There are also consoles and arcade games that use optical drives, and there are probably other applications for optical drive emulators. The Tattiebogle was originally designed for and tested with certain arcade games that used optical drives for storage (I'm surprised that the drives lasted as long as they did - optical drives were always the most failure-prone parts of my computers, and those arcade games kept the drives in continuous use).

Those are still kind of niche markets, though.

What disk images are capable of properly imaging a CDROM disc that would allow a computer to recognise it as the game CD and play the audio from it?

There was some software that allowed that but I cant for the life of me remember what we used...
It let you play copies of games as if it was the game, and even allowed emulation to get past anti piracy protections

I believe bin/cue format is one of those.
As for the software at least in Win98 Se - Alcohol 120%. It has been my go to at the time and nowadays too.

What version of Alcohol do you use?

There's a retro version there that is totally free to use.
https://trial.alcohol-soft.com/en/downloadtrial.php

Has there been any reviews of this new cd.rom ode ?
i feel we are so close to having something working finally

are cdrom drives still being produced? i think nobody buys one now.

SETBLASTER wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:08:

Has there been any reviews of this new cd.rom ode ?

If you mean Fixel's ide emulator, then no. Unfortunately, we're all still waiting for them to ship.

justajeffy wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:12:

SETBLASTER wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:08:

Has there been any reviews of this new cd.rom ode ?

If you mean Fixel's ide emulator, then no. Unfortunately, we're all still waiting for them to ship.

yea Fixel's , thats the one that we all hoped it would work on really old computers.
did you buy it? it seems strange that a year has passed and no news about it.

SETBLASTER wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:45:

justajeffy wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:12:

SETBLASTER wrote on 2024-02-09, 02:08:

Has there been any reviews of this new cd.rom ode ?

If you mean Fixel's ide emulator, then no. Unfortunately, we're all still waiting for them to ship.

yea Fixel's , thats the one that we all hoped it would work on really old computers.
did you buy it? it seems strange that a year has passed and no news about it.

Well there is a little more information on the discord. It sums up to personal problems, family problems, illness & logistic problems.
There seems to be a light in the darkness, but then apparently more logistics problems arise.
So for now It's still waiting.
There was also mention of a youtuber having received a sample for review and delaying posting the video, though with all these hindrances that fixel was/is experiencing, It seems like a good thing that that video is delayed.
at least until the first & second batch orders have completely been sent out, though you can still order in on the second batch of ide-emus.
Can you imagine the inrush of a few hundred or thousand orders from all over the globe when the first orders still haven't been fully shipped.

What do you mean by really old computers? as far as I know it likely won't work from the start on XT machines, and everything else after that is just the plain AT-IDE, ATA, ATAPI.
fixel's ide-emu would support ultra dma transfers, which implies late pentium, super socket 7 boards

The craziest little tidbit would be the optional wifi module would allow for diskimages over the network... but the wifi module doesn't exist yet.. neither does the oled/rotary encoder module.

aside from this fixel is also working on several other projects, including family & work.

edit: oh yeah I forgot, there was also mention of a possible EU distributor located in germany.

I still have IDE emulation project on my rp2040 agenda, to be tackled in near future. There is no need for expensive FPGAs, whole thing should be able to run on $30 platform like PicoGus.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-09, 09:52:

I still have IDE emulation project on my rp2040 agenda, to be tackled in near future. There is no need for expensive FPGAs, whole thing should be able to run on $30 platform like PicoGus.

one rp2040 for the bus interface, and one rp2040 for the data formatting/processing, hid, audio out ?
also picogus is 8bit.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 10:03:

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-09, 09:52:

I still have IDE emulation project on my rp2040 agenda, to be tackled in near future. There is no need for expensive FPGAs, whole thing should be able to run on $30 platform like PicoGus.

one rp2040 for the bus interface, and one rp2040 for the data formatting/processing, hid, audio out ?
also picogus is 8bit.

one rp2040 for everything, there is enough IO for whole IDE, SDcard and i2S

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:15:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 10:03:

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-09, 09:52:

I still have IDE emulation project on my rp2040 agenda, to be tackled in near future. There is no need for expensive FPGAs, whole thing should be able to run on $30 platform like PicoGus.

one rp2040 for the bus interface, and one rp2040 for the data formatting/processing, hid, audio out ?
also picogus is 8bit.

one rp2040 for everything, there is enough IO for whole IDE, SDcard and i2S

at what speed?
I recall someone saying something akin to the timings of the ide bus requiring a cpld or fpga, while that was a few years ago.
Now you're saying the rp2040 should be able to handle that. That would be very nice.
I've seen an rpi project to attach an ide drive to an rpi, though the speed wasn't that great, and that is kind of the reverse of what is wanted.
Here's to hoping there's enough pins available.

edit: mmmh http://www.zuluide.com/ ? though that seems like a lot of smoke and no fire.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:26:

at what speed?

at least couple MB/s

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:26:

I recall someone saying something akin to the timings of the ide bus requiring a cpld or fpga, while that was a few years ago.

wouldnt be surprised if it was me 😀

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:26:

Now you're saying the rp2040 should be able to handle that.

bluescsi is a good evidence of that, goes all the way to 10MB/s. Of course scsi is not IDE, main problem with IDE is that down low its actually ISA bus and talking to HDD involves writing and reading registers with strict maximum timings. In theory IDE Device must be quick enough to reply in time, and rp2040 would be in trouble here because PIOs dont have internal ram (other than serial buffer) to store variables forcing you to push data to ARM core and hope it pushes answer fast enough back to PIO, but both picoMEM and PicoGUS show that rp2040 has no trouble keeping up, and there is always IORDY to slow every access down by 1us when needed.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:10:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:26:

at what speed?

at least couple MB/s

So that would remain well in PIO territory, forget about anything DMA related. good enough for old dos, not so good for anything windows 9x & higher.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:26:

I recall someone saying something akin to the timings of the ide bus requiring a cpld or fpga, while that was a few years ago.

wouldnt be surprised if it was me 😀

Yeah, wouldn't surprise me either. 😀

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 11:26:

Now you're saying the rp2040 should be able to handle that.

bluescsi is a good evidence of that, goes all the way to 10MB/s. Of course scsi is not IDE, main problem with IDE is that down low its actually ISA bus and talking to HDD involves writing and reading registers with strict maximum timings. In theory IDE Device must be quick enough to reply in time, and rp2040 would be in trouble here because PIOs dont have internal ram (other than serial buffer) to store variables forcing you to push data to ARM core and hope it pushes answer fast enough back to PIO, but both picoMEM and PicoGUS show that rp2040 has no trouble keeping up, and there is always IORDY to slow every access down by 1us when needed.

I guess the strict timings do not apply so much to the data transfer, given that fixel sees the possibility of doing diskimages over WIFI on his emulator. ?

Bit bummed though about the zuluide seeming real, though not available and no github firmware page either.
That would've been the project you were thinking of if it had hdd support. and the possibility for emulation of two devices ... and dual audio out and additional wifi & display & input for selection of diskimages and emulation of cd changers and ... 😉

Thank you for the photo @t3hbeowulf. I'm still not convinced in such a product. As 3DO.dev is not able to show pictures of the actual product, does not give a documentation. I'm still waiting for the demonstration video, but this is apparently no longer on the agenda.

There was a very promising 2017 project called NetPi-IDE. It was using a Pi Zero with an interface using a FPGA acting as a buffer for registers connected between the GPIO ports and a IDE port. But the project seems dead for years now. It was supposed to be able to emulate a wide variety of IDE peripherals. It was possible to mount drives from a network share. And a tool called PIMOUNT.COM was developed allowing to mount drives from the command line. That is very sad to see no further development.

