Re: HOWTO->obtain CDROM functionality for a IIe

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca>]

Courtney Thomas wrote:

> Greetings !
>
> What is required for ............
>
>     1-burning CDROM images that are accessible by a IIe

I can make them on my Mac with my CD burner. Since ProDOS has a
limit of 32mb, if you had more than 32mb of data then you'd have to make
a single burn partitioned CD.

>     2-hardware that will access  CDROMs so burned, I assume, hopefully
> wrongly, Apple proprietary only

Depends. If you're talking Rev C SCSI card then there's only a couple of
old
Apple CD players that work with it. The Apple Hi-Speed SCSI card should
support a larger variety of CD readers. The Ramfast SCSI card supports a
wide
variety  of CD readers including some currant production ones, though the
40
and 50x drives are a vast overkill on a IIe. On my IIe I use a Ramfast with
a
NEC 4x largely because this particular NEC has controls on the bezel for
playing music CDs.

>     3-software that will enable 1 & 2

ProDOS will map the CDs partitions to any available slot so you'd access
them the way you would any hard drive or floppy disk.. In other words no
special software needed.

>     4-where can 2 & 3 be obtained and what are reasonable prices

The SCSI card is the hard part as they are out of production and only
available
second hand. Probably ebay is your most likely source. Once you have the
card
CD drives are easy to find

> I am hoping that it might be possible to run programs from the CDROM. Is
> this incorrect ?

Yes, you can run any ProDOS program from a CD though you'd be better off
puting it on a hard drive for faster access times. If you stop using a CD
drive
for more than a few seconds the CD drive spins down and you have to wait
while it gets up to speed

> If so, is a SCSI harddrive the only alternative ?

You might check out ///Shh systeme in Germany. They sell controllers for
ide drives. I don't know what the situation is for CD drives.
http://www.wbwip.com/shh

> Again, if so, are proprietary Apple harddrives still made and if not are
> there alternatives ?

Hard drives are a totally different situation from CD drives. Generally
most older
hard drives will work fine with most SCSI cards. Most people with a IIe
choose
an older drive in the 40 to 120mb range. Generally speaking because of
ProDOS
limitations drives over 300mb aren't the most practical. Especially if
there's a CD
reader in your SCSI chain.

    Wayne