DesertPanther wrote on 2024-06-15, 22:48:

If anyone is looking to buy the IDE Emu from Fixel/Felix, then I have terrible news for you: https://cohost.org/Ackart/post/6055 […]
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If anyone is looking to buy the IDE Emu from Fixel/Felix, then I have terrible news for you:
https://cohost.org/Ackart/post/6055773-the-chronicles-of-an

In short, Felix kept lying to those who purchased/pre-ordered products from his site. The orders never got shipped and he made a lot of excuses to buy himself time. Eventually, many of the customers asked for refunds.

I am surprised that not too many people are talking about this, the IDE Emu is still available for "purchase" on his site and more people could fall for his scam!

Oh hi!

I recognize your handle from the trash fire Discord. I was contemplating whether it's worthwhile bringing up that the Fixel product is looking less and less likely as a contender, but yeah. The dude seems to be allergic to admitting that he's having production our throughput issues, he's been blaming 3rd party logistics for close to a year now.

I've tried a few of the available CD emulators, none of them are ideal and all have tradeoffs.

The MAC SD works with redbook out of the box and has hardware eject functionality, making it great for DOS. Not so great for Windows era as it fails basic CD Check. It's the one I'm using for my SS7.

ZuluIDE has alot of potential, passes some CD checks but not others, I'm not sure if it's the images I've been using or the hardware, but I'm just too lazy to dig up my old disks and cd rom drives. One of the devs posted a video of an Add on board with a rotary encoder/eject buttons/LCD display, but no official support for CD audio or hardware eject quite yet.

ZuluIDE rotary encoder in action: https://www.zuluide.com/ZuluIDE-Control-UI-demo-12MB.mp4

The MAC SD works with redbook out of the box and has hardware eject functionality, making it great for DOS. Not so great for Windows era as it fails basic CD Check. It's the one I'm using for my SS7.

I don't know which CD check you're referring to. MacSD does work as a CD drive with Redbook audio, in both DOS and Windows. The hardware eject works in Windows as well.

YMK wrote on 2024-06-17, 02:29:

The MAC SD works with redbook out of the box and has hardware eject functionality, making it great for DOS. Not so great for Windows era as it fails basic CD Check. It's the one I'm using for my SS7.

I don't know which CD check you're referring to. MacSD does work as a CD drive with Redbook audio, in both DOS and Windows. The hardware eject works in Windows as well.

CD check in later windows titles, I wouldn't call it DRM but it seems to be more difficult to emulate. It fails games that that Daemon Tools is reliable with and ZuluIDE is spotty with (ex. include Die By the Sword, Dark Earth, Turok 2) Daemon Tools is 'good' enough for Windows era games but with a 450mhz processor I'd avoid the processing overhead of software emulation if given the option. Plus, games like Turok 2 have CD audio and my sound card is ISA, so I don't have the option of using WDM drivers.

Gennadios wrote on 2024-06-17, 02:42:

YMK wrote on 2024-06-17, 02:29:

The MAC SD works with redbook out of the box and has hardware eject functionality, making it great for DOS. Not so great for Windows era as it fails basic CD Check. It's the one I'm using for my SS7.

I don't know which CD check you're referring to. MacSD does work as a CD drive with Redbook audio, in both DOS and Windows. The hardware eject works in Windows as well.

CD check in later windows titles, I wouldn't call it DRM but it seems to be more difficult to emulate. It fails games that that Daemon Tools is reliable with and ZuluIDE is spotty with (ex. include Die By the Sword, Dark Earth, Turok 2) Daemon Tools is 'good' enough for Windows era games but with a 450mhz processor I'd avoid the processing overhead of software emulation if given the option. Plus, games like Turok 2 have CD audio and my sound card is ISA, so I don't have the option of using WDM drivers.

This is why clonecd disk image support would be really nice , as it would mimic the copy protection , but it would amount to a massive effort of work so i get why it wont probably ever be supported.

This is why clonecd disk image support would be really nice , as it would mimic the copy protection , but it would amount to a massive amount of work so i get why it wont probably ever be supported.

Does this DRM rely on bad sectors?

