pii_legacy wrote on 2020-06-14, 21:00:

I'm patiently awaiting a good ATAPI ODD emulator as well, but for a lot of purposes the iodd2531 is one of my favorite things i've ever owned. Not internal but at least it can appear to the PC as a USB-CD if you wish...

Ooh thanks for letting me know about this! I can use it with some VIA mini-ITX systems I have that present USB storage devices to DOS. Not sure if audio will work though.

For what it's worth, the SCSI2SD card can also emulate a CDROM device. It's not useful for general purpose retro computing because you have to basically dd your image file to a specific location on the SD card, but it works pretty well for more 'permanent' use of CD images such as operating system install discs.

IE to "change discs" you have to power off your target computer, move the SD card to a more modern computer that has something like dd, rewrite your new CD image to the correct spot on the card, and then move it back to the first system and boot up.

http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD
http://llamamusic.com/s50s550/microSD_Partitioning.html

electric_monk wrote on 2020-05-02, 19:36:

Currently DOS will just see it as a plain ATAPI drive - you need to connect something via USB if you want to swap disks/etc. (which could be the DOS machine itself, if you could get USB CDC serial devices working under it).

However, I did install Turbo Pascal (the first language I ever really learned) as I wanted to make a utility you could run in DOS to switch images/etc. from inside the host machine, but I didn't have much time to actually work on that yet!

The most important question for me is: can I boot from the device? I have a lot of mainboards, which do not offer to boot from USB. I always have to attach an IDE-CD-Rom to install an OS. 200$ is quite expensive, but it's worth to finally get rid of those ugly CDs....

Snear wrote on 2020-06-28, 04:45:

The most important question for me is: can I boot from the device? I have a lot of mainboards, which do not offer to boot from USB. I always have to attach an IDE-CD-Rom to install an OS. 200$ is quite expensive, but it's worth to finally get rid of those ugly CDs....

I don't remember if I tried it, but it should work (from the PC's BIOS it should just look like a normal ATAPI device, which just involves reading a fake floppy disk image off the CD-ROM, somewhat bizarrely). I can certainly give it a go anyway.

Also, I am aware of the mounting issues, it was originally meant to just plug into the CD ribbon cable socket of a Konami 573, so originally I hadn't planned to require any actual sort of mounting beyond just being plugged in. However, it was hard to source the 90 degree connectors, and people wanted to use it in other systems anyway, so that requirement doesn't exist anymore, so I plan to try and add some screwholes the next time I do a run (alongside a better SD card slot). After that, it should be easy to 3D print a 3.5" or 5.25" enclosure with the right holes for both the PCB and the drive bay.

Electric_monk,

Apologies is this was already covered but I’m not quite clear. Can you attach an audio cable between your device and a sound card for in-game cd audio in say Quake?

The best ODE must be a device who simulate only the laser pickup (and his mechanism) for 100% compatibility.

Unfortunaly this type of ODE does not yet exist and devive like Mega SD , Super SD or PSiO for example are not realy true ODE, just some sort of emulation.

Oh, $200 is little bit expense, but it is exactly what was looking for!
I envy the technology that can make this.

Such a device that could be made bootable and run mixed-mode CDs would be a real holy grail for the retro community. Audio-out is a key feature, via SPDIF if available but via 4-pin analog at a minimum. I think a lot of users here would be interested in a drive emulator like that!

Chadti99 wrote on 2020-07-28, 11:04:

Electric_monk,

Apologies is this was already covered but I’m not quite clear. Can you attach an audio cable between your device and a sound card for in-game cd audio in say Quake?

Sorry yes, analog audio is on the 4 pin header at the top left, same pinout (LGGR) as a real optical drive. Sadly no SPDIF currently, but I believe the SPDIF chips still available also take I2S same as the ADC, so it may be possible to just drop one in alongside the DAC, so I'll have another look as I've had that request a few times.

I forgot, there's also *.CDR format.. It's also used for archiving ancient shareware CDs hosted on archive.org
that predate ISO9660 and use High-Sierra.
Perhaps that's a better choice than the boring ISO/BIN combo. 😉

Here's a little history lesson for the youngsters among of you who do know nothing but ISO (ISO9660), BIN+CUE (or worse, with MP3 tracks)..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Sierra_Format
https://fileformat.fandom.com/wiki/CDR
😜

I just found another option when I was browsing for SCSI2SD devices:
http://macsd.com/index.php
Basically an SCSI2SD & CD-ROM emulator but also with support for Redbook audio

If anyone here owns one of these already, I'd be greatly curious to know if this could be tested on a PC with SCSI support. According to the manual at http://macsd.com/manual.php the SD card is formatted using FAT32 and uses *.bin as well as *.iso file types. "The MacSD is configured via a macsd.ini file in the root directory of the SD card. The syntax follows INI file format." I think the odds of Redbook audio working are pretty low, but it could be an interesting alternative to SCSI2SD if it works.

Check out this Raspberry Pi based IDE emulator project.... sounds like you should be able to use mounted CD images as well.
https://hackaday.io/project/20774-netpi-ide

Jo22 wrote on 2020-11-07, 15:27:

Here's a little history lesson for the youngsters among of you who do know nothing but ISO (ISO9660), BIN+CUE (or worse, with MP […]
Show full quote

Here's a little history lesson for the youngsters among of you who do know nothing but ISO (ISO9660), BIN+CUE (or worse, with MP3 tracks)..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Sierra_Format
https://fileformat.fandom.com/wiki/CDR
😜

Well, there is a difference between the two. Cue files are actually just a bit of metadata for the different tracks(their description and pointers to the backend file(s)). It's the track's data itself that actually is formatted in the ISO9660 filesystem(or any other filesystem, mp3 file streams or pure 16-bit stereo audio as signed words).

