Is there any point to a CD-ROM drive with an A1200?

Ulysses13 · 19 February 2021, 17:35

OK, so this isn't primarily a post asking how to connect a CD-ROM drive to my A1200, as I can see there are a few ways and a lot of little details to look into...

...I was wondering what hooking up a CD-ROM drive to my A1200 would actually allow me to do? I guess see files on CD, but would it actually open up much of a new or interesting software library?

I've seen Amiga software on CD, so I guess there are some titles, but would I be able to run CDTV stuff? Would there be a route to running CD32 discs? I have some of each of those...

Just curious, as it is something I'd love to do, but I'm not sure why, given that I have the internal SD card and PCMCIA slot, so I'm not short of ways to get large amounts of data onto the computer.

keithamiga1200 · 19 February 2021, 18:32

Today? Not much point, not unless you want to directly run CD32 disks. That said; there's a horde of forgotten stuff on the magazine cover CDs.

alexh · 19 February 2021, 18:37

Games with CDDA. Most CD games have HD rips so you can play the game but the CDDA and any FMV isn't included.

There are only a hand-full of these games. In todays world, really not worth going through the pain of making a CD capable A1200.

hitm4n · 19 February 2021, 18:45

I used to have one sat externally to my A1200 linked to an ugly PC Power supply with inline switch. The PSU powered my internal harddrive too and the IDE cable had to go in and out of the Amiga case to link up both my harddrive and cdrom to the one ide port. With some hacked IDE adapaters... It was an ugly setup but worked and i loved it.

The CDRom drive took some fiddling to figure it out, get it reliably working and have audio passthrough working too, to play music CD's. I think i used the CDFS libs to get the drive going, was so long ago, but i think i had to use this as it supported the audio stuff too where some other CD file system libs didn't.

But in the end i never played audio cd's (well, not never, but very rare), i used it to sample from a few times. Primarily it was used to read CD's from the covers of Amiga Format and CU Amiga, and read the few scene CD's i'd managed to collect. Actually, i still have them all right here in front of me....

The Weird Science Multimedia Toolkit CD (500 HAM images, fonts, mods and apps).
"Amiga CD! Magazine" cover CD's from issues 1, 2 and 3. A shortlived and uncommon mag i think, so the discs might be rare?
The AGA Experience Volume One (from Amiga Format and comes with Phase 2, Fonts Clipart and Images CD.
Utilities Experience (from Sadeness Software).
THE CDPD Public Domain Collection for CDTV (worked fine on A1200) which includes Fred Fish 1-660 among other things.
Assassins 3 "The Ultimate Games CD".
Scene Storm from Amiga Format.
and a WOS disk that Martijn sold me for a tenner back in 1999 when his WOS site was still on www.void.demon.nl. This was to get a complete speccy game set for an emulator on Amiga, and soon PC too.

Good times.

Would i hook up a CDRom to an Amiga now? Hell no. Not with the harddrive stuff, SDCard readers and PCMCIA stuff you can get now, which is easier faster and bigger capacity. And the fact that all these CD images are readily available online to pick apart and take what you need from them, can mount them on PC and do whatever. Can't remember the last time i even put a disc in my PCs CDRom drive.

Would it play CD32 or real CDTV games. I have no idea, someone else will have to answer that. I never had any.

cpiac64 · 19 February 2021, 18:50

you can add a cd-rom on pcmcia

install idefix with support cd32

Ulysses13 · 19 February 2021, 19:08

It feels like there's no practical reason to have a CD drive for an Amiga computer these days.

But...

...if an A1200 could run any Amiga-branded media, that would be cool, and perhaps a reason to have a CD drive hooked up.

Anything, Amiga floppies, CDTV discs, CD32 games. knowing that the A1200 could do it all would be nice.

So maybe it's less a question of the actual CD-ROM thing, but more one of compatibility? I imagine CDTV stuff is easier because that was basically an Amiga 500 - but the CD32 had some extra hardware didn't it?

Perhaps it would be easier to make a CD32 play floppy discs...

alexh · 19 February 2021, 22:06

There is no reason why you cannot use all the CDs as listed above as ISO images mounted via virtual CD. Depending on the power and memory of your A1200 there are virtual CD mounters for AmigaOS or mount them as a drive from a PC over SAMBA. Almost every Amiga CD has been dumped including cover discs.

The one or two CD32 games used the Akiko, because it only had 2MB of ChipRAM but these have been patched in software. Add FastRAM to AGA and there is no need for an Akiko.

There really is no need for optical media on wedge Amiga's the decision is a bit harder on big box Amiga's, especially the A4000 which has the CDDA audio mixer built in.

crazyc · 19 February 2021, 22:22

Surely 'because you can' has got to feature somewhere as a reason to do it?