If it handled returning read errors for bad sectors (which is what most early CD copy protections relied upon), it would depend if/how your CD image included that information - a basic MODE1/2048 .iso isn't going to have that information, for example. But "bad" sectors in a MODE1/2352 or MODE2 image can be indicated with missing headers, bad crcs, etc. And the copy protection software is surprising lenient - as long as the drive returns something other than "everything's OK!" when reading those sectors, it will pass. I guess that's because drives back then didn't really have "standard" behavior when it came to error handling.

If it handled returning read errors for bad sectors (which is what most early CD copy protections relied upon), it would depend if/how your CD image included that information - a basic MODE1/2048 .iso isn't going to have that information, for example. But "bad" sectors in a MODE1/2352 or MODE2 image can be indicated with missing headers, bad crcs, etc. And the copy protection software is surprising lenient - as long as the drive returns something other than "everything's OK!" when reading those sectors, it will pass. I guess that's because drives back then didn't really have "standard" behavior when it came to error handling.

Having a drive emulator compute CRCs isn't great for performance. Something like an alternate sync pattern to indicate bad sectors would be much easier to work with.

YMK wrote on 2024-06-17, 03:54:

Having a drive emulator compute CRCs isn't great for performance. Something like an alternate sync pattern to indicate bad sectors would be much easier to work with.

The original drives all did it and they were probably using hardware that had less computing power. It's only 2048 bytes per sector... and did I mention you can typically get away with only doing it for READ CD (SCSI 0xBE) commands...

(The sync pattern is usually missing/zeroed too, since the original sectors can't be read when the discs are dumped.)

DesertPanther wrote on 2024-06-15, 22:48:

If anyone is looking to buy the IDE Emu from Fixel/Felix, then I have terrible news for you:
https://cohost.org/Ackart/post/6055773-the-chronicles-of-an

In short, Felix kept lying to those who purchased/pre-ordered products from his site. The orders never got shipped and he made a lot of excuses to buy himself time.

Sad to hear. This is why I have such a HUGE respect for Polpo and his PicoGUS PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS). Talk is cheap (nudging Polpo to try Pico Re: PiGUS: Gravis Ultrasound emulator on an ISA card with Raspberry Pi), designing and debugging hardware is fast and enjoyable (8 days to recreate vintage module https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module), but Logistics?!?! Logistics scare me. And Im not even talking shipping, but the easy stuff like writing documentation or updating mailing list, things I know I would screw big time by procrastinating all the way to the moon.

YMK wrote on 2024-06-17, 03:19:

This is why clonecd disk image support would be really nice , as it would mimic the copy protection , but it would amount to a massive amount of work so i get why it wont probably ever be supported.

Does this DRM rely on bad sectors?

Seems to be the case

There's a post on reddit from ajshell1 that goes in more detail about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/comments … g_cddvd_images/

Gennadios wrote on 2024-06-16, 23:37:

I recognize your handle from the trash fire Discord. I was contemplating whether it's worthwhile bringing up that the Fixel product is looking less and less likely as a contender, but yeah. The dude seems to be allergic to admitting that he's having production our throughput issues, he's been blaming 3rd party logistics for close to a year now.

I am disgusted that Felix still allows purchases to happen on his site despite his complete lack of ability to fulfil them!

Gennadios wrote on 2024-06-16, 23:37:

ZuluIDE has alot of potential, passes some CD checks but not others, I'm not sure if it's the images I've been using or the hardware, but I'm just too lazy to dig up my old disks and cd rom drives. One of the devs posted a video of an Add on board with a rotary encoder/eject buttons/LCD display, but no official support for CD audio or hardware eject quite yet.

ZuluIDE rotary encoder in action: https://www.zuluide.com/ZuluIDE-Control-UI-demo-12MB.mp4

I recently got my hands on a ZuluIDE and I agree that it clearly has some work that needs to be done to make it primetime. At present, in the system I tried it in (a Pentium III-866 using an AMI BIOS) it causes large delays during the POST process as it enumerates itself — the POST process takes almost 4x as long with it connected as it does with it disconnected. When I fed it an ISO image to make it behave like it had a disc in the drive, it continued to drag down the responsiveness of the system, and overrode the boot order with itself even though the boot order specified floppy first, HDD second, and the ZuluIDE wasn't selected at all.

I am all for testing things, and the devs have stated that the device is in an open beta state, but this feels more like an alpha than anything else at the moment. Documentation is also very minimal.

