gonna go with a prerecorded audio MiniDisc here, Meatloaf's "Bat Outta Hell." And there you go. It detects it straight away. Reads all the different tracks that are on there.
I really need to get some more albums on MiniDisc, like that were actually sold in stores cuz I've also tried those that are recorded, you know, and some independent ones and those do not work, at least not for me here. But yeah, this definitely works ["Heaven Can Wait" plays quietly] Well, it's not very loud. Probably don't have the mixer settings set correctly for the sound card, but... ♪ Heaven can wait ♪ ["All Revved Up..." etc plays]
It is just surreal to be able to play MiniDisc through Windows 3.1, like it's so cool. Oh man! Anyway, yeah I really wanna get more just to experience this but like I said, I can't get it to work with anything else. Although I haven't tried this yet. This is something I just coincidentally picked up over the weekend 'cause I was at Vintage Computer Festival East 2025 in New Jersey and they just happen to have another MD Con display, smaller than what was at Southwest when I went to that in Texas last year. I've got videos about this stuff on my LGR Blerbs channel, but yeah they gave me this demo disc, I'm not sure what's on there. Also like, some kind of wristband.
Some stickers, And like a little wristband key chain thing with a little teeny little MiniDisc, so cute. So thank you very much for handing me off those when I was looking at your display. But yeah, I was just gonna test this one really quick cuz maybe they recorded it in a way that makes sense for this drive, I don't know. Oh, see that actually works. So however this was recorded, and it is just a standard MiniDisc, it's not any of the later ones.
It just doesn't like it on this particular drive or the software, the drivers or something. - [Narrator] This program was written and recorded in early 2024. An interpretive history, designed to fit in roughly an hour of audio. - [Clint] That's awesome. [upbeat MD audio track plays] - [Narrator] MDLP and NetMD, feeding North America's desires.
- [Clint] There's an Andrew Huang song on here. [upbeat "Upbeat" song by Andrew Huang plays] Yeah, this is great. Well thank you once again for handing this off to me. Obviously he's not a sponsor or anything, I just happened to run into him at the show.
There it is. Yeah, let's try the DOS stuff, because... [cackles in MiniDisc] this is neat! All right, so we got this little readme here just going over the different things that it comes with for DOS. So the main thing that is really going on here is it loads this TSR, MD Manager, loads on startup and also MDfsex, or MD file system executable. And that lets the computer in both DOS and Windows know that there's a drive there and how to read the file system. Interesting "excuse list" here.
Does not support hybrid ones, multiple character sets, does not support booting, the file system checker program's not supported under Windows. Yeah, I saw that was available in 95 so they figured it out eventually. A few other things and then the programs that it comes with. So the formatter, basically the same thing as we were doing in Windows. This is a checker program, which I think I showed with the MDH-10. Well let's show these things.
So MDplay, this is just a command line version of the MiniDisc audio player. Yeah, the MiniDisc Drive is, well, it's an audio one we have in there right now but it is set as D here 'cause now I have a CD ROM driver at the moment. But yeah, if we just do this, that's pretty much all you get and it just plays the front to back. [MD music plays] and I think that's it pretty much. I mean, by the way, it will run no matter what else you're doing. So yeah, you can run your DOS programs, you can play Doom while your MiniDisc is playing music.
I mean, it doesn't care. [Doom+MiniDisc music playing over each other] Yeah. Conflicting sound, because it's just playing straight through the sound card's analog audio input, same way that you would normally get CD audio, over the four-pin cable.
And I think if we just do "MDplay stop." Yeah, that's that. As far as I can tell.
Yeah, I mean there is nothing that lets you skip around or do anything else other than just if you want choose to play certain specific tracks but you can't even see what tracks are on there. It's so bare bones. I thought the Windows 3.1 one was bare bones but this is uh, *grizzly bare* bones? What's more bare than bare? I don't know.
There's nothing here. The fact that it does anything all is really charming to me. I wish it did more but it doesn't. And then we have the, yeah, the checker right here, which I don't think is gonna be able to do anything on the audio one. So let's switch over to some data. So there is our MD Data disc from earlier.
And so if we run into this, yay, we're good. That's all that does. We have conformed. And really the last thing we gotta check here is playing some DOS games straight off of an MD Data disc, which I couldn't even try before. So let's just do that now.
We're going to make our own directory here and just copy all that stuff over. [keyboard clicking] And then see how it is in terms of loading it straight off of there. Now it's not cached or in memory or anything. Haven't run it on this computer since I started it up but there we go.
Loading, loading, loading. So it takes a little bit longer than just loading it directly off the hard disk, as one would expect. [Keen4 overworld music plays] And there we go.
Yeah, definitely a bit more sluggish but not too bad. And of course once it's all loaded in it's fine. I mean, you can play these games directly off a floppy and it's fine. Just takes a while. It is interesting though to like, hear MiniDisc loading noises as this is going.
And yeah, it does, yeah. It seems a little iffy here and there, but it's still loading everything as it should, so awesome. [chuckles] I mean, it was not made to do this but I just wanna try, right? I've got "One Must Fall: 2097," that would be more substantial. Definitely gonna take a more lengthy amount of time to copy everything over, cuz it's like 14, 15 megabytes.
All right, well that took about 13 minutes. Let's see what we got going on here. That took a while just to even get to this point. Oh dear. [thunder cracking] All right, [OMF theme plays] [Clint chuckles with pleasure] Success so far.
