I'll look into these (I may need to find such CUE/BIN dumps though for testing). I've seen similar issues before but they should have been sorted. For the audio issue I'm probably just missing a bit flag on an audio command I wasn't expecting or something 😊

Edit: I can reproduce the issue, though it'll be a few days to get you a fix as my debug cable broke during reproduction of the issue!

electric_monk wrote on 2021-04-07, 03:00:

I'll look into these (I may need to find such CUE/BIN dumps though for testing). I've seen similar issues before but they should have been sorted. For the audio issue I'm probably just missing a bit flag on an audio command I wasn't expecting or something 😊

Edit: I can reproduce the issue, though it'll be a few days to get you a fix as my debug cable broke during reproduction of the issue!

No worries, thanks for the update!

I just received an IDE CD/DVD drive Simulator.

So far it works great.

I'm still learning how to interact with it, the most trouble I had was figuring out the right device driver in Windows for setting up a local COM virtual port to communiciate with it. It took some time, but was successful. I have the PuTTY command window open now and have played around with the command set.

I'm not quite sure how scripting works.. or whether its of use in my use case, but it is interesting.

I am interested in capturing the IDE bus commands from a DVD Burner situation in a very old DVD recorder and saving a burn session to a file on a USB drive or the SD flash card.

To do that I think I need to collect data and submit that to the developer, so future versions of the firmware will support the IDE bus commands and responses a DVD burner would make or expect.

Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!

electric_monk wrote on 2021-04-06, 02:37:

darry wrote on 2021-04-06, 02:16:

Wow, thanks for the very fast response ! I actually pm-ed you regarding the image group idea because I believe that might feasible at low cost and wanted to be sure you saw that . What are your thoughts on this idea ?

Apparently I can't reply here yet anyway, I must have posted too little 😊 I think there might be something possible there, there's no exposed GPIO on the board itself but I could add a mode for one of the USB ports perhaps, I could maybe get three pushbuttons on one of the USB ports if I fiddle around with detecting the pins that are normally dedicated to USB.

I am very interested in this ! If you do end up adding some buttons and a display, a case with a 3.5 mounting bracket would be next. I am sure I will end up being a customer soon. Please keep it up!

Just wanted to mention you can simulate the Tattie ATAPI Simulator “no stop” issue pretty easily with the Windows CD Player in Windows 98. Pressing stop or pause has no effect. Hope that helps!

electric_monk wrote on 2020-12-15, 02:08:

...

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc
according to this review 🙁
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps

visualer wrote on 2021-06-29, 07:48:

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc according to this review :( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps […]
Show full quote

electric_monk wrote on 2020-12-15, 02:08:

...

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc
according to this review 🙁
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps

Except it does work. I don't know what this guy got wrong, but I have one in my 440BX machine and it works just fine in both DOS and Windows. I installed Windows 98 SE from an ISO using it.

There are some strange hiccups (like the disc dismount or audio not stopping issues), but on the whole it works.

Yeah, I'm still working on PC support - basically, the older your PC (ISA, 386) the harder it has been to make it work, ironically. It comes down to the IDE spec having its historical roots in the PC ISA bus, the closer to the 'original' you get the hairier things get (and a lot of ISA I/O cards even note in their chipset's datasheets that they specifically don't meet what's listed in the IDE standard for signal timing, etc. too, for example). Machines like arcade and non-PC computers (and even PCs with a southbridge, which abstracts out the IDE port completely from what it looked like on an old ISA card) work fine already as they're much "cleaner".

There's an update on http://issues.tattiebogle.net/view.php?id=9 which is nearly working. In that it seems to be perfect for some people (works on 386s and 486s with ISA cards, runs all the games they've thrown at it, etc.), and still slightly off for others, so I'm working on that last hurdle now. I think it's just some subtle timing issue.

electric_monk wrote on 2021-06-29, 20:26:

Yeah, I'm still working on PC support - basically, the older your PC (ISA, 386) the harder it has been to make it work, ironically. It comes down to the IDE spec having its historical roots in the PC ISA bus, the closer to the 'original' you get the hairier things get (and a lot of ISA I/O cards even note in their chipset's datasheets that they specifically don't meet what's listed in the IDE standard for signal timing, etc. too, for example). Machines like arcade and non-PC computers (and even PCs with a southbridge, which abstracts out the IDE port completely from what it looked like on an old ISA card) work fine already as they're much "cleaner".