The major saving grace is that the devs appear to be pretty active (the last firmware update was July 2), but there's a major, major hump to overcome with respect to the documentation.

@mbalmer already knows this, but since the July 2nd ZuluIDE release, there have been five further firmware updates, as we identify and squash remaining bugs, and I'm pretty comfortable with where we're at now.

https://github.com/ZuluIDE/ZuluIDE-firmware/r … tag/v2024.07.30
https://github.com/ZuluIDE/ZuluIDE-firmware/r … tag/v2024.08.02
https://github.com/ZuluIDE/ZuluIDE-firmware/r … tag/V2024.08.15
https://github.com/ZuluIDE/ZuluIDE-firmware/r … tag/v2024.08.20
https://github.com/ZuluIDE/ZuluIDE-firmware/r … tag/v2024.08.22

For anyone who wants to try one out, you can do so risk-free at https://shop.rabbitholecomputing.com/products … -rp2040-compact. If you find it doesn't meet your needs, just send it back to us for a full refund, less the original shipping cost.

I recently got my hands on a ZuluIDE and I agree that it clearly has some work that needs to be done to make it primetime. At present, in the system I tried it in (a Pentium III-866 using an AMI BIOS) it causes large delays during the POST process as it enumerates itself — the POST process takes almost 4x as long with it connected as it does with it disconnected. When I fed it an ISO image to make it behave like it had a disc in the drive, it continued to drag down the responsiveness of the system, and overrode the boot order with itself even though the boot order specified floppy first, HDD second, and the ZuluIDE wasn't selected at all.

I am all for testing things, and the devs have stated that the device is in an open beta state, but this feels more like an alpha than anything else at the moment. Documentation is also very minimal.

The major saving grace is that the devs appear to be pretty active (the last firmware update was July 2), but there's a major, major hump to overcome with respect to the documentation.

This was about two months ago, and in the last two months, holy smokes, has this thing gotten better. Not only have there been a bunch of firmware revisions that have directly addressed many of the problems I was having with being able to boot from the device and get it to enumerate in DOS and elsewhere, the devs have been amazingly responsive and communicative.

The problem I had in the quote above was ultimately resolved with a firmware update that was pushed shortly after I received the device, and other issues that cropped up along the way have only improved things. To make it clear, here were the things I was having difficulty with along the way:

• Device enumeration at POST taking way too long and often failing
• Device not visible in DOS; OAKCDROM.SYS and MSCDEX can't see the device
• Unable to boot from the device when it's detected
• Device stubbornly reloads the same image after an eject instead of the next in the list

ALL of these items eventually got fixed thanks to very, very solid communication from the devs, and this device is far more polished now than it was two months ago. I'm really glad that I was able to get in touch with the devs on this and get these things fixed. It's worked out far better than I ever thought from the get-go.

Hi,
At current state, is it possible to install Windows 95 / 98 / XP from this device?

is there a version of zuluide that supports CDDA ?

keropi wrote on 2024-09-14, 13:19:

is there a version of zuluide that supports CDDA ?

It's in the works! 😀
https://github.com/ZuluIDE/ZuluIDE-firmware/issues/109

I'm using FakeCD, but there is also SHSUCDX and SHSUCDHD that support .iso files in DOS. Hope, this helps. Will test tomorrow, if CDDA works and will tell, if so...

Mr_Magoo wrote on 2024-09-15, 21:07:

I'm using FakeCD, but there is also SHSUCDX and SHSUCDHD that support .iso files in DOS. Hope, this helps. Will test tomorrow, if CDDA works and will tell, if so...

I believe that doesn't support CDDAs. I thought Windows 98 with WDM drivers was the earliest I could get a CD emulator working with audio tracks. The overhead of constant reading to continue the stream and a TSR that decodes the audio and pipes it to a sound card could affect games that were just expecting the CD drive to handle the playback. That's why it's the dream goal for a hardware optical drive emulator. There's many options to mimic the file side which mainly differ on is the different copy protections are properly handled. But with a cracked executable, that problem also goes away. But on old systems the CD drive would output an analog and later drives a TOSLink stream of the CD audio that the sound card would just stream back out, potentially mixing other audio the card is generating for the game.

Scorpio, you're right. I just tested it out, cause I was curious anyway... Unfortunately no CDDA... Don't give up! There is a solution for sure! Will follow this topic anyway - it's an interesting question!