Key sticking
22 messages in this thread
Yes, 'tis true. 10Mhz 286 Tandy 1000 TL/3 for $395. If ya want one to use
as a doorstop (or magazine shelf bookend) drop me a note I work at a Tandy
Computer Center / Radio Shack retail outlet.
ERIC
Eric,
Does it accept full-size cards or is it another Tandy-architecture uniquity
? If nothing else for $395 + $350 you've got a CDROM machine… better yet
$395 plus $399 for the DAK CDROM then $450 more for the coupla dozen CDROMS
that DAK sells packaged…
– da – via Whap!
The DAK drives are very nice…and plug into the PC compatables we have
quite well. UNFORTUNATELY, I can't figure out how to interface them to the
Amiga. Seems that Sony has a rather 'peculiar' interface and, as yet, no
'host adaptor' yet exists for the Amiga.
I'm itching to buy a drive, and I'm aiming at the CD Technologies
repackaging of the Toshiba 3201. It's about $600 from Educorp, and it's
SCSI, and I've seen it run on a Mac, PC and Amiga before my very eyes. The
PC requires a $120 SCSI adapter, though.
John,
Sounds good. If I ever find a SCSI controller for the DAK, I'll
certainly publish it here.
That would be wonderful. Those DAK products look too good to be true at
times!
Now, naive question time: Let's assume that I get a CD-ROM drive and
attach it via SCSI to my A2500. (the Xetek (sp?) drive, for instance, that
comes with Amiga drivers, FF disc, etc) I gather that I cannot use any of
the many IBMish CD-ROMs in it, correct? Is the reason: 1) because I cannot
read the data off the disc *at all* , 2) I can read the raw data, but
cannot interpret it cause it is in MS-DOS format?, 3) I can read the raw
data and get it to my amiga, but cannot interpret it cause it is encrypted?
Example: A CD-ROM with the complete works of Shakespeare. It has all the
text, probably organized by play, act, verse, etc…. probably indexed more
ways than Sunday. Well, if I hook it up to the system described above, can
I even sit there reading text? Can I get that far? Can I read an 'index'
on the disc that tells me where stuff is? Is all this a function of the
CD-ROM driver (which apparently is included in Xetek system), or of the OS
itself? As you can tell, I am very confused. 🙁
–jp–seattle–
John, just a few note's about IBM CD's. I have 3 around here that I've been
playing with. Of the 3, I can read any of the text and data files that are
on the disk. The reason I can read a IBM, Mac, or CDTV CD on my Xetec is
because they are all in the ISO-9660 format. You can look at it as a
standard file system across different computers. All Xetec had to do was
write a driver to read the ISO-9660 CD's and away you go. Now that you have
a standard filesystem, whatever files are on the CD can be read by any
computer as long as they have the necessary driver. The only problem is
that I can't run the "Search engines" that will present the files in a
usefull way because they are IBM executables. An IBM user trying to run a
CDTV Rom would have the same problem, the search engines are Amiga
exectable programs. Even though I can't run the search engine doesn't mean
the CD is useless. For example, I have written my own search engine for the
Buckmaster Ham Radio CD Rom that has all of the Amateur radio operators in
the US on CD. Another IBM CD has a bunch of GIF format pictures that can be
converted easily for the Amiga. And you may have read my previous message
about the NEC CD's such as "Image Folio" that has 4000 full color pictures
in TIFF format, and "Clip Art 3D" that has 2500 3-D images. With Adpro, it
would be very easy to take those pictures and convert them to Amiga IFF (or
Ham-E) pictures. As for your Shakespeare CD, I would guess that the
datafile is also in a standard database format, but you really don't know
until you get one to look at, or ask some IBM'er that has it and knows a
little about the file format. Chances are, it has an index file sorted by
play, act, verse that is searched and then goes out and grabs the record
with the text. So for it to work on your Amiga, you would have to figure
out how it is indexed, and then write the Amiga program to pull in the
record and display it. In reality, it is probably much easier to get a
Bridgeboard, a Chinon controller for the IBM side, and use the Xetec drive
for the IBM CD's. I plan on
[ MORE ]
Thanks for the info, really. I could see a large potential market for
these 'other' CD's, if interfaces are developed for the Amiga as well. For
instance, if the MicroSoft reference CD was given an Amiga interface, so
that it multitasked all that reference info, it would be fantastic.
Natch there are difficulties in porting; in particular the encoded formats,
indexes, etc…. but with dilegence, etc. ??? I wonder what the *legal*
ramifications would be? If I (for instance) were to write my own Amiga
interface for the MicroSoft reference CD, and just sold the interface,
telling customers that they needed to purchase the CD seperately, would I
get in hot water with MS? Do CD-ROM's come with 'play on this brand of
computer with our interface only' warnings? Do the ones you have mention
any restrictions?
