#CDROMs and the Amiga
5 messages in this thread
I have an Amiga 3000 with the Chinon CDA-431 and CDROM-FS. Is it possible
to read data from CDROMs designed for IBM PC's without any additional
software? Do I need a special driver to use the Chinon with my PS/2 mod 80
SCSI disk controller at work, or is it sufficient to have the MSCDEX? And
finally, is there is list of CDTV CDROMs that will work on the Amiga
(perhaps with a few ASSIGNS)? I have had limited success with World Vista
and USA Vista (the text pages don't display correctly). Thanks for any
information. Steve
There is 1 Reply.
Steve:
I have a NEC CDROM drive which I share betwen my Amiga 3000 and a PC so
it's possible to share. You shouldn't have any problem reading data from
IBM CDROM's, I do it all the time. You are not going to be able to run any
programs obviously but you can certainly access the data.
You will almost certainly need a driver to access the CDROM drive on the PC
side, this is in addition to MSCDEX. I would contact your controller
manufacturer and if that doesn't help try the drive manufacturer.
The only CDTV disc I have tried was the American Heritige dictionary and
could not get it to work. My understanding is that the problem with a lot
of CDTV discs is not that they won't run on an Amiga but that they have
problems with anything other than a stock 68000 machine. The 3000 with a
25mhz 68030 breaks many CDTV titles. Very poor programming by many CDTV
developers IMHO, but I guess they only actually tested it on a CDTV unit. I
think I remember seeing a text file uploaded to one of the Amiga forums
that listed the Amiga compatibile CDTV titles, so you might want to check
there.
BTW: Even though the American Heritage disc won't run on the 3000, it can
still be a useful disc, it contains over 4000 IFF images which you can
access.
Regards,
-=Martin=-
– via Whap!
Thanks for the reply, Martin. One of the Genelogy publication that I
subscribe to had a CDROM that contains information for almost 1 million
ansestors that were submitted by subscribers. Now that I know that I can
at least read the data I will go ahead and order it. I know that I can't
execute programs on the IBM CDROM's. Has anyone thought about using
something like AmigaVision or the Director to simulate some of the CDTV
actions so we can have easy access to all of that data? The IBM that I
have access to has a standard SCSI interface. I know that CDROMs for the
IBM's usually have a special interface, but since I would be using the
standard SCSI disk controller do I still need a special driver? Steve
I've recently completed an article that will appear in AmigaWorld about
CD-ROMs designed for the Mac and PC that contain data that is useful on the
Amiga – clip art, images, text files, etc. I avoided describing which CDTV
titles will work on an Amiga. There are differences between an Amiga and a
CDTV, as you discovered. As for using the Chinon on your PC, yes, you will
need a SCSI card, low-level SCSI driver (which might be in ROM on the card)
a CD-ROM driver on top of that (which is specific to the Chinon) and then
the MSCDEX on top of that.
Thanks for the reply, John. My PS2 already has the SCSI controller card. I
was hoping that I didn't need a special driver for the CDROM drive. I had
heard the the Time Table series will run on the Amiga. I hope that it is
true since that information would be very interesting to me. Steve