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IIgs CD burning?

mkinn

Well-known member
Is there a program that will burn files to a SCSI CD recorder, which CD ROM drive should I buy, and how does one do this, if at all?

I realize that there is a table of contents, finalize process, etc., but this should be, in theory, possible.

The redbook CD-R data rate is 4.3218Mb/sec. Will the IIGs support this ?

I have a TWGS card at 7mhz, and a CFFA card that will recognize CF cards up to 128GB, if formatted with HFS.

I have an Apple CD150 external SCSI drive, which is supported on the GS, but I could remove that drive and try a CDROM recorder in it.

My IIgs: ROM1, 8Mb Sirius card, Ramfast D SCSI card, TWGS card.

 
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gsteemso

Well-known member
Mb is megabits. At least the second time you used it I’m pretty sure you meant MB for megabytes. If that data rate is indeed specified in megabits per second, it might work if your CD burner has an adequate buffer; if it is supposed to be quoted in megabytes/second, you’re probably going to need special helper hardware.

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
Seems like you should be able to.  Your RamFast SCSI card can theoretically push 5MB/sec.  That's within spec for a 1x CD-R.  Would be an interesting project.

 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Not happening. The fastest an Apple II can theoretically push data out is 1 megabyte/second and real life numbers don't come close to that. Leave the CD burning to a modern machine with a bus running faster then 1Mhz.

 

waynestewart

Well-known member
Fastest I ever got was with a 15mhz IIgs, Ramfast SCSI/1MB cache with a SCSI to CF adapter. 256k/sec write, 512k/sec read. Too slow for normal CD writing. You'd have to write your own software so maybe if you wrote one sector at a time. Don't know if that's possible. if you have to write one track at a time then I think you're out of luck. Maybe if you had a SCSI card with an 8MB buffer that you could fill and then write a track in one go at faster than the IIgs could normally handle it.

I wrote ProDOS CDs on a Mac at one time. Made up a ProDOS disk. Connected it to the Mac. Started the Mac with the drive off so it wouldn't mount. Then turned it on and used the device copy they used to have in Toast. Made bootable Cds.

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I like the buffer idea.  Since the SCSI is limited to about 256k/sec in actual usage, might as well make the buffer device serial.  Then you don't need an expensive SCSI card to to burn CDs.  Send the data over serial to the buffer, which then writes to the CD-R.

 

Paralel

Well-known member
I believe it would work, but only at very low writing speeds. A 1x burn speed is only a 150 KB per second to the CD-R media (according to Sony, and Wikipedia backs that up)

http://sony.storagesupport.com/node/6085

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed

Also, from Memorex:

http://support.memorex.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1027/~/52x-combo-drive---troubleshooting

"CD & DVD Drives: My recordings fail due to "buffer underrun". What does that mean?

"Buffer underrun" occurs when the drive asks for data to burn on a disc at a rate faster than the computer can provide. The computer's buffer memory storage can run out and interrupt the data stream. There are several ways to avoid this problem:
 
1. Let the computer's RAM memory concentrate only on disc burning by making sure you shut down all other applications, even those running "in the background" such as anti-virus programs. 2. Defragment the hard drive so files run contiguously and the drive does not have to hunt for missing pieces. 3. Record at a slower speed."

Doing DAO, with enough RAM for buffer, and ensuring that the files to be burnt are all in one place, in one piece, I think it's entirely possible.

 
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mkinn

Well-known member
I just figured that since it can read at 1X, it can't be much harder to write a CD at 1X.

Has anyone tried to copy a CD to an HFS-formatted drive large enough to hold it? (800MB or larger)?

Could this image be mounted using Mount-It or some other program? Please explain this.

Is there any Cd authoring software that will take a raw 44.1 Khz stereo PCM file, add the table of contents and the other stuff (subcode channels, etc.) and create an Apple IIgs readable .iso/.cdr file? If there are any open source code out there that could be assembled/compiled/linked for the IIgs?

This should be fairly easy if the hardware could support it.

 

Paralel

Well-known member
...Has anyone tried to copy a CD to an HFS-formatted drive large enough to hold it? (800MB or larger)?

Could this image be mounted using Mount-It or some other program? Please explain this...
I have indeed done this for a number of titles, no problem whatsoever getting the discs to run. Heck. I even created the HFS-formatted CD image files on a PC and had no issues moving them over using FTP.

 
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