Re: CDROM Burners

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas Enoreth) wrote:

>One thing that I think is being overlooked is the amount of processor
>'power' used to burn a CD. Perhaps I am wrong, but I am under the
>impression you need a fairly ok processor speed. I know that even with
>tons of memory and everything configured right, the CDR burned quite a few
>coasters on my LCIII (25Mhz 030), and everything was setup
>perfectly...there were a few minor problems once in a while on the Centris
>(33Mhz 040), and now on the 7100 (80Mhz PPC601) everything seems to work
>fine all the time. But you guys want someone to write software for a 6502
>that will burn CDRs? Or even a 65816...

Burning audio CDs or single and multisession CD-ROMs takes
a lot of processor speed.  That's because of timing issues.
The computer has to dump the hard drive's image onto the
CD-ROM at one time and thus pace itself and that's where the
computer is basically frozen doing the burn.

BUT...DirectCD is different.  In DirectCD, data is written in
PACKETS and so requires no more CPU power than writing to
a hard drive or floppy drive.  Packets of data are saved to
blocks on a CD-RW disk and the directory is updated, just
like a hard disk.  An Apple IIGS or even an Apple IIe would
be able to handle DirectCD easily.  In DirectCD, you don't so
much as burn a CD in sessions as write files to it in blocks.