#Amiga & CD Rom???
4 messages in this thread
You tell me Bill! You are more of the expert ! I received another reply on
this thread saying that GVP IVS and Supra all claim to be working on
interfaces. Even with a hardware interface it is still neccessary to redo
the search engine software for each product as each one is proprietary. No
standard as yet. It is worthy of note that all the windows search engines
suffer mightily from the 640 k dos limitation and the slow software bitmap
graphics. An amiga implementation of same would be much faster. PS say hi
to John Severs for me he is an old buddy from his SOS computers days. Russ
I haven't been at Aegis in 18 months, but if I see John, I'll say hi. As
to CD-ROM, the two major formats of CD-ROM are High Sierra and ISO 9660
(very similar). These are supported on the Macintosh and PC (and other
systems). Now I've seen Amiga software that lets you treat a MS-DOS format
disk as a normal Amiga disk. I.E. sort of like Dos2Dos, but stuff that
actually runs in background and/or replaces the standard file system for
that drive. The same thing should be possible for CD-ROM. The physical
connection could be SCSI. Typical CD-ROM titles might have images in TIFF
format so reading them isn't a problem. A title like Groliers Ency. might
also need a retrieval engine. Alot of CD-ROM stuff is just files (clip art
etc..). So it could be quite usefull to read IBM/Mac CD's. The standard
format situation is really unique (when compared to floppies) and is worth
supporting.
Would it be possible to create a generic search engine or would you have to
reinvent the wheel on every title? Is there some way to snoop around on a
CDROM once you get it SCSIed so that you could see how the indexes and file
storage is done, ie some existing tools? Thanks for the informative reply.
It all depeneds on what's out there (on the CD-ROM). Some files would be
easy to deal with. It's certianlly possible to write a retrieval engine
for data on a CD-ROM if you know the file format. The Disc formats are
generally standardized, so that's not a problem.