Wachi · 20 February 2021, 00:25

Being able to play CD AUDIO, most of the CD32 and CDTV games, the games on CD, being able to put your collection of DEMOS-WHDLoad on a DVD and that of Games-WHDLoad on another DVD ......

Cubemon · 20 February 2021, 00:42

Back in the day, I had an A1200.

Bought a CD-ROM drive for it. I didn't like the external drive with its own power supply.

Bought a tower. But then I had a kludgy external keyboard and a huge tower, but I still wasn't able to use expansion cards.

Bought an A4000. The graphics weren't still any better for productivity.

Bought a CV3D card. It didn't work right, because I had the wrong revision Buster.

Bought another A4000 (and sold the old one). Even though now everything worked, I still would have to pay three times the price for peripherals like webcams, compared to a PC one.

Bought a PC.

Some 12 years later, bought an A1200. Did not get a CD-ROM drive.

Korodny · 20 February 2021, 17:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ulysses13

It feels like there's no practical reason to have a CD drive for an Amiga computer these days.

Well, CDDA has been mentioned. I don't know how many titles feature CDDA though - I can only think of DotC 2 and Genetic Species right now.

The other reasons - playing Audio CDs, software compilations on CD, commercial games on CD - are moot these days or can be solved by simply mounting the CD as a virtual device.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ulysses13

...if an A1200 could run any Amiga-branded media, that would be cool, and perhaps a reason to have a CD drive hooked up.

Maybe. But adding a CD-ROM to an A1200 is a mess. You have three options:

SCSI - i.e. a Blizzard 1230 card with the rare SCSI addon or a super expensive Blizzard 1260 - and an external SCSI case
IDE, i.e. start chopping up your Amiga case and try to fit an IDE CD-ROM drive in there. Or fuck aesthetics and just leave IDE and power cables as well as a naked CD-ROM drive lying around on your desk.
Or you try to get on of those Amiga specific PCMCIA CD drives. I assume these are hard to find.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ulysses13

So maybe it's less a question of the actual CD-ROM thing, but more one of compatibility? I imagine CDTV stuff is easier because that was basically an Amiga 500 - but the CD32 had some extra hardware didn't it?

The CD32 has another custom chip - Akiko. It does chunky-to-planar conversions. No idea how many games use it.

Amiga4000 · 20 February 2021, 18:15

IDK, plugging in a USB CD-ROM is pretty easy on my A1200.

crazyc · 20 February 2021, 18:20

Or put your a1200 in a checkmate case and fit a cd/dvd drive...

AmigaHope · 20 February 2021, 20:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Korodny

The CD32 has another custom chip - Akiko. It does chunky-to-planar conversions. No idea how many games use it.

Technically, Akiko was primarily the CD-ROM controller. The C2P feature was added in as a bonus. The only games I remember using it for C2P were Wing Commander and Gloom.

Instead of having transparent writes though, you had to write planar data to its registers, and then copy the output back out from it and then put it into chip ram. As a result it wasn't that much faster than other techniques (CPU or blitter C2P). Since there wasn't much dedicated development for the CD32, it wasn't used much.

Daedalus · 20 February 2021, 21:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Korodny

Well, CDDA has been mentioned. I don't know how many titles feature CDDA though - I can only think of DotC 2 and Genetic Species right now.

Yeah, that's probably the primary reason these days, other than for the nostalgia of actually using the media - much like floppy drives in that regard.

As for titles using CDDA - it depends on how expanded the A1200 is. Many of the later titles released on CD have CDDA soundtracks - Napalm, OnEscapee, Exodus: The Last War, Foundation, Payback come to mind, as well as ports if you have a *really* expanded machine - Quake, Earth 2140, Wipeout 2097 and so on.

Predseda · 20 February 2021, 23:26

There is no point for mounting any mechanical drive to Amiga today. But I just LOVE playing talkie version of Simon the Sorcerer from CD drive of my A1200.

Torti-the-Smurf · 21 February 2021, 12:58

Dont know if that helps, but you can always mount a CD Iso with "DiskImageGUI"if needed.

[ Show youtube player ]

golem · 21 February 2021, 14:20

Only reason I have hooked mine up in the past 5 years is to install OS3.9 to a CF. This proved to be so much of a pain with EIDE and 060 etc, etc I looked up a better way and it is so much easier to get a USB to CF adaptor and use WinUAE on a PC to do it.

Korodny · 21 February 2021, 16:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amiga4000

IDK, plugging in a USB CD-ROM is pretty easy on my A1200.

I wouldn't call USB on A12000 an "option", unleass you (a) already have a controller lying around or (b) the seller is a dying man who urgently needs one of your kidneys.