(I'm just usign the MS reference set as an example. Have no idea of how it
is setup, etc….)
–jp–seattle–
I don't think there would be too many legal ramifications in selling an
Amiga search engine for the Microsoft reference CD. Microsoft would still
get their royalties for the CD since you would have to buy it anyway. You
might run into trouble if a company sells a search engine and CD Rom
seperately, but even then I don't think you would have too much trouble
getting their permission since it will increase sales of the CD Rom. For
instance, the Buckmaster Ham Radio CD has a seperate search engine called
"Questar" from Sony. You have to pay an extra $50 to get it. So if I were
to write an Amiga search engine that used the Questar index's, then I'm
sure I would have to get permission from both Sony and Buckmaster. Or I
could create my own index based on the data file and get permission from
Buckmaster to distribute it, etc.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
John,
I don't see why you would need Sony's or Buckmaster's permission to
distribute a program to work with the Buckmaster CD. When you dish out the
fifty bucks for the CD, you are buying the right to use anything on that
disk. If there are Questar index files on the disk, and you can figure out
how to use it, then so much the better for you! Course, maybe Sony
encrypted their index files.
If you create an Amiga Search Engine that used Questar's Index or
Buckmaster's index (if they have one), you should not need permission to
distribute the program. You would not be distributing the data, since
anybody using your program would still have to purchase the Buckmaster
CDROM which contains the data your program works on. If you were going to
distribute some data from the disk with your program, then you would need
permission.
If you looked at this from another point of view – how many hams are there
with Amiga's, CDROM drives, and the BuckMaster disks? Not a heck of a lot!
So the numbers wouldn't warrant Sony or Buckmaster taking any legal actions
if they had any grounds to (which they won't since your only using the data
ON THE DISK).
Now, this engine of yours is going to be FreeWare, right? <GRIN> If not,
then when (ever) I get a CDROM drive, I'll just have to install SuperBase
4.0 on the hard drive and make my own engine!
Does the Buckmaster CDROM have info on hams outside the USA? The ads says
500k hams, so it sounds like it is USA only, or is it all of North America?
73, Kelly
Kelly, are you speaking from opinion, or from a legal background?
I don't THINK that just because you own a dis(k/c) you have a right to
reverse engineer its file system, its encrypted data, and use it on another
system. (I do mean use the dis(k/c), not xferring it to another medium,
which would be a clear copyright violation.) Maybe you can, maybe you
cannot, maybe it 'depends'?
A CD-ROM may have been created to support a very specific application
running on a very specific computer. It may well be that it is the
application (often distributed on regular computer disk) that the vendor is
making their bucks on (including upgrades thereof) and hence they would
have no incentive to allow others to use the data they collected in any
other application/system.
Are you on solid legal footing when you state that "…the numbers wouldn't
warrant Sony/Buckmaster taking any legal actions if they had any grounds to
(which they won't since your're only using the data ON THE DISK)." Do you
have good legal knowledge that what you say is true, or is this OPINION?
Not meaning to be critical, but law is law, and I'd like to hear from any
legal whiz's out there, since I don't know.
–jp–seattle–
Kelly, you are probably right about not needing Buckmaster's permission to
use the Questar index for the search engine. But I do like to check first,
and I've received permission so it's a mute point. I'm not sure how much
value it would be for a ham to search all Ham's in Walla Walla, or all
Ham's with an expiration year of 2000, etc. Right now it searches only for
callsigns and will find a call in less than 7 seconds, based on a binary
search. You also have the option of printing labels. The first version was
done in Basic, compiled, and is ready. The second one is in C and it's not
8^) The version that just searches for Callsigns will be FreeWare. If I do
decide to figure out the Questar index and create a full search engine, it
will probably be Shareware. Its going to take a lot of time to figure out
the Questar index and how it's formatted. As yet, the Buckmaster CD is for
US Ham's only. They have indicated a International version of the
Buckmaster CD is being considered, but as yet has not made a firm
commitment.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
[ continuation ]
doing just that some time this week as soon as I get all my goodies from
Xetec. Hope I've given you some idea on how IBM or Mac CD's are use with an
Amiga, but if you have any other questions, feel free to ask.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
John,
Reading the raw data is a function of the drive based on
instructions given by the driver and the design of the hardware. Getting
that data from the drive into your program is a function of the driver.
Doing something useful with that data is a function of the software you're
running at the time that is asking for the data.
