Product Code Database
MSCDEX or Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions is a Computer program produced by Microsoft and included with MS-DOS 6.x and certain versions of Windows to provide CD-ROM support. Earlier versions of MSCDEX since 1986 were installable add-ons for MS-DOS 3.1 and higher.
The final version of the MSCDEX program was 2.25, included with Windows 95 and used when creating Booting with CD-ROM support. Starting with Windows 95, CD-ROM access became possible through a 32-bit CDFS driver.
The driver uses the Microsoft networks interface in MS-DOS. This is the reason that at least version 3.1 of MS-DOS is required. The driver essentially looks similar to a network drive from the system perspective. It is implemented as a terminate-and-stay-resident program and an extension to the redirector interface ( CDEX).
Datalight ROM-DOS includes an implementation of MSCDEX.
Based on NWCDEX, IMS REAL/32, a successor to Novell's Multiuser DOS and Digital Research's Concurrent DOS, provides a similar driver named IMSCDEX.
A cloaked variant of MSCDEX was provided as part of Helix Software's Multimedia Cloaking product. It uses Helix Cloaking to relocate and run in protected mode on 386 and higher processors.
Corel offered CORELCDX.COM as alternative to MSCDEX.
There's a free alternative called SHSUCDX that is used with the IDE/AT Attachment driver UIDE.SYS first released in 2005. It is often used with FreeDOS and works with other DOSes as well.
In 1998, Caldera UK provided a DRFAT32 driver for DR-DOS to dynamically mount and unmount FAT32 volumes on DOS versions otherwise not natively supporting FAT32. DRFAT32 uses a variation and extension of the CDEX API in order to achieve this and work with older DOS versions.
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