CompuServe Messages

To get to the specific questions that you have… I think the DAK drive is almost certainly a SCSI device (all or almost all CDROMs are) and the 'connector card' that DAK includes is a PC SCSI card – thats good news cuz all sorts of AMI options for SCSI exist and that is the standard way of connecting most harddisks to AMI… I would expect that I could plug the DAK unit on to my SCSI controller and read the RAW data stored on it. The problem, as you seem to notice, is that the RAW access doesn't mean anything about meaningful data access, e.g. access to the structures on disk (CDROM) that tell how the information is laid out (just as AmigaDos has a way of organizing data on AMi disks, MSDOS on PC's etc), OR how the specific CDROM manufacturer has stored their data (e.g. DBase Iv stores its files as PC/MS-DOS format, but additionally stores data, indices, etc in its own internal formats) The Groliers Encyclopedia folks have some way of internally storing all the keys that allow fast word and article access and mebbe even the articles which are not (as far as I know) documented, and the Atlas program and 450-book library CDROMs may actually store their stuff differently. For the PC machines the "reader" software that DAK supplies will know how to get the information off the CDROMs but those CANNOT be run on AMIGA, natch. I'm told that most PC-market CDROMs store the data as just huge MS-DOS filesystems, so we might be able to use a filesystem "converter" program like DOS-2-DOS (there is also a PD program to do this) to allow us some sort of access to, e.g., a DAK drive connected up to an AMIGA SCSI controller… BUT, we'd still be left with a bunch or inaccessible internal formats in the data that describes what is where, and no way to run the reader software. <<more>> – da