See how long this takes to go... Oh man. At least the mod music is playing. It just keeps on going. Wow, this is... [chuckles] I knew it would be slow,
but it's fascinating what loads, what stays in memory, what doesn't. There we go. Come on, you can do it. [singing along] ♪ MiniDisc, it's a data MiniDisc ♪ It finally loaded. Oh.
Oh, this is interesting. [music stuttering horribly] My goodness. That's a heck of an impromptu glitchy remix.
Yep. I just had to put it out of this misery. That being said, there is one other thing I gotta try. And I'm going to do a complete full safe format just to give it the best possible chance of being nice and clean for Duke Nukem. Yeah, I expect this to take some time. And I just wanted to show that it indeed does run perfectly on here, as you would hope.
But, yeah, that's not what we're here for. We wanna see this running not off of the, I was gonna say hard drive, it's not even a hard drive. What is this... a SCSI2SD. But yeah, not off of there, but off of the MiniDisc, which I let copy over pretty much overnight actually. I just let it go, I don't know how long it took, but I'm sure it was a good while, because, yeah, it's like 51 megabytes or something.
So yeah, let me just restart here and we're gonna load that, however long it takes. [keyboard clicking] Well that's interesting. Well it got through that a lot quicker than I thought, but now it's just chilling here. Well, no. [explosion booms] Huh! ["Grabbag" theme plays] Yeah, it's been hanging around here, you can see a few minutes at least. I should have had that clock going earlier when we were testing, but yeah, it got through that initial bit a little quicker than I thought, but this part where it's loading in like the, not just the menu but the level for the demo that runs in the background, that can take a while, even just like on a a 486 with an older hard drive.
This, it could be a bit. Oh, well, got signs of life. Again, not actually as long as I thought maybe formatting and just kind of starting over with that MiniDisc helped.
Either way, oh gosh, the performance. What performance? Piece by piece that MiniDisc drive is dying, but it's getting it done. Oh, it took one of those. Wow. This is fascinating. Just to see what it can and can't do. [laughs] Come on, let's get into that first level. We can do it.
- [Duke] Let's rock. - [Clint] Okay. Finally. So it had to load another demo level, now it's loading the first level. It's only been what, nine minutes? - [Duke] Those aliens are gonna pay for shooting up my ride. - All right. Yeah, I was gonna say, as it's loading different sounds, the way this game works is it just loads them as it's about to play them for a lot of 'em anyway. So the first time I sound the plays, like this.
[pistol fires, game hangs] You'll see it wait for the explosion. And same with Duke grunting. [Duke grunts] Well, maybe not. I guess the alien fire, or getting hurt. Yeah, basically once the sounds play the first time and get loaded into memory, they're fine. Usually, I just know this because I've tested this on such low-powered systems with such slow hard disks and very little ram that I've seen this before, not this extreme, but it's the same kind of thing you run into when you just don't have much going on.
I think also when I was trying to load this from an Iomega Zip Drive, so yeah, I think we'll be okay now with it reloaded. Yeah, so stuff is already in memory mostly. [Duke grunts] [gunfire blasting] [chuckles] Mostly. I say as the game freezes again. I'm assuming there's like some animations, maybe still loading, graphics, but of course it's mostly the sound effects I imagine, that seems to be the thing that trips us up the most when you're running it on something that just isn't capable of loading everything in as quickly as it wants.
I imagine if we just disable the sounds entirely then it'll be fine, but I don't actually know. Nope. [laughs] Well, maybe it's still trying to load the sounds or like graphics, who knows? I don't know exactly how this works behind the scenes. Yeah, see, I would, well there's a bit of a slowdown. Was gonna say, I expected that to slow down and then it did. Just not exactly what I thought.
That's fascinating, so we got pig cop noises, maybe that's what was loading in, making a different sound. And of course it makes a different sound when it dies there, that hadn't played before. So yeah, I really do think it's mostly the sound that's tripping the things up even though we have it turned off, it's still kind of being whatever. Yeah, see I was trying to break the glass there and it, it tripped up.
Shotgun noise, that's a different sound so it's still loading them even though the sound is turned off, it's interesting. And I'm happy to see that it does seem to load a bit better. Wow, that's, oh. You know, it's iffy.
Just curious if it loads any quicker if the sound is just turned off entirely, like in the setup itself. Well, maybe not. Well, maybe there's... Well, huh. Heh! Yeah, so we're getting some unusual things.
Looks like it had those con file errors at the start and then that end screen there with the text was weird. Now I can't open the setup. [chuckle of defeat] So it could very well be just an old MiniDisc. It's got some issues, even though we did a full format, low level.
I wonder if you can just flush the thing, if that does anything different or not. Nope. I mean, you know, the checker never really seems to tell you anything very useful whatsoever. It's in conformance but apparently something's wrong because some of the files just aren't working. Anyway, yeah, that's pretty much it for this video I think.
Even though it's not 100% working here, that's way more than I've ever seen it do and I just love seeing MD Data on MiniDiscs on a PC in DOS, Windows 3.1, and hope you did too. [jazzy penmanship tunes] And if you did enjoy, then check out my previous MD Data "Oddware" episode for more history and context and lemme know in the comments if you've ever used the format or just any MiniDisc memories in general. And as always, thank you for watching LGR.
2025-04-27 20:32
