This project aims to reproduce the LMSI CM-153 card needed to operate a Philips CM-100 CD-ROM drive. This drive was originally released in 1985 and used an early version of the LSMI protocol to connect. Later versions of LMSI cards, such as the CM-260, are not compatible with earlier drives (I do not know what the exactly compatibilities are). So an early card is required. The CM-153 is a very uncommon part to find due to it's limited use, high cost, and the fact that it would probably be tossed out with the computer when upgraded being separated from its original drive.

Thanks to Roland who has a working CM-100 and CM-153 we have some pretty high quality reference images of what this card looks like. It uses all off the shelf 74 series logic chips and one 8251A UART controller. It should therefore be possible to recreate without needing any rare chips or ROM dumps.

The card has been fully reverse engineered and tested to be functional. It has been demonstrated to work using this driver with a CM100 drive.

A boot floppy image that can be used for booting weird or recalcitrant machines from other devices, such as CD-ROMs.

textfiles.com is also in the process of archiving archive CDs that were common on BBSes in the 1990's. These often contained shareware, text files, applications, graphics, chiptunes, and other such things that filled out our collections back in the day. If you poke around a little you might find something you've not seen before (like an archive of Atari software).