On top of that, I would assume that a USB based CD-ROM drive wouldn't be very useful for CD32 games trying to play CDDA.

Amiga4000 · 21 February 2021, 17:02

It works fine as the Poseidon USB stack handles CDDA. In some cases even the audio is played thru Paula from USB on some CD games such as Inherit the Earth - Quest for the Orb (always wondered how this game was able to do that - I looked and it has something to do with the audio file type). In most cases you just need to connect a pair of powered speakers to the external CD ROM. I play audio CDs all the time with Song Player to read the CDDA data. And, of course, ASIM CD software has full provisions to play CD32 titles (probably other software on AmiNet that will accomplish the same thing). Maybe it's just me but, I enjoy all aspects of the Amiga's capabilities and CD support is fun.

"I wouldn't call USB on A12000 an "option", unleass you (a) already have a controller lying around or (b) the seller is a dying man who urgently needs one of your kidneys."

AmigaKit still sells Rapid Road for A1200......

19 February 2021, 17:35	#1
Ulysses13 Registered User Join Date: May 2020 Location: Surrey / UK Posts: 111	Is there any point to a CD-ROM drive with an A1200? OK, so this isn't primarily a post asking how to connect a CD-ROM drive to my A1200, as I can see there are a few ways and a lot of little details to look into... ...I was wondering what hooking up a CD-ROM drive to my A1200 would actually allow me to do? I guess see files on CD, but would it actually open up much of a new or interesting software library? I've seen Amiga software on CD, so I guess there are some titles, but would I be able to run CDTV stuff? Would there be a route to running CD32 discs? I have some of each of those... Just curious, as it is something I'd love to do, but I'm not sure why, given that I have the internal SD card and PCMCIA slot, so I'm not short of ways to get large amounts of data onto the computer.

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19 February 2021, 18:32	#2
keithamiga1200 Registered User Join Date: Oct 2019 Location: UK Posts: 29	Today? Not much point, not unless you want to directly run CD32 disks. That said; there's a horde of forgotten stuff on the magazine cover CDs.

19 February 2021, 18:37	#3
alexh Thalion Webshrine Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Oxford Posts: 14,336	Games with CDDA. Most CD games have HD rips so you can play the game but the CDDA and any FMV isn't included. There are only a hand-full of these games. In todays world, really not worth going through the pain of making a CD capable A1200.

19 February 2021, 18:45	#4
hitm4n Registered User Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Lincoln, UK Posts: 604	I used to have one sat externally to my A1200 linked to an ugly PC Power supply with inline switch. The PSU powered my internal harddrive too and the IDE cable had to go in and out of the Amiga case to link up both my harddrive and cdrom to the one ide port. With some hacked IDE adapaters... It was an ugly setup but worked and i loved it. The CDRom drive took some fiddling to figure it out, get it reliably working and have audio passthrough working too, to play music CD's. I think i used the CDFS libs to get the drive going, was so long ago, but i think i had to use this as it supported the audio stuff too where some other CD file system libs didn't. But in the end i never played audio cd's (well, not never, but very rare), i used it to sample from a few times. Primarily it was used to read CD's from the covers of Amiga Format and CU Amiga, and read the few scene CD's i'd managed to collect. Actually, i still have them all right here in front of me.... The Weird Science Multimedia Toolkit CD (500 HAM images, fonts, mods and apps). "Amiga CD! Magazine" cover CD's from issues 1, 2 and 3. A shortlived and uncommon mag i think, so the discs might be rare? The AGA Experience Volume One (from Amiga Format and comes with Phase 2, Fonts Clipart and Images CD. Utilities Experience (from Sadeness Software). THE CDPD Public Domain Collection for CDTV (worked fine on A1200) which includes Fred Fish 1-660 among other things. Assassins 3 "The Ultimate Games CD". Scene Storm from Amiga Format. and a WOS disk that Martijn sold me for a tenner back in 1999 when his WOS site was still on www.void.demon.nl. This was to get a complete speccy game set for an emulator on Amiga, and soon PC too. Good times. Would i hook up a CDRom to an Amiga now? Hell no. Not with the harddrive stuff, SDCard readers and PCMCIA stuff you can get now, which is easier faster and bigger capacity. And the fact that all these CD images are readily available online to pick apart and take what you need from them, can mount them on PC and do whatever. Can't remember the last time i even put a disc in my PCs CDRom drive. Would it play CD32 or real CDTV games. I have no idea, someone else will have to answer that. I never had any.

