I posted a new video about some of the additional progress that has been made with the project recently, please check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFxTugQKInA

I'm also going to be doing a presentation on Optical Drive Emulators at VCFMW this weekend. I'll be in the secondary room at 12:00pm ! Hope to see some folks there. I won't have too much time to dive into my project specifically but I'll be around for questions, troubleshooting and such!

Got to say, the change-over to Circle made USBODE on a Zero 2W play vastly nicer with an EBox 3350DX2 - It seems to be quite particular about the cut-off point for removable devices being "present" when booting.

Thanks for the feedback! We have been seeing some issues when it comes to USB booting related with the ITX Llama, (may affect other vortex based systems) and are currently investigating it. There's an open issue with the circle framework and I have been coordinating with the main framework dev with some possible resolutions, but nothing as of yet.

Doesn't work on USB 1.1 (fullspeed), but 2.0 working perfect. USBODE v2.10.0 Beta 6. Should it work on 1.1 at all?

DangerMouse wrote on 2025-11-20, 11:00:

Doesn't work on USB 1.1 (fullspeed), but 2.0 working perfect. USBODE v2.10.0 Beta 6. Should it work on 1.1 at all?

Oh, my bad! I missed the USB setting...

USBODE v2.15.0 RC2 still isn't detected in DOS on 1.1 ports on older motherboards (it's detected in 1.1 mode on 2.0 ports).

Changing images or reinitializing in DOS after rebooting PC often experiences clicking sounds when playing CD-Audio over L2C. If I change images, the clicking sounds disappear after a few changes, which seems to be a buffer issue.

Also, the current version sometimes freeze system when trying to play cdaudio in DOS. I couldn't figure out the cause.

Thanks for the report.

Regarding USB 1.1 : There is a known incompatibility with VIA USB chipsets. Please let me know which chipset your motherboard is using for the USB1.1 ports.
Also make sure the cmdline.txt is a single line, in previous versions I added a line break and that was messing things up.

You can also try using "Classic Mac" mode in MSDOS, if you'd like since that actually changes the PID/VID and you might have different experience. Feel free as well to unset Classic Mac mode and use different VID/PIDs and report back if you have any success with detection. It's possible the issue is at the USB driver level, and I'm not able to find a via chipset motherboard for a reasonable price.

Regarding the sound issues, I've seen that as well, but it's hit and miss for me. I think I should try restarting the CD Player on each disk load to clear the state, so I'll try and get that looked into.
Have you tried CHD mounting yet?

If you really want to help, and can afford it, you can purchase a USB Sniffer (the open source one) for about $40 USD / 30GBP and capture some of the packets for me, then maybe I can resolve the issue.

danifunker wrote on 2025-12-07, 12:49:

Thanks for the report.

Thanks for reply. Mobo P3B-F (440BX). "Classic Mac" mode doesn't help, cmdline.txt is a single line.
"Have you tried CHD mounting yet?" - no, only bin/cue, mdf/mds.

I'll try different VID/PIDs for 1.1 and CHD for check clipping.

Custom PID/VID doesn't work too on 1.1 port on 440BX. Checked couple of real IDs for panasonic for example: usbcdrom_vid=0x04da usbcdrom_pid=0x0d01
On 2.0 port they detecting correctly.

These are some strange issues, are you able to join our discord so I can try to help you directly? I want to get to the bottom of this. I haven't had any issues on my 440bx board.

Oh also, for USB1.1 support, you need to set the device to full-speed mode. Circle doesn't handle USB speed auto-detection. That might resolve your issue.

Device configured in full-speed (1.1) and it work on 2.0 port on NEC PCI card in 1.1 mode. Also usb flash drives work perfect in 1.1 ports on mobo, there is only fail on usbode...
I'll try different mobos later, it may be best way to swap the board.

Hmm okay, that's really strange. I want to do some more diagnostics. Have you tried disabling any legacy usb support features and other things like that (usb mass storage mode) in the BIOS if your BIOS has those options? Also, have you updated the BIOS to the latest?

Also are you sure your onboard USB is 1.1? I just checked a P3B-F manual and it did mention USB 2.0 in the manual. I'm not 100% sure, but some older USB 2.0 buses won't work with circle on 1.1 either. Let me know what the PCI VEN and DEV are for your motherboard, maybe you're having a different issue than we expect.

P3B-F USB 1.1 only, as all 440BX boards. I tried USB 2.0 mode on device too, nothing change. Also tried all possible combinations regarding USB in BIOS, including legacy and IRQ, but nothing helped. USB flash drives work perfectly in mobos USB 1.1, they are detected both in automatic search and manually only on a specified adapter.

BIOS is the latest for this board.

USB 1.1 VID=8086h PID=7112h

I checked the .chd format, it clicks the same way as others when playing through I2S. If clicks appear, I mount the image 1-3 times befor everything sounds perfect.

P.S. Overall, I don't care that 1.1 doesn't work on this motherboard; 2.0 card is faster. I hope the audio clicks will disappear in the next updates. Thanks for the great device!

I spent all day long on the CD audio crackling issue (that is what I was experiencing). I believe the way how USBASPI handles the USB bus transition is messing up something, so I tried working around it.

Please have a look at the latest release and let me know if you're still experiencing the CD Audio issues after a disc swap.

https://github.com/danifunker/usbode-circle/r … ses/tag/v2.15.1

danifunker wrote on 2025-12-08, 01:50:

I spent all day long on the CD audio crackling issue (that is what I was experiencing). I believe the way how USBASPI handles the USB bus transition is messing up something, so I tried working around it.

Please have a look at the latest release and let me know if you're still experiencing the CD Audio issues after a disc swap.

https://github.com/danifunker/usbode-circle/r … ses/tag/v2.15.1

Thank you for developing the project, but it hasn't improved, the clicking noise is still there, and I have to mount the image several times to get it to go away. I checked CHD, MDF/MDS, and BIN/CUE.

It would be helpful if you could assign unused GPIOs (or better yet, define them in the config) to connect soft reset and power off buttons. It would be possible to solder the buttons and place them on the Raspberry Pi case. I know how to do this with Linux scripts, but that's not the way to do it here.

It might be important to note that I'm using a Zero 2W with a fast SD card and I've tried several different SD cards.

Oh great. thanks for the heads up. There is a way to restart the device from the web interface if you'd like.

I've tried disc swapping from DOS now and it doesn't seem to have that many issues, but on Windows 98 the problem is really bad. I'm going to keep investigating it. I also think there are some API endpoints to initiate the reboot if you want to hit them programmatically but I can't recall what they are right now.

Either way, I think I'm going to get to the bottom of this crackling issue. As a workaround, if your Windows 98 system supports it, you can switch to using WDM drives for sound and you could enable Digital Audio Extraction.

It's not a permanent solution but might help.

Are you seeing disk swap audio issues as well in MSDOS or just in Windows 98?

In Win98 everything works fine with WDM, but there are also software emulators for Win9x. The main advantage of USBode is its support for redbook in DOS, and for me, this is what the device is primarily for.

Rebooting and shutting down via the web interface is available, but using GPIO would be much more convenient for some cases.