There's an update on http://issues.tattiebogle.net/view.php?id=9 which is nearly working. In that it seems to be perfect for some people (works on 386s and 486s with ISA cards, runs all the games they've thrown at it, etc.), and still slightly off for others, so I'm working on that last hurdle now. I think it's just some subtle timing issue.

nice work !

visualer wrote on 2021-06-29, 07:48:

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc according to this review :( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps […]
Show full quote

electric_monk wrote on 2020-12-15, 02:08:

...

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc
according to this review 🙁
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps

I already mentioned the MacSD SCSI CD-Rom Emulator as a potential alternative a few pages before. According to a youtube review of this product, Win9x will soon be supported as well, so I hope it's only a matter of time until DOS support will be added to it.
https://youtu.be/zwz6qMC2ZE4?t=2942
At $119 it's also somewhat competitively priced, considering the functions that it provides.
https://www.tindie.com/products/ymkdevices/macsd/

visualer wrote on 2021-06-29, 07:48:

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc according to this review :( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps […]
Show full quote

electric_monk wrote on 2020-12-15, 02:08:

...

Looks like it doesn't work in retro pc
according to this review 🙁
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWBXxO2YHps

The CRC errors that he was getting on his second and subsequent read attempts is actually identical to the behavior that I've seen from emulated cd drives running in certain configurations of PCEM. The solution in that instance was to remove SMARTDRV from the autoexec.bat.

electric_monk wrote on 2020-12-15, 02:08:

The DOS utility isn't quite ready yet either, but I'm hoping all of it will come together soon for a new release with a bunch of […]
Show full quote

The DOS utility isn't quite ready yet either, but I'm hoping all of it will come together soon for a new release with a bunch of new features.

Here's a silly little screenshot of it in an earlier incarnation I shared before, just testing the UI side:
Screen Shot 2020-09-03 at 11.18.57PM.png
It actually mostly works now, but since MSCDEX.EXE and its accompanying drivers don't have the facility to pass through SCSI commands directly, I had to use ASPI. This also turned out to be a pain - ATAPIMGR.SYS (from Panasonic) rejects vendor-specific SCSI commands. ASPI.SYS (Oak Technologies) seems to be fine, but it's still an irritation. In addition to this people might not want random extra drivers loaded (even though there's ways to load/unload them on demand), so I may also make a mode where it just pokes the IDE registers directly (which sadly obviously means it won't work for exotic IDE ports that actually need a driver).

I did consider making a TSR version to switch in-app from DOS but last time I made a TSR I was 15 and it was a project with my dad, and that also wouldn't work with 32-bit DOS extender-based games, I believe. I do intend to make a Windows version just because ASPI is already there, too.

Bluetooth is an interesting idea, I could possibly get a Bluetooth stack working via a USB Bluetooth dongle 😉 I played around with adding support for an ethernet dongle in the past just for a laugh (you'd be able to upload/download ISOs as well as switch them remotely), but that was still limited by the fact you needed the ethernet cable flopping around.

Once you have the bugs worked out fully for the control menu i am def picking one of these up for my 486 - i dont find much use for anything older as there arent that many dos cd-rom games that a 486 is too fast for, i am happy to keep a copy of wing commander around if its too hard to get working on a 386, and not sure of any CD games that would require a 286 or 8088 anyway? I love these ODE's on my game consoles - this is just great!

I'm rather puzzled really. The past few years we've seen projects that have found a way to emulate pretty much everything under the sun, new Sound Blaster compatible sound cards and a host of other things yet one of the few hardware elements that have actual physical wear a tear and are bound to die, namely the CD drives, are yet to have some solution? It's puzzling.

