CD-ROM under DOS/Windows

[Beeble]

How would be the best way to access CD-ROM Iso on ao486?

Anyone tried Wing Commander III yet?

[rhester72]

There's already a whole bunch of information on this in the ao486 thread. The short answer is SHSUCDHD:

http://adoxa.altervista.org/shsucdx/

but you can't get Red Book audio that way (or any way, currently).

[Chris23235]

In Windows 95 it is possible to get Daemon Tools running, if you need Red Book Audio try this. You have to install USB Drivers and the Windows 2.0 installer first, but then everything works.

[rhester72]

Daemon Tools still randomly hangs for me a lot *shrugs* But yes, when it works, it works.

[Beeble]

Thank you very much!

[Caldor]

Daemon Tools still randomly hangs for me a lot *shrugs* But yes, when it works, it works.

I have found that if you have mounted some ISO in Daemon Tools and then reboot Windows, you should remember to unmount it, or it will freeze / crash when you try to open This Computer or otherwise see the virtual drive. But after unmounting, you can mount again and it should work.

But there might still be other issues while using it.

[Chris23235]

Daemon Tools still randomly hangs for me a lot *shrugs* But yes, when it works, it works.

I have found that if you have mounted some ISO in Daemon Tools and then reboot Windows, you should remember to unmount it, or it will freeze / crash when you try to open This Computer or otherwise see the virtual drive. But after unmounting, you can mount again and it should work.

But there might still be other issues while using it.

You can prevent this beaviour by deselecting automount on start in the Daemon Tools settings. By doing so your virtual drive is always empty when the computer launches.

[Caldor]

Daemon Tools still randomly hangs for me a lot *shrugs* But yes, when it works, it works.

I have found that if you have mounted some ISO in Daemon Tools and then reboot Windows, you should remember to unmount it, or it will freeze / crash when you try to open This Computer or otherwise see the virtual drive. But after unmounting, you can mount again and it should work.

But there might still be other issues while using it.

You can prevent this beaviour by deselecting automount on start in the Daemon Tools settings. By doing so your virtual drive is always empty when the computer launches.

Oh yeah, good idea

[bootsector]

It would be great to have a proper CD interface with this core so I could play Relentless - Little Big Adventure again directly from a rip of my own CD (that does have CD-Audio tracks on it).

[Chris23235]

It would be great to be able to connect a USB CD Rom

[Caldor]

It would be great to have a proper CD interface with this core so I could play Relentless - Little Big Adventure again directly from a rip of my own CD (that does have CD-Audio tracks on it).

Yup... but so far it will require using Windows and one of the CD drive emulators for Windows that support audio CDs. That should work for Warcraft 1 f.ex. I think. I have not experimented much with it though. In fact, I do not think I have tried out any games using audio CDs yet, but I have made images of almost all my CD rom games. Most of my floppy disk games as well, but the MiSTer does not support copy-protected disk formats for... any of the cores yet, I think. Installing DOS games that just use ISO images works great so far for me. I have made a mount script that removes the existing drive, if there is one, and mounts the image to a new drive. Multi-CD games though, like Kingdom O Magic is a problem. I am trying to make a bit of a hack where I make a custom CD that has files from both CDs to trick it into accepting one CD for the adventures that requires the Sharon CD, so that I can start the game with that CD. I made an image for this, because I tried just using a folder and subst, but I got some errors. Not sure why.

[Caldor]

It would be great to be able to connect a USB CD Rom

Very much so... the MiSTerFS might be a way around that... except it would still not access the audio part. I am pretty sure it would take quite some time and know-how to implement support for a software, yet alone a hardware support for CD rom drives.

Do USB CD-Rom drives even support audio-CD playable? I do have two... 3 I guess, USB-DVD drives, but I have not tried using them for audio CDs, only for ripping CDs.

[bootsector]

It would be great to have a proper CD interface with this core so I could play Relentless - Little Big Adventure again directly from a rip of my own CD (that does have CD-Audio tracks on it).

