CD ROM FAQ Other Platforms

Information in this page updated: 07 Jan 96


11. CDs for other plattforms

11.1 Magazines

If you are looking at a CD published by a dedicated Amiga magazine, okay. But all other magazines piublish PC or MAC CDs with special software for retrieval. Of some use may be Disks with Fonts, Pictures, Clips etc. But take care that they are in a format, that your application understands or where you can get a converter for.

11.2 special PC CDs

Be carefull! Most of the CDs are published by DOS, Windows, OS\2 or Macintosh magazines. They use propriatary formats for their data and the retrieval programs only run on a special OS. If you're looking for pictures, anims, clips you may get lucky, but all of the new multimedia CDs are not for you. Go, buy a PC :-(

Sometimes you can get even in our days a simple HighSierra processed CD, this kind of filing system is not readable on several CDFS'.

11.3 PC emulations

You may connect a CD-ROM to a bridgeboard in your amiga, but there is no software to access this drive from the amiga side, so the drive sticks to the bridgebaord only. (The same is it with a drive on the amiga!)

I do not have any information about the PC Modul for the Emplant board, sorry.

There is a new alternative for you: PC-Task 3. The program emulates a 80286 processor and so you can run at least Windows 3.1. But beware the "gigantic" requirements of PC-Task (lots of ram, GfxBoard for VGA, fast 68k processor etc.) It offers a special driver to access a CD-ROM connected to the amiga. Be aware that large anaimations, videos etc. will not work, they expect more from a PC than PC-Task can offer. But, you can access several databanks, multimedia applications and such things. But I know at least one applications that plays dirty tricks with the CD-driver and this does not work with PCTask. Also PCTask has severe problems with some SCSI-Controllers (Dataflyer, Masoboshi, Squirrel) and comes up only with a DOS error message "No HS or ISO format"

11.4 Macintosh emulations

Emplant

Emplant supports SCSI(!) CD-ROMs trought its own controller, via Amiga SCSI controller and non-SCSI CD-ROMs via the empcd.device that then emulates a CD as removeable.

ShapeShifter: ShapeShifter comes with buildin support for CD-ROM drives such as transforming evary SCSI drive into an Apple CD-300, which can be accessed via the Apple CD-ROM extensions/drivers. Thrid party toolkits such as FWBs work with every drive when the trasnformation is disabled. Also ATAI drives are supported via the empcd.device as removeables.

11.5 Data formats

 Format     Amiga-program
 ---------------------------------------------------------
 BMP, GIF,
 JPG, PCX,
 TIFF, SUN,
 VOC, WAV   Datatype, ADpro, ImageFX, Scala MM400, Xv
 FLI/FLC    MainActor, ADpro, ImageFX, ImageMaster, Scala MM400
 AVI        MainActor, Xv
 DL         MainActor, Xv
 GL         ImageFX, Xv
 PhotoCD    PhotoworX (pro), Asimware, ImageFX, PBM, Scala MM400
 MPEG       special Hardware or real slow
 VideoCD    special Hardware
 EB¹            ShapeShifter (MacOS: PaperOut)

11.5 MPEG, FULL Motion Video

Theses VideoCDs can only be played by special cards like the FMV-module for the CD³² or a MPEG video card like PEGGY. On several PD-places you find software MPEG-players, but be warned, even 040 CPUs have difficulties showing them.
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