Consider the example of programs that allow the Amiga to read-write
MS-DOS disks. First of all, the disk drive (hardware) has to be compatible
with the MS-DOS disk. Standard Amiga drives won't read/write a 1.44 Meg
MS-DOS floppy no matter what you do.
Next, the driver has to understand the layout of MS-DOS disk and be
able to "instruct" the disk drive to read that data and "separate the wheat
from the chaff" so to speak. Finally, the software that's is calling the
driver and telling it to go get the data has to know what to do with it
once you have it.
Of course, once you have all that…you still may end up with junk.
Say you read off the file "command.com" from an MS-DOS disk. You've got
the file, but won't be able to do much with it since it's Intel code, not
Motorola code thus of very little value on an Amiga.
Thus, to use one of those MS-DOS CD-ROM's, you'd have to have a
drive that was compatible with the disk layout (be able to physically read
the data from the CD-ROM disk), then a driver that allowed the Amiga to
'talk' to that drive and be able to separate out the data from the sector
header information and software that understood what the data meant. That
is…which was index, which was text and how to get from one to the
other…and of course…how to convert that data into a screen display.
Make sense?
Don
Yeah, it does make sense, explained that way. So, if I have discs in ISO
9660 format, and the Xetek drive/driver (or the CDTV device, for that
matter?), then I can get the data off the drive. Now its up to my program
to make sense of it, correct?
So, if I issued (the equivalent of) a DIR command on a CDTV with a IBM/ISO
9660 disc in it, I would get a list of files in some way? I would then
need to read those files and figure them out (indexes, data, programs,
etc)?
I realize that I could not use any of the specific programs on the disks,
(unless they are amiga discs/programs, of course), but I could write my own
programs to read the indexes, do the searches, etc?
If I'm on (somewhat) the right track I've enought to satisfy me. If I'm
way, way off, I'd like to know. Thanks.
–jp–seattle–
John,
Yup…you're on the right track now. Yes, presuming is a disk with
a filesytem (rather than pure data/indexes laid out in specific spots) yes,
a program that worked like DIR would be able to tell you what files were on
the disk.
Yes, you could write your own programs to read the indexes/data and
do something useful with them.
Don
Thanks again.
–jp–seattle–
Have you seen the CD Rom package Tiger Software sells? It comes with the
NEC CDR-36 CD drive, which I assume is SCSI since you can get the package
for the Mac. Also comes with 16 CD's including NEC's Clip Art 3-D which has
2500 3-D Color images. Not a bad bundle price for $899. Of course, you
probably wouldn't be able to use the other CD's unless you used it on the
Bridgeboard or Amax. They also have available Image Gallery (2800 designs
and illustrations in TIFF and EPS formats), and Image Folio (4000 Color
Photos in TIFF format). Looks like some nice stuff if you are doing
commercial graphic arts design.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
John, I thought all those NEC CDs each were 'locked' and you received a
portion of each disk in the 'unlocked' format. THEN when you wanted more
images, you call an 800 number give them your credit card number and the ID
number your issued with the disk, and then you tell them which sections you
desired access to, and then they give you the 'unlock' codes that have to
be entered into a software program that initiates the release of those
sections to you. So does Tiger Software also provide the necessary program
that will release the disk's sections as you purchase them or are you
getting a completely 'unlocked disk'?
chris
ACCU-TYPE & GRAPHICS
Chris, as far as I know the NEC disks are not "Locked". I asked the guy
there at Tiger software about the file and picture format. He stated they
were a standard ISO-9660 file format and the pictures were TIFF. Didn't say
anything about the disk being locked, and Tiger doesn't sell any software
to unlock a NEC disk. Now the only one I was interested in was "Image
Folio", so maybe one of the others is that way, but I don't think so. I've
been checking around on some of the prices and Tiger is a little pricey.
Their printed price is $399, they will sell it to me for $349, but I found
it at another company for $250.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
John–
Is this is a better deal than the Xetec drive? What do you use for a
software driver, and what cards is it compatible with?
Jonathan
– via Whap!
It is a full size box. You can also fit in in the Tandy CDR-1000 internal
CD-ROM drive for $399. True… for $800, you can have a great CD-ROM
workhorse. The TL series are the last of the Tandy 286's to have "normal"
slots. The 2500 series has three, but they are sideways. Put in a
hardcard, and you've blown a slot. Any other questions? BTW, I work at
the Bridgewater, NJ Computer Center. Highest volume in the Hartford, Conn.
Radio Shack district. I actually enjoy the job. If you have any other
questions, feel free to ask.
ERIC