With the time passing, and with excellent projects like PicoGUS, I now think Raspberry Pi can be a better solution to simulate drives than closed source FPGA all in one solution at very expensive prices with no possibilities of knowing what they really are capable of.
The advantage of RPi is they are affordable and offer a good base for developing Open Source/Hardware projects, so anyone can contribute and expand it. I'm coming back to this because it's really something I hope to see one day. Maybe it is possible to make a RPi GPIO expansion that can manage interfacing an IDE and a floppy peripheral at once, providing analog audio line output in case of an emulated CD-ROM drive. Allowing network share or local SD card access and configurable through a web interface using Wi-Fi (and optionally through a control panel like on Gotek or with a software tool). Putting the thing somewhere in the computer case, powering it with a Molex or floppy power connector and voila.

It is easier said than done, but can be a cool project for a student in electronic engineering or by an enthusiast or a community of enthusiasts with sufficient knowledge.

Datadrainer wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:39:

Thank you for the photo @t3hbeowulf. I'm still not convinced in such a product. As 3DO.dev is not able to show pictures of the actual product, does not give a documentation. I'm still waiting for the demonstration video, but this is apparently no longer on the agenda.

That photo is of the actual product and comes directly from the developer of the product.
Here's another photo https://twitter.com/cyothevile/status/1725361784331137219
Yes the lack of documentation is annoying.
The lack of demonstration or review video can be frustrating.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:24:

Bit bummed though about the zuluide seeming real, though not available and no github firmware page either.
That would've been the project you were thinking of if it had hdd support. and the possibility for emulation of two devices ... and dual audio out and additional wifi & display & input for selection of diskimages and emulation of cd changers and ... 😉

Do you mean seeing the site and github got you interested, or is there additional information I'm not seeing about issues with the project? It seems like it's by the maker of ZuluSCSI who also did a SCSI RP2040 device that is available. It's very possibly still under development. But with that board pic, I'm hoping it's close. The SCSI RP2040 is $59, so a possible IDE device that's under $100 would be very appealing. More than $300 is way out of what I'd budget for something like this.

SScorpio wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:56:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:24:

Bit bummed though about the zuluide seeming real, though not available and no github firmware page either.
That would've been the project you were thinking of if it had hdd support. and the possibility for emulation of two devices ... and dual audio out and additional wifi & display & input for selection of diskimages and emulation of cd changers and ... 😉

Do you mean seeing the site and github got you interested, or is there additional information I'm not seeing about issues with the project? It seems like it's by the maker of ZuluSCSI who also did a SCSI RP2040 device that is available. It's very possibly still under development. But with that board pic, I'm hoping it's close. The SCSI RP2040 is $59, so a possible IDE device that's under $100 would be very appealing. More than $300 is way out of what I'd budget for something like this.

The site got me interested.
It links to rabbitholecomputing but there is no product. And the site mentions 2023.
You mean the lack of github and additional information.
That got me bummed.

The board pic is nice. Having an actual product is nicer 😉
Having a version that can be used in a laptop and has 8/16bit hdd support would be grand !

I agree on the pricing of the 3do one being a bit on the high side.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:24:

I guess the strict timings do not apply so much to the data transfer, given that fixel sees the possibility of doing diskimages over WIFI on his emulator. ?

you first program IDE device with what you want and either pool its status register or wait for interrupt, only then can the real transfer begin at sector/miltisector granularity. rp2040 would have no problem keeping up with at least UDMA33 for the data transfer part, at this point the limitation is sdcards tapping out at ~25MB/s https://github.com/juico/pico-sdio-example
Transfer of actual data will not be a problem for rp2040, its the command/status register access that worried me from the beginning, but since it can be slowed down all the way to 1us it should also be fine.

weedeewee wrote on 2024-02-09, 12:24:

Bit bummed though about the zuluide seeming real, though not available and no github firmware page either.

afaik zuluscsi started out as straight closed source copy of bluescsi, but recently began sharing code. Its not vaporware, more like announcement, product is most likely in development. That picture shows fpga tho 😀 most likely Chinese one as I dont immediately recognize the logo.