19 February 2021, 18:50	#5
cpiac64 Registered User Join Date: Apr 2010 Location: Italy Posts: 1,136	you can add a cd-rom on pcmcia install idefix with support cd32

19 February 2021, 19:08	#6
Ulysses13 Registered User Join Date: May 2020 Location: Surrey / UK Posts: 111	It feels like there's no practical reason to have a CD drive for an Amiga computer these days. But... ...if an A1200 could run any Amiga-branded media, that would be cool, and perhaps a reason to have a CD drive hooked up. Anything, Amiga floppies, CDTV discs, CD32 games. knowing that the A1200 could do it all would be nice. So maybe it's less a question of the actual CD-ROM thing, but more one of compatibility? I imagine CDTV stuff is easier because that was basically an Amiga 500 - but the CD32 had some extra hardware didn't it? Perhaps it would be easier to make a CD32 play floppy discs...

19 February 2021, 22:06	#7
alexh Thalion Webshrine Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Oxford Posts: 14,336	There is no reason why you cannot use all the CDs as listed above as ISO images mounted via virtual CD. Depending on the power and memory of your A1200 there are virtual CD mounters for AmigaOS or mount them as a drive from a PC over SAMBA. Almost every Amiga CD has been dumped including cover discs. The one or two CD32 games used the Akiko, because it only had 2MB of ChipRAM but these have been patched in software. Add FastRAM to AGA and there is no need for an Akiko. There really is no need for optical media on wedge Amiga's the decision is a bit harder on big box Amiga's, especially the A4000 which has the CDDA audio mixer built in.

19 February 2021, 22:22	#8
crazyc Registered User Join Date: May 2012 Location: Gravesend - UK Posts: 927	Surely 'because you can' has got to feature somewhere as a reason to do it?

20 February 2021, 00:25	#9
Wachi Registered User Join Date: Jul 2014 Location: Madrid Posts: 141	Being able to play CD AUDIO, most of the CD32 and CDTV games, the games on CD, being able to put your collection of DEMOS-WHDLoad on a DVD and that of Games-WHDLoad on another DVD ......

20 February 2021, 00:42	#10
Cubemon Recovering Amiga user Join Date: Aug 2015 Location: Underground Posts: 52	Back in the day, I had an A1200. Bought a CD-ROM drive for it. I didn't like the external drive with its own power supply. Bought a tower. But then I had a kludgy external keyboard and a huge tower, but I still wasn't able to use expansion cards. Bought an A4000. The graphics weren't still any better for productivity. Bought a CV3D card. It didn't work right, because I had the wrong revision Buster. Bought another A4000 (and sold the old one). Even though now everything worked, I still would have to pay three times the price for peripherals like webcams, compared to a PC one. Bought a PC. Some 12 years later, bought an A1200. Did not get a CD-ROM drive.

20 February 2021, 18:15	#12
Amiga4000 Registered User Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: The Ford Galaxy Posts: 214	IDK, plugging in a USB CD-ROM is pretty easy on my A1200.

20 February 2021, 18:20	#13
crazyc Registered User Join Date: May 2012 Location: Gravesend - UK Posts: 927	Or put your a1200 in a checkmate case and fit a cd/dvd drive...

20 February 2021, 23:26	#16
Predseda Puttymoon inhabitant Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Tromaville Age: 46 Posts: 7,539	There is no point for mounting any mechanical drive to Amiga today. But I just LOVE playing talkie version of Simon the Sorcerer from CD drive of my A1200.

21 February 2021, 12:58	#17
Torti-the-Smurf Registered User Join Date: Dec 2018 Location: Earth Posts: 1,058	Dont know if that helps, but you can always mount a CD Iso with "DiskImageGUI"if needed. [ Show youtube player ]

21 February 2021, 14:20	#18
golem Registered User Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Nottingham, UK Posts: 77	Only reason I have hooked mine up in the past 5 years is to install OS3.9 to a CF. This proved to be so much of a pain with EIDE and 060 etc, etc I looked up a better way and it is so much easier to get a USB to CF adaptor and use WinUAE on a PC to do it.

21 February 2021, 17:02	#20
Amiga4000 Registered User Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: The Ford Galaxy Posts: 214	It works fine as the Poseidon USB stack handles CDDA. In some cases even the audio is played thru Paula from USB on some CD games such as Inherit the Earth - Quest for the Orb (always wondered how this game was able to do that - I looked and it has something to do with the audio file type). In most cases you just need to connect a pair of powered speakers to the external CD ROM. I play audio CDs all the time with Song Player to read the CDDA data. And, of course, ASIM CD software has full provisions to play CD32 titles (probably other software on AmiNet that will accomplish the same thing). Maybe it's just me but, I enjoy all aspects of the Amiga's capabilities and CD support is fun. "I wouldn't call USB on A12000 an "option", unleass you (a) already have a controller lying around or (b) the seller is a dying man who urgently needs one of your kidneys." AmigaKit still sells Rapid Road for A1200......

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