@SmooBandit. Thank you for your feedback. I followed the debugging series of the IDE Simulator. A hard work has been done on it.
There was a similar attempt by Zorix called the Z-IDE, but seems abandoned.
cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-15, 00:58:
BloodyCactus wrote on 2021-09-15, 00:23:
oh yeah there is also RaSCSI which can do ISO emus and its a PI so you remote in and tell it which iso in the config, or it usees a browser for config so its easier.
But that doesn't support CD audio does it? That's the whole problem. We need something for DOS that supports bin/cue and will play CD audio.
The $200 unit covers that for IDE and the MAC SCSI one that is $120 does as well but the MAC one sounds like it is not nearly as easy to use as the images are configured through an .INI file.
Audio output needed. And not only for DOS, but for Windows 3.x (well, MCI depends on the DOS CD extensions) and Windows 9x too.
All virtual CD-ROM drives I know only works from Windows 95 OSR2 (build ≥ 4.00.1111), none for 4.00.950. And from my experience, analogue audio emulation uses a few resources (PCM conversion, redirections to a driver, managing a buffer etc), on 486 and on first gen Pentium it can be a little problematic. Comes the network problem too. A CD image is big from a FAT16 point of view. What I do is mounting a network drive and mounting the image on the virtual drive from it. It works very well will all tested games even on 10 Mb/s NIC, even more considering the access is on a Windows 2000 VM 🤣. But as soon as audio tracks are involved, I got regular small freezes (from ~100 to ~300 ms, very perceptible) no matter what machine is used. So for such games, two choices, disabling CD Audio, or copying the ISO locally.
And considering Pi solutions. Personally I hate this option. First, its external, so not integrated (obviously). Second, the Pi have to be started long before for the host PC to detect it on POST. Third, a Pi 4 can emulate an old PC ; I means I understand to use a Pi for MT/CM-32 emulation but why using such a powerful hardware to do emulate ATAPI commands... As a hobbyist project, that's okay, as an everyday usable thing however...
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