Yup... but so far it will require using Windows and one of the CD drive emulators for Windows that support audio CDs. That should work for Warcraft 1 f.ex. I think. I have not experimented much with it though. In fact, I do not think I have tried out any games using audio CDs yet, but I have made images of almost all my CD rom games. Most of my floppy disk games as well, but the MiSTer does not support copy-protected disk formats for... any of the cores yet, I think. Installing DOS games that just use ISO images works great so far for me. I have made a mount script that removes the existing drive, if there is one, and mounts the image to a new drive. Multi-CD games though, like Kingdom O Magic is a problem. I am trying to make a bit of a hack where I make a custom CD that has files from both CDs to trick it into accepting one CD for the adventures that requires the Sharon CD, so that I can start the game with that CD. I made an image for this, because I tried just using a folder and subst, but I got some errors. Not sure why.

Unfortunately Relentless doesn’t work in Windows 95. It asks you to reboot in MSDOS mode. With that, I lose any CD emulation capability provided by any software on Windows.

[Caldor]

Yeah... that is the case with many DOS games. I have gotten it to run without CD sound though. Maybe something can be done using the HX DOS Extender, as its meant to make it possible to use some Windows features in DOS. Should even work with some simple UI stuff, but its mainly for command line Windows stuff. Daemon Tools does have a command line feature, but... I doubt that would work with the HX DOS Extender.

I guess games that use CD audio from DOS have to be ignored for now, or played without audio. Or maybe try to force it to run as a DOS app in Windows, using special compatibility settings, but I doubt that would run well, if it would even run at all.

[Chris23235]

It would be great to be able to connect a USB CD Rom

Do USB CD-Rom drives even support audio-CD playable? I do have two... 3 I guess, USB-DVD drives, but I have not tried using them for audio CDs, only for ripping CDs.

USB CD-Drives are capable of everything an internal CD-Drive is capable of.

[bootsector]

Yeah... that is the case with many DOS games. I have gotten it to run without CD sound though. Maybe something can be done using the HX DOS Extender, as its meant to make it possible to use some Windows features in DOS. Should even work with some simple UI stuff, but its mainly for command line Windows stuff. Daemon Tools does have a command line feature, but... I doubt that would work with the HX DOS Extender.

I guess games that use CD audio from DOS have to be ignored for now, or played without audio. Or maybe try to force it to run as a DOS app in Windows, using special compatibility settings, but I doubt that would run well, if it would even run at all.

I’ve given up on the CD version for now. I’m now looking for the 8 disks version of this game.

[Caldor]

I had some issues with Daemon Tools, but I finally found a fix. You have to disable pre+load cache for CD+Rom drives. I am thinking it probably makes sense to do the same with HDD drives. Its under system settings - performance

[ExCyber]

Do USB CD-Rom drives even support audio-CD playable? I do have two... 3 I guess, USB-DVD drives, but I have not tried using them for audio CDs, only for ripping CDs.

USB CD-Drives are capable of everything an internal CD-Drive is capable of.

In principle, yes, but in practice I've never heard of a USB optical drive capable of playing (as opposed to reading/ripping) audio tracks. Even if they internally support the commands, a separate audio output is also required. A few USB drives with such an output probably exist, but I think USB wasn't common before this feature was considered obsolete. Presumably for the same reason, I've also never seen a SATA optical drive with the necessary audio output.

[Chris23235]

I never heard of any external CD Rom not being able to play audio CDs. Over the years I used various external CD/DVD-Roms and know many people who use them (e.g. when the optical drive in their laptop breaks down) and nobody ever had a drive that wasn't able to play audio tracks.

[ExCyber]

Modern applications can work fine by reading the audio data. I thought the feature being referenced was the old-school playback mode where the host system just sends the drive a command like "play track 12" and the audio then goes directly from the drive to the sound card via a dedicated cable. There are external drives that support this, but the only ones I've seen are older types with SCSI or proprietary interfaces. By the time USB became popular, this mode of playback was rarely used.

I'm sure it's possible to have a driver intercept the relevant commands and use the data-reading approach behind the game's back (after all, a driver can emulate an entire drive), but I don't know if anyone's done that or what the performance/timing impacts might be.

[Caldor]

Yeah, the thing is internal CD and DVD drives required being connected to your audio card to fully support CD audio playable. Unless you did not have the drive play the audio, but actually read it with your hardware, but back in those days, I am pretty sure that was not how you played audio CDs most of the time, because that meant it would be the CPU that had to deal with the playback rather than just passing that playback through the computer.

Given how limited CPUs these old systems had, that was a pretty essential feature I think, but with USB on modern systems I guess anything is possible. It might take the audio playback through the USB and send it to... some audio device. But I think that would require the drive to also be seen as an audio device? CD audio always confused me a bit.