VOGONS


First post, by Xenphor

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I've been having issues getting cd audio to work with daemon tools when using vxd drivers in Windows with a YMF744 sound card. Some games like quake don't play any cd audio while others like need for speed III and IV play just fine. This is actually better than what I've experienced with a Sound Blaster Live Value Card with vxd drivers where need for speed games didn't get cd audio at all. I read about a solution to get cd audio working with quake by disabling hardware sound acceleration, but that introduces some bad audio lag and causes the entire game to pause for a few seconds before the music plays. Of course then there's DOS, which I don't believe has any sort of virtual cd drive tool that I'm aware of.

I'd rather not mess around with optical drives and cds as I have 0 nostalgia for that headache inducing media, so I was wondering if someone could make an optical drive emulator for the PC? I know there's the Gotek floppy emulator that seems to work well and of course many different console systems have such devices (rhea, phoebe, gdemu, satiator, psio, etc). The only thing I've come across for the pc is this thing: http://iodd.kr/wordpress/product/iodd-2531/. But that seems to be aimed at IT professionals for mounting installation ISOs, not for mounting game images with CDDA.

Reply 2 of 5, by Xenphor

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So that was 3 years ago and there is still no such device available? Is there something about the pc interface that makes it harder to do than the solutions found on other platforms?

edit: It seems installing directx 8 has fixed at least quake 1, 2, and half life for audio playback in daemon tools, without having to modify the directx sound acceleration settings. Unfortunately it seems to have conflicted with my need for speed 1 se install since that game no longer boots.

Reply 3 of 5, by Stiletto

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I prefer to overengineer solutions, but my analysis:

I think part of the problem is that there's no single, widely-adopted CD image format that purports to cover every weird disc format, offset, filesystem, audio channel, sector, sub-channel, copy protection, and other data stream from a CD or DVD. Unfortunately, imaging CDs goes through the OS, motherboard's drive controller, CD drive's internal controller, and each only allows access to certain data off the CD. There's no verbatim archival disc image format that 100% duplicates what's on the CD as a "raw read".

Mind you, MOST PC needs aren't all that sophisticated, and something along the line of BIN+CUE+SUB should be enough. Still, having a solution that'd support everything under the sun would be better.

There's actually a few competing disc image file formats that claim they can preserve everything about a CD or DVD. Hence why there's multiple (warring) CD dumping projects (TOSECISO, Redump.org, etc.) - each uses different, often closed-source, utilities and holds different standards.

The open-source project DiscImageChef seems like it may potentially solve some of these issues by creating yet another disc image format and being able to convert between many others. Still, creating a new disc image standard that covers all the bases, well, simply creates yet another format standard.

These logistical issues (as well as the intra-group "personal"/"political" issues) are not easily solved.

In tandem with this: the world needs a Kyroflux for CDs/DVDs. I've heard a few rumors in this area, but nothing visible yet.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 4 of 5, by Xenphor

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Most disc based games seem to be fine with either cue/bin or iso for dvds, at least that's what redump uses. I think it's consoles where a lot of the obscure formats come into play although most of those can be ripped as cue/bin too.

Reply 5 of 5, by mirh

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Redump should be using DiscImageCreator tbf.
With the exception of Alcohol and Daemon though, I'm not aware of any "generic OS-wide" mounting software that would support most of pc DRM. Cdemu on linux super-maybe.

pcgamingwiki.com