Re: CDROM Burners

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

David Empson wrote:

>
>
> Only if you were burning a small amount of data.  A partitioned CD-ROM
> would become unwieldy on a IIe if you had more than about two partitions
> (maybe four, if the machine doesn't have a hard drive).  You wouldn't be
> able to access many more than that with an original Apple SCSI card, and
> you would run out of unit numbers if you went much higher with an Apple
> High-Speed SCSI card.  The RamFast might allow manual switching between
> enabled partitions, but it would be very clumsy to use.

Yes, that's why I said that with a full CD It'd be a lot of partitions.
However
Accessing another format of CD with a IIe isn't feasible, While accessing
HFS
formatted disks are great for storage on a IIgs, they aren't bootable and
the only
thing you can run directly off them are GSOS applications.
Actually I'm using HFS CDs to store our user groups IIgs PD library.
Maybe, when I next update it I'll consider making a bootable ProDOS
partition with System 6.0.1 part of it

> The preferred solution for dealing with a lot of data for a IIe would be
> to burn the CD in ISO-9660 format, and use specially written software
> which handles the ISO file system itself.  I believe Apple had a package
> which supported this, though I never saw it.  In any case, I expect that
> ISO is simple enough that it wouldn't be hard to write custom code to
> handle it.

I haven't seen it either. However programs programs that are unfindable or
unwritten are't too usefull, at least to me.


> I expect that mixing ISO and ProDOS could be achieved using the same
> technique as a Mac hybrid ISO/HFS session.  This would allow the Apple
> IIe to see a normal 32MB ProDOS partition, and special software on the
> CD would provide access to all the data buried in the ISO part.  I don't
> know of any software on the Mac which would be able to burn this
> combination.

Same problem here, my Mac software won't do it.

> Using a multi-session CD on an Apple II is unlikely to be useful, given
> the age of the CD-ROM drives which are typically used with the II
> family.  Old CD-ROM drives can only see the first session, so later ones
> would be ignored.

A while back I was handing out a number of multi-session CDs to people
to see if anyone had a drive on a IIgs that would see more than one session.

No luck unfortunately


> On the Mac, you can do a multi-session CD with a single HFS partition in
> each session.  This appears on the desktop as a separate logical volume
> for each session.  Each session is a completely self-contains HFS
> volume.
>
> An ISO disk is different: if multiple sessions are written, the computer
> only mounts the last one.  Data in earlier sessions can be referenced
> from the directory of later ones.

Again for the IIe we're back to the lack of software problem.


> A ProDOS multi-partition CD is actually a single session, which contains
> a partition table just like a hard drive.  These partitions can be
> ProDOS and/or HFS, and the IIgs will happily mount all of them.  The
> Mac's standard CD-ROM driver ignores all the ProDOS partitions, only
> seeing the HFS ones (possibly only the first HFS partition).

Actually my Mac will see the first ProDOS partition in a single session
ProDOS
multi-partition CD with the stock Apple CD reader. With the CD burner with
it�s
custom driver all the ProDOS partitions mount. I'm using a 7600 with OS 9.
I should mention that it works this way for the ones I�ve burned myself.
With the
Golden Orchard my Mac doesn�t see any ProDOS partition.


> An example of this is the System 6 Golden Master CD.  It has a single
> session, and within that session has six ProDOS partitions, followed by
> an HFS partition.
>