UniPCemu in fact already does this, for example. It translates using the ATAPI interface the selected LBA and then uses the cue file to find the backend file(which may be an iso or bin file). It verifies the track type when needed and plays back the block of audio(for audio tracks only) or reads the iso9660 sector block or CD-DA audio block from the backend for the OS to read from a buffer through the ATAPI implementation.

You could theoretically take the entire UniPCemu ATA/ATAPI driver(ata.c) and run it on some hardware(if it can be compiled using c/c++) like a FPGA using a basic I/O port passthrough to use it as some virtual CD-ROM or virtual hard drive. Although you might need some modifications for the file interface and a wrapper for the I/O interface for the physical hardware.

I've got a scenario like this: I have some old OEM PCs with their respective restore discs in ISO format. To restore the OEM image, you boot from CD 1 and start the process. It will ask for CD 2 which you have to manually swap in and then 3 and so on. I would like to be able to load these ISO on to an SD card and boot from CD 1 via the ISO. When it asks for CD 2, I could press a button and select it and then the computer thinks I just inserted CD 2 physically. In this situation you can't really have something that connects to a network or load an ISO within DOS as you would be within the restore process an unable to first of all mount the ISO nor exit out and change the current mounted ISO.

So basically like a Gotek but for CD ISOs. Not too interested in the CD audio aspect of it but it sure would save a lot of disc burning.

Does any such device exist or is in the works? I see those mentioned in the thread but none are very Gotek-like which is what people are asking for.

LieboOSBA wrote on 2020-12-09, 17:19:

Does any such device exist or is in the works? I see those mentioned in the thread but none are very Gotek-like which is what people are asking for.

I don't know for sure. There are Virtual CD-ROMs drivers, so in theory, some could use them. A Raspberry Pi has a lot of GPIO pins, also. So a combination of both of them could result in an ATAPI compatible CD-ROM emulator.

Maybe the Playstation or Dreamcast scene has a working CD-ROM emulator that can be adapted for our purposes.

Generally speaking, IDE and ATAPI are/were quite popular in the hardware hacker scene.
Japanese systems also used SCSI, so maybe there are also projects that can be useful to us.
But keep in mind that "emulation" has a bad stigma over there. In their mindset, emulation is associated with unlawful activities. So terms like "simulation" or "virtual" etc. do perhaps provide more hits.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-12-08, 17:39:

Check out this Raspberry Pi based IDE emulator project.... sounds like you should be able to use mounted CD images as well.
https://hackaday.io/project/20774-netpi-ide

Is this project still being actively worked on? The link you provided also happens to be the most recent mention of it, but that's from almost three years back.

LieboOSBA wrote on 2020-12-09, 17:19:

Does any such device exist or is in the works? I see those mentioned in the thread but none are very Gotek-like which is what people are asking for.

I mean, my PCB will do exactly what you want, the only issue is the lack of a button to switch images. You could also swap SD card or USB flash drive with one per image, though I need to fix a firmware bug I know of where it sometimes won't rescan when a drive is unplugged/replugged.

Other than that (or if all your images are on one drive), you'd need to send it a command over the USB port (which simulates a serial port, allowing for a command line interface).

I was working on adding some support for CrystalFontz USB LCD screens (with buttons) so it could have an out-the-box GUI for people who want that, but it's been on the back burner a little since I'm working on other compatibility features just now (like increasing compatibility with some older 386s and adding support for UHD floppies like ZIP disks, which is something that's useful to some people). The main thing that makes it a bit of a pain is that they use a FTDI USB to serial chip, instead of a chip that implements the official USB serial adapter protocol, so I need to write a driver for that.

electric_monk wrote on 2020-12-13, 23:21:

I mean, my PCB will do exactly what you want, the only issue is the lack of a button to switch images. You could also swap SD ca […]
Show full quote

LieboOSBA wrote on 2020-12-09, 17:19:

Does any such device exist or is in the works? I see those mentioned in the thread but none are very Gotek-like which is what people are asking for.

I mean, my PCB will do exactly what you want, the only issue is the lack of a button to switch images. You could also swap SD card or USB flash drive with one per image, though I need to fix a firmware bug I know of where it sometimes won't rescan when a drive is unplugged/replugged.

Other than that (or if all your images are on one drive), you'd need to send it a command over the USB port (which simulates a serial port, allowing for a command line interface).

I was working on adding some support for CrystalFontz USB LCD screens (with buttons) so it could have an out-the-box GUI for people who want that, but it's been on the back burner a little since I'm working on other compatibility features just now (like increasing compatibility with some older 386s and adding support for UHD floppies like ZIP disks, which is something that's useful to some people). The main thing that makes it a bit of a pain is that they use a FTDI USB to serial chip, instead of a chip that implements the official USB serial adapter protocol, so I need to write a driver for that.

I would certainly fancy a more self-contained version of this device.
Do you have any news about that DOS utility, so we can switch CD images from inside the host machine? Usage it in a retro gaming rig would be far more viable, if I didn't have to connect the IDE simulator to another computer.