🚀 go-pugleaf

Randall Lasini (suicyde@eck.net.au) wrote:
> 
> My  problem is I have a psuedo CD rom via NFS/ethernet/PC-soundblaster and
> it  is  only  single  spin  as  well.  What I would like to do is set up a
> single  650M  partition  on  my  Harddrive(I am getting a 2gig soon), then
> 'clone'  the  CD  across  the  network  and  put it locally so that I have
> Standard  filesystem access to the CD's data.

Hm... is a 4x speed CDROM really that expensive to warrant loosing 650MB
of hard disk space? It sounds like a weird idea, because I always thought
that HD space is more expensive...

Christian


-- 
Christian Stieber                    stieber@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
Fortune cookie of the day:
  They say that in time a blessed luckstone can make your god happy.

Christian Stieber wrote:
> 
> Randall Lasini (suicyde@eck.net.au) wrote:
> >
> > My  problem is I have a psuedo CD rom via NFS/ethernet/PC-soundblaster and
> > it  is  only  single  spin  as  well.  What I would like to do is set up a
> > single  650M  partition  on  my  Harddrive(I am getting a 2gig soon), then
> > 'clone'  the  CD  across  the  network  and  put it locally so that I have
> > Standard  filesystem access to the CD's data.
> 
> Hm... is a 4x speed CDROM really that expensive to warrant loosing 650MB
> of hard disk space? It sounds like a weird idea, because I always thought
> that HD space is more expensive...

Yours woudl be a good solution in an ideal world, BUT I think that
Randall has made an interesting and useful suggestion.

For example, there may well be many valid reasons as to why he does not
want to / cannot add a 4x CDROM drive to his current system.

I use a CD32 / SX32Pro at home, and the CD32 is only 2x speed -
something such as Randall is suggesting would prove very useful for me
at times - having a virtual CDROM with hd access speeds is very useful.

Just HMO, of course.

TTFN,
Keith

stieber@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Christian Stieber) writes:
>Randall Lasini (suicyde@eck.net.au) wrote:
>> 
>> My  problem is I have a psuedo CD rom via NFS/ethernet/PC-soundblaster and
>> it  is  only  single  spin  as  well.  What I would like to do is set up a
>> single  650M  partition  on  my  Harddrive(I am getting a 2gig soon), then
>> 'clone'  the  CD  across  the  network  and  put it locally so that I have
>> Standard  filesystem access to the CD's data.

>Hm... is a 4x speed CDROM really that expensive to warrant loosing 650MB
>of hard disk space? It sounds like a weird idea, because I always thought
>that HD space is more expensive...

A 2G drive is about A$200, i.e. 650M on a 2G drive are A$65. You can get
a nice used CD-ROM for that, but anything you can actually buy today will
set you back about A$100 (and be faster than 4X).

Of course, once you get up to 6G harddisks, things are looking even better.
The only advantage of the CD-ROM is that you can change the CD. If you don't
intend to do so, harddisk space is cheaper.

Bernie
-- 
============================================================================
"It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy...
    	                                   ...let's go exploring"
Calvin's final words, on December 31st, 1995

Keith Blakemore-Noble <knoble@lsil.com> wrote:
: Christian Stieber wrote:
: > 
: > Randall Lasini (suicyde@eck.net.au) wrote:
: > >
: > > My  problem is I have a psuedo CD rom via NFS/ethernet/PC-soundblaster and
: > > it  is  only  single  spin  as  well.  What I would like to do is set up a
: > > single  650M  partition  on  my  Harddrive(I am getting a 2gig soon), then
: > > 'clone'  the  CD  across  the  network  and  put it locally so that I have
: > > Standard  filesystem access to the CD's data.
: > 
: > Hm... is a 4x speed CDROM really that expensive to warrant loosing 650MB
: > of hard disk space? It sounds like a weird idea, because I always thought
: > that HD space is more expensive...

: Yours woudl be a good solution in an ideal world, BUT I think that
: Randall has made an interesting and useful suggestion.

: For example, there may well be many valid reasons as to why he does not
: want to / cannot add a 4x CDROM drive to his current system.

: I use a CD32 / SX32Pro at home, and the CD32 is only 2x speed -
: something such as Randall is suggesting would prove very useful for me
: at times - having a virtual CDROM with hd access speeds is very useful.

Something like this already exists (hurrah!) for Windoze (boo!).

Produced by Logicraft Information Systems, it's called, imaginatively enough,
"Virtual CD-ROM". Their e-mail address is virtual-cdrom@logicraft.com.

I've found it very useful, with my annoying habit of losing CDs, not to
mention stepping on and scratching the damn things. Most of them can now live
safely in their boxes.

It also allows you to compress the CD images - very handy for compiler CDs and
such like which have piles of highly compressible documents - Visual C++ 5.0
Professional squashes down to a relatively neat 250 Megs. It's not so good for
games, though, which tend to have large amounts of already-compressed data,
such as animations - C&C Red Alert, which comes on two CDs, will eat up over a
Gig of space, for example...