Seeing FPGA and how powerful it is, would there not be a way to incorporate a Mister as a CD drive, using a small display at the front where the tray would be to swap between CD images of all kinds (similar to the floppy GoTek drives)? Because honestly, besides the fact that having 30 CD wallets with all my games is a drag and they get damaged by use, it's becoming harder and harder to find a low speed CD drive that doesn't sound like a freaking JET ENGINE when it spins up. A half decent CD quad speed easily costs €60+ without shipping and you still have no clue how long the laser will still last.

It's especially odd considering consoles such as the Playstation already received projects that replace the CD drive yet the PC doesn't ... weird.

Agreed, this is something quite surprising to me as well. If the price wasn't too steep, I'd buy a couple in an instant. Of course it would need to support analog audio/redbook tracks.
I still have enough proper drives for the time being but at some point a proper virtual CD drive will become critical, just like I'm really happy to still have both physical floppy drives and GoTeks.

red_avatar wrote on 2021-09-14, 10:24:

it's becoming harder and harder to find a low speed CD drive that doesn't sound like a freaking JET ENGINE when it spins up.

There are ways to slow down fast CD/DVD drives to 4x speed, which makes them almost completely silent. For pure DOS you can use CDBeQuiet! by fellow Vogons user @Locutus. For Win9x there is Nero Drive Speed which can do something similar.

But I do agree that something akin to the GoTek floppy emulator would be great. Physical discs can get scratched or damaged by heat and sunlight, so having something that can work off images would be better.

They already exist.... but most of them are in USB format. In fact they've existed for a good 15 years or more, these days they're down in the size of a thumb drive and work almost identical to a Gotek or similar.

I've not seen any native IDE/SCSI connected devices.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-09-14, 10:36:

red_avatar wrote on 2021-09-14, 10:24:

it's becoming harder and harder to find a low speed CD drive that doesn't sound like a freaking JET ENGINE when it spins up.

There are ways to slow down fast CD/DVD drives to 4x speed, which makes them almost completely silent. For pure DOS you can use CDBeQuiet! by fellow Vogons user @Locutus. For Win9x there is Nero Drive Speed which can do something similar.

But I do agree that something akin to the GoTek floppy emulator would be great. Physical discs can get scratched or damaged by heat and sunlight, so having something that can work off images would be better.

Yeah I know that software - I've used it in Windows and I guess I could try it in DOS but I'm not a big fan of solutions such as these.

Even then, later drives are often of shoddy quality. The first half of the 90's had solid quality hardware but I have a big stack of ones of the second half of the 90's that all have flaws - trays that get sticky, they start to vibrate, the black foam crumbles away, etc. One of the few later drives I still use, is my trusty Pioneer DVD drive from 1999 - it's quiet, reliable and has no tray to open (it's slot loaded) but dang, is it expensive to find second hand ...

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-09-14, 10:37:

They already exist.... but most of them are in USB format. In fact they've existed for a good 15 years or more, these days they're down in the size of a thumb drive and work almost identical to a Gotek or similar.

I've not seen any native IDE/SCSI connected devices.

Oh yeah I know of the USB ones but even those aren't perfect - I believe they don't support audio book? A lot of DOS games have CD audio so that's a no-go.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-09-14, 10:36:

There are ways to slow down fast CD/DVD drives to 4x speed, which makes them almost completely silent. For pure DOS you can use CDBeQuiet! by fellow Vogons user @Locutus. For Win9x there is Nero Drive Speed which can do something similar.

On my 486 I use teac_cdi.sys that has a /S parameter to restrict speed, works well! My previous 4x CD drive died and had to switch it to a 52x that I restrict to /S:4.

red_avatar wrote on 2021-09-14, 10:24:

I'm rather puzzled really. The past few years we've seen projects that have found a way to emulate pretty much everything under the sun, new Sound Blaster compatible sound cards and a host of other things yet one of the few hardware elements that have actual physical wear a tear and are bound to die, namely the CD drives, are yet to have some solution? It's puzzling.

I guess it is because most CD/DVD software belongs to a later era, where pure software emulation (virtual drive, CD/DVD images) is adequate in most cases.