Op 25-4-2010 14:23, Neal Weissman schreef: > Eric, > i am a stranger in a strange land. How can i learn this lingo: > "UDFCDX" "gcdrom" "gcxdrom" "SHSUCDX" "MSCDEX" "eltorito.sys" ... ? >
Let's see, nearly 2 decades ago Microsoft introduced a driver called MSCDEX to allow you to gain access to a cd-rom disc in your optical drive, as long as the cd contents was in ISO9660 format (most normal CDs). Also NWCDEX existed, from another DOS manufacturer. They needed a driver to be loaded in config.sys system file first, usually this driver was delivered together with your purchased CD DRIVE unit. Quite some time later, on windows 95/98 bootdisks, Microsoft provided a driver from a CD manufacturer by default. It was pretty generic/universal for most IDE (ATAPI) drives. At the same time there was also the Acer (nowadays Benq? or Acer again) universal working driver called VIDE-CDD.SYS which had a lower memory footprint. To make a long story short: Jack R Ellis has had a number of drivers developed for access to optical units and discs, most of this software has sourcecode available. His latest is UIDE.SYS which should support CD drives also on Serial-ATA (possibly in AHCI-mode, or just IDE-emulation). FreeDOS earlier already had a replacement for MSCDEX, it's called SHSUCDX. Still only allowing access to ISO9660 discs. UDF is a file format for optical discs most used on DVD movies I think, and allows more than ISO9660. A version of SHSUCDX with support for UDF is what you might call UDFCDX, it doesn't exist yet. Additionally there's much more to write about CD unit support (ASPI, SCSI, USB, CD writing, packetwriting, emulation, ramdisks, bootable CD using the config.sys ELTORITO.SYS driver, etc). You can load the CD support in the historically correct DOS way by installing 1 driver in config.sys ( DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\UIDE.SYS /D:FDCD0001 for example) and then loading the CDEX ( SHSUCDX /D:FDCD0001) with same 'block device name' (in this case the FDCD0001 name). Or, use a modern commandline device driver loader program named DEVLOAD: DEVLOAD C:\FDOS\BIN\UIDE.SYS /D:FDCD0001 SHSUCDX /D:FDCD0001 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
