Re: Philips PCA80SC CD drive and IIGS

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

gospodin@clubi.ie (Vincent Quinn) wrote:

>I've just got hold of a pair of Philips PCA80SC CD drives (nominally
>eight-speed). On the front are hardware controls (back-play/pause-forward)
>for playing audio CDs directly instead of through software. So I thought
>I'd try one on on the GS (Apple high speed SCSI card, standard System 6.0.1
>CD drivers). Worked perfectly, both for data and audio CDs (using the
>hardware controls - I should have tried playing audio from software, but I
>was so pleased I forgot all about it).

That's ok.  The CD Remote desk accessoryl is hardwired to work
only with the Apple CD100 and Apple CDSC drives.  For all
other drives, you need to use the Media Control desk accessory.
However, if you have hardware controls, it is even better to
use them.  ;-)

>Although these are brand new drives, I've no documentation with them - and
>anyway, it wouldn't answer these  :-)
>1) are there any negatives to using the hardware audio playback on a GS
>(like, could it cause problems with data on the SCSI bus)? The audio CD
>isn't mounted on the GS desktop

No, there is no problem at all.  Audio CDs are always invisible
on the Finder desktop.  There is also no negative effect in
using hardware audio playback.

>2) is using an eight-speed drive likely to cause any problem - is it too
>fast for the GS?

No problem.  The faster the better.  There has been talk that
above 6x would gain no additional speed on the IIGS because
of the Apple Bus transfer limit of 1MB/sec.  However, one must
remember that the faster speed the CD-ROM, ACCESS TIME
also decreases!  That's where most of the speed increase comes
from.  I can tell you right off that my Zip drive is much faster
than any CD-ROM on the IIGS and that my 1GB IBM SCSI
hard drive on the IIGS is much faster than my Zip drive.  Most
of that speed difference comes from ACCESS TIME!

With your 8x drive, I'll bet access time (as well as data transfer
rate) is MUCH better than with a 2x drive and thus would
work much better and faster on the IIGS.

>3) if anyone else has one of these things, can you tell me exactly what the
>eight pairs of jumpers on the rear of the drive are for? (I need to disable
>on-board termination before putting them into external cases).

Can't answer this one since I don't have the drive.

Good luck!