A1200 CD help please.

[russraine]

I've had a good look on here for the info but couldn't find it, apologies if I'm asking a question someone else has already answered.

I had an A1200 with a PCMCIA Cdrom drive, it did not need any drivers or anything, when I turned Amiga on I just placed CD into drive and game booted.

So I'm guessing all info to boot from CD must be in the Amiga 3.0/3.1 ROM.

This should mean that if I place a cd in my Emulated A1200 the Rom should detect it, even under WinUAE.

But here is the question, how do I get my emulated A1200 to have a CDRom drive?

If that doesn't make sense then here it is simply, I have a real A1200 CD game (NOT CD32), and I want to play it using WinUAE, how do I do it?

Many thanks

[thomas]

I had an A1200 with a PCMCIA Cdrom drive, it did not need any drivers or anything, when I turned Amiga on I just placed CD into drive and game booted.

So I'm guessing all info to boot from CD must be in the Amiga 3.0/3.1 ROM.

No, there is nothing like that in the ROM. The Amiga cannot boot from CD. You probably had installed the CD drivers to HDD and when the drivers were started, they continued booting from the game CD. (I never heard of such drivers, though.)

I don't know about anything like this for WniUAE. To make the CD drive available to WinUAE, you enable uescsi.device emulation and install a CD filesystem on AmigaOS (e.g. CacheCDFS or AmiCDFS). But you cannot boot from CD.

However, WinUAE can emulate a CD32 which happily boots from CD (and only from CD). You just need the CD32's extended ROM (like it is contained in AmigaForever).

[russraine]

I have to disagree with you there.

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure I'm not remembering it wrong.

I had an A1200 with a 4MB expansion card in and an double speed Overdrive PCMCIA CDROM drive attached.

When I placed a CDrom in, it booted from the ROM screen, in the same way a floppy booted from the ROM screen.

I know it was a long time ago but I'm sure that is what I used to do

I didn't have a Hard drive so it could not have been that and I'm sure I would have remembered having to load workbench on floppy every time.

[thomas]

Well, I consider myself to be an expert and I know for sure that the Kickstart ROM does not contain any CD-ROM drivers.

However, I am not sure about the cappabilities of the PCMCIA slot. Perhaps the Overdrive controller has some kind of firmware ROM which adds a bootable CD drive automatically when the system examines the bus.

But you can be sure that no such mechanism exists for WinUAE. You could only write such a ROM yourself and add it to the "Cartridge" slot of WinUAE.

[russraine]

Originally Posted by thomas

Well, I consider myself to be an expert and I know for sure that the Kickstart ROM does not contain any CD-ROM drivers.

However, I am not sure about the cappabilities of the PCMCIA slot. Perhaps the Overdrive controller has some kind of firmware ROM which adds a bootable CD drive automatically when the system examines the bus.

But you can be sure that no such mechanism exists for WinUAE. You could only write such a ROM yourself and add it to the "Cartridge" slot of WinUAE.

Yes this sounds quite likely now you come to mention it.
Don't think I'd be able to write a ROM, I can only just manage to spell it .

It does seem odd though, I thought having onboard cdrom support would've made sence for the A1200, as it was intended to be futureproof at the time, and in many ways it is isn't it?

So if we do assume it was the firmware of the CDrom drive, could a future version of WinUae exploit this and have this added so that it could recognise an Amiga cd rom inserted into the PC CD drive and boot from A1200 3.0/3.1 ROM screen? It sounds possible to me but y'know!

[thomas]

You could add the CD as a HDD directory in order to boot from it. It's just not removable then (you have to reset WinUAE in order to change CDs).