Speed-wise, I'd say that, on my P120, it's roughly equivalent to a 4x drive
when using compressed images. For uncompressed images it would doubtless be
much faster, but I haven't tried them yet.

The only thing missing really is the ability to master CD-ROMs directly to a
virtual drive. At work, this would save me a lot of time, and my boss a lot of
money in wasted CDs ;)

Anyway, that's proof of concept - now someone can write it for the Amiga. :)

-- Mat.

Randall Lasini <suicyde@eck.net.au> wrote:

: On 26 Jul 1997 02:03:10 Mathew Hendry wrote about "Re: Virtual CD-roms and DMS'ers for CD's?":

[Virtual CD-ROM systems for Windows]

: > Anyway, that's proof of concept - now someone can write it for the Amiga. :)

: Well,  thats  exactly  what  I was originally asking about.  But not quiet
: what I had in mind.  AFter all, if you are going to make a virtual CD on a
: HD  partition, you would want to be able to boot from it like you can with
: and amiga/cdrom.  If you are using a hardfile image of it, it would not be
: able to be booted from.  But the theory is still the same.

Being able to boot from such an image is a simple matter of script files.

mount vcd0:
assign sys: vcd0:

; ... more assigns ...

cd sys:
execute s:startup-sequence

A hardfile also avoids the need for repartioning, and prevents space from
being wasted: a dedicated partition would have to be 650MB in size to cope
with all CDs.

And, it would be inconvenient to be forced to create more partitions if one
wanted to have 2 or more CDs available at once. With hardfiles, all one has
to do is mount more devices.

-- Mat.

On 26 Jul 1997 02:03:10 Mathew Hendry wrote about "Re: Virtual CD-roms and DMS'ers for CD's?":

> Something like this already exists (hurrah!) for Windoze (boo!).
[Stuff removed for bandwidth]
> 
> Speed-wise, I'd say that, on my P120, it's roughly equivalent to a 4x drive
> when using compressed images. For uncompressed images it would doubtless be
> much faster, but I haven't tried them yet.
> 
> The only thing missing really is the ability to master CD-ROMs directly to a
> virtual drive. At work, this would save me a lot of time, and my boss a lot of
> money in wasted CDs ;)
> 
> Anyway, that's proof of concept - now someone can write it for the Amiga. :)

Well,  thats  exactly  what  I was originally asking about.  But not quiet
what I had in mind.  AFter all, if you are going to make a virtual CD on a
HD  partition, you would want to be able to boot from it like you can with
and amiga/cdrom.  If you are using a hardfile image of it, it would not be
able to be booted from.  But the theory is still the same.

Any  takes on writing some shareware software to do this?  Its just that I
can get hold of a 1xSCSI drive cheap, but for me at the mo.  anything more
expensive is to much.  So being able to virtualize the cd would be a great
time saver.

Randall Lasini

--
,----suicyde@melb.alexia.net.au------http://www.eck.net.au/~suicyde/-----.
|Randall Lasini|Phone AH:+61 57 922635        |A2000T/Derringer030/882/~/|
|31a Railway St|    AMIGA-Truely The First    |8/4/1Ram-540/105HD   // / |
|Seymour 3660  |Advance Multimedia Intergrated|PC-Task/SS/VMM#OS\\~// /  |
|Australia Vic.|    Graphics Architecture     |DICE3.0/GNU++ #3.1\X/Amiga|
`--------------^------suicyde@eck.net.au------^--150MTAPE/A2060/ZIP/CV3D-'

Randall Lasini wrote:
> 
> My  problem is I have a psuedo CD rom via NFS/ethernet/PC-soundblaster and
> it  is  only  single  spin  as  well.  What I would like to do is set up a
> single  650M  partition  on  my  Harddrive(I am getting a 2gig soon), then
> 'clone'  the  CD  across  the  network  and  put it locally so that I have
> Standard  filesystem access to the CD's data.  Also if the games reads(via
> a  custom trackdisk-filesystem setup) the 'driver' to the virtual CD would
> act properly as a normal CD rom.
> 
> I  am also interested in the propect of DMSing a CDROM so that I would not
> have  to  copy  it across a network each time I wanted to play a different
> game, I would just have to unDMS the CD over the old one.
> 
> Any ideas on this software?  Is it posible.
> 
Not only is it possible, you can do it already.

The Amiga developers' CD holds CD32 developers info, which includes CD
imaging (imperative for mastering CDs). The CD image will then hold
all the data, and is used exactly as normal, only substituting a
different
device for cd.device in the mountlist.
	I tried this with ATR, as this is only 2Mb used, and it booted and
ran fine from my hard disk.

	DMS should work.. IIRC it has paramters, so you just need to put
in the start and end cylinder (get it from SysInfo or something,
probably).
Haven't tried it, but should be possible.
Better bet is to make the Image with MakeCD (or whatever the Developer's
CD software is called, I can't remember) and then just LhA the image.

Good luck,

Ian Gledhill

img4@aber.ac.uk