https://shop.tattiebogle.net/product/prod_EkTnv3Tk2Trxhf

This is a very much needed device.
But 200$ is crazy talk.

Yeh one of the main selling points of the Gotek is price, even over the Hxc drives.

It's a good start though, it's proof of concept.
IDE drives are still cheap enough to be throw away, but don't think that'll last much longer at which point something like this will go mainstream and costs will drop. (hopefully)

At the moment it’s probably one guy making them for a niche market (arcade). The gotek has a big market due to organs and synths using them instead of floppy drives. Plus the retro community, which is probably smaller. I would suspect that price might go down by 50% with more volume, but it‘ll still be niche.

mothergoose729 wrote:

I feel like 75$ is more my comfort zone.

pretty sure that Z-IDE will cost more than $75 just guessing by the components on the board and development time required to create such a device, it's developer would have to comment further (curious why the last name was scratched off the board)... if it is <$75 and worked in arcade systems I am sure we would buy a dozen!

anyway, the op asked in the title if it was possible, not it if was possible inexpensively

root42 wrote:

At the moment it’s probably one guy making them for a niche market (arcade). The gotek has a big market due to organs and synths using them instead of floppy drives. Plus the retro community, which is probably smaller. I would suspect that price might go down by 50% with more volume, but it‘ll still be niche.

could not have said it better myself... really for retro computing I don't see the point, any cd emulator is going to cost way more than a gotek, both in terms of hardware and hardware/firmware development, and is going to have a significantly smaller market which will also drive the price up... just buy an optical drive for $10 and 100 blanks for another $16

@flecom Do you have any idea if the device allows hot-swapping? The wiki makes it sound you need to either reboot the device or send commands through the USB host with terminal software. If that's the case it would be a hassle to use in a retro computer.

Rawit wrote:

@flecom Do you have any idea if the device allows hot-swapping? The wiki makes it sound you need to either reboot the device or send commands through the USB host with terminal software. If that's the case it would be a hassle to use in a retro computer.

honestly not sure, we've never tried... we only use them in arcade machines so we have no need to change the image... try reaching out to the guy that made it, he's been super helpful

only useful if it can also extract audio data from images and give me analog signal output.

So i can hear CD Audio Tracks of emulated games.

If not, you just can also use shsucdhd and emulate with images on harddrive.

If you're willing to emulate a SCSI CD-ROM drive instead of an IDE/ATAPI one, and can live without audio, you can get another PC running FreeBSD to emulate the CD drive from an .ISO file as discussed in this thread (which I should update with new results!).

Investigating other options for SCSI target "emulation" (it's still a real target, just not the type of device it's pretending to be), I ran across this forum post which seems to be from the developer of some called VirtualSCSI and VirDIS. If I recall correctly, you get a custom SCSI adapter from them which you plug into a Windows PC and you get a GUI to control what the virtual SCSI CD drive or HDD presents to the "initiator". Funnily enough this seems to be something that people with music gear want/need too, just like floppy emulators. I assume it still doesn't do audio though, that'd just not be something you'd have gotten from an external SCSI drive except via a jack on the drive itself.

I suppose there is some chance that FreeBSD could be updated to support .BIN/.CUE or something, and upon receipt of the SCSI commands that tell the drive to start playing audio, route the audio to the FreeBSD machine's sound card, so in place of hooking headphones or speakers up to the headphone jack on an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, you hook them up to the FreeBSD machine.

Zorix wrote:

I'm actually working on one. It will be a while before it's done though. […]
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I'm actually working on one. It will be a while before it's done though.

What are you going to name it? Z-IDE? Good work so far, that looks awesome!

Zorix wrote:

I'm actually working on one. It will be a while before it's done though.

You're doing the lord's work.

Zorix wrote:

I'm actually working on one. It will be a while before it's done though. […]
Show full quote

I'm actually working on one. It will be a while before it's done though.

Bless you, my son!

Any rough estimates on the off-the-shelf price?

James-F wrote:

https://shop.tattiebogle.net/product/prod_EkTnv3Tk2Trxhf

This is a very much needed device.
But 200$ is crazy talk.

$200 is chump change in the Arcade scene.
Anything that can one of hundreds of $500+ Arcade devices for only $200? that's a damn deal.

DNSDies wrote:

James-F wrote:

https://shop.tattiebogle.net/product/prod_EkTnv3Tk2Trxhf

This is a very much needed device.
But 200$ is crazy talk.

$200 is chump change in the Arcade scene.
Anything that can one of hundreds of $500+ Arcade devices for only $200? that's a damn deal.

That thing is impressive! 😀 The fact that it supports *.ISO or *.CUE/*.BIN combo only, but no *.NRG is slightly lame, though.

Jo22 wrote:

but no *.NRG is slightly lame, though.

I mean, I'm open to suggestions 😉 I haven't heard of that format before though. It doesn't look very well documented (at least, based on the weirdly technical Wikipedia article about it).

No need for the feature creep. Users can convert format with CDemu/ISOBuster first.

Who uses .nrg nowadays anyway. 😀

Nobody uses NRG these days but a lot of the images from the day are archived by Nero.

And we can convert the format.

gdjacobs wrote:

And we can convert the format.

Multi-session and hybrid images, too ? 😉

If CDEmu can load em, yes. Then you rip the virtual device to bin/cue.