19.8 CD-ROM Drivers

CD-ROM Drivers & Software

METADOS: was made by Atari, over the years many people have upgraded it and now it is the standard and supported by ALL OS. METADOS comes with two drivers; *.DOS and *.BOS, a small config file tells METADOS where the drivers can be found, on what port the CDROM is connected and what drive letter should be assigned to it. It sounds more complicated then it is, just a little bit logical thinking.... MetaDOS is freeware Take the latest release 2.70 from Julian Reschke
EXTENDOS: is a commercial CDROM driver, installation is very simple and it supports nearly all drives. There is a program incuded with wich one can play Music CD's. EXTENDOS GOLD is a commercial CD ROM and Writer Driver, installation is also easy. Both these programs are well suited for people who can't be bothered/know nothing about config.files etc... I'm not sure if it runs/supports all OS.
EGON CD Utilities: is also a commercial program, it's based on METADOS and comes with its own *.DOS and *.BOS drivers. It runs under all OS and is compatible with all major applications. Installing it is very simple
CD Tools: is a commercial program with nearly the same features of EGON. CD-TOOLS comes from Hard&Soft in germany and is not longer supported
SPIN: is a shareware program written by Julian Reschke, when run from MINT or MAGIC you can read MAC HFS CD's and see/copy files with long file names. SPIN is the ONLY CD driver wich allows this. Under plain TOS this packet works equally well. But You lose the benifits of the long file names and being able to read HFS Files. SPIN is also ideal to grab music tracks from Music CD's. It saves them as *.WAV files. When run from MAGIC, NAES/MINT it uses a XFS driver instead of METADOS.
BETADOS: is compatible with METADOS and ads some goodies like clusters and compatibility with MAGIC 6.x shared library's. It runs on all OS.
CD RECORDER PRO: is a program for CD Writers, it supports all the major standards, but also CD rerecordable yet. The program uses METADOS and its own *.BOS driver. There's no installation program supplied, so you have to do that yourself. Before bying a CD Writer check the compatibility list, not all CD Writers are supported.
CD SOLUTIONS: is the same thing as the one above, but for the MILAN clone. This one can use CD Writers with IDE interface, note that for some bizarre reason CD RECORDER PRO doesn't work with the SCSI card from the MILAN.

Connect a CD ROM to your Atari

What you need:

-SCSI CD ROM
-SCSI to DMA convertor (LINK, ICD etc..)
-One of the programs mentioned above

and that's all there is to it, it's just as easy as connecting a harddisk. BTW: You don't need a harddisk to have a CD ROM connected. The drivers are so small you can easily boot from disk.

When buying a CD ROM don't be blinded by speed, the AHDI/SCSI interface on all standard Atari's can't sustain more then 1800Kb/sec. So buying a 32x or 36x speed CD ROM is just waisting money. A 12x speed is perfect and can be obtained cheaply from PC-Nerds who always NEED faster drives to run Micro$hit applications -))))

A good program to play Music CD's is CD Player from Alexander Claus, it runs on all OS, has a built in database that keeps track of your CD's and is it also possible to extract music tracks with it. CD Player is freeware.

On Atari's and clones with a IDE interface You can also connect a IDE CD ROM, METADOS can handle these with no problems. The advantage is speed => 36x at full speed. The disadvantage is that you lose one of your two possible IDE connections...

There's probably a lot I forgot here, but to start with this should keep you busy -))) and with no doubt there will be a lot more postings with tips and comments coming in...

Some Links:

Cheers from Belgium
Dennis

dennis.vermeire@ping.be
atasoft@atari-computer.com