CD ROM FAQ Glossary
Information in this page updated: 07 Jan 96
A. Glossary
- AT-Bus, IDE-connector
- This often complies to the proprietary connectors
from three different drive manufactures: Mitsumi, Sony and
Panasonic. These connectors are not real IDE connectors and
all the drives requier a special controller either on a
seperate card or on a sound-card. Only the Mitsumi-style
connector is supported on amigas.
Note that these connector have nothing to do with the harddisk
interface of the same name!
- EIDE
- EIDE or better ATAPI describes the change from the propriertary
connectors to real IDE-style conectors. Since the ATAPI command
set is a feature of EIDE anyway they are often refered to as
EIDE drives, but they're not.
So there is a little shift in naming conventions:
Type harddisk CD-ROM drive
------------------------------------------------
IDE IDE Mitsumi, Sony, Panasonic
EIDE EIDE IDE(ATAPI)
- High-Sierra
- first draft of a standard with FAT 8+3 naming and
limited directory-struture.
- ISO-9660
- High-Sierra draft with minimal changes.
XA
- the XA-standard has new sector formats including audio- and
data-sectors to interleave. In a normal CD-ROM mode it saves
2048 bytes (form-1) and 2336 bytes (form-2) of data. The
XA (Extended Architecture) format saves in a differing method
in form-1 2048 bytes, in form-2 2324 bytes of data.
- RRIP
- »Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol«, fully downward compatible to
ISO 9660. It offers support for the extended features of other
files-systems then DOS (long filenames, more flags, deeper
directory-structure, object-links)
- MultiSession
- PhotoCDs are not written in a single shot, but in
several sessions. Each of this sessions has a "lead-in" (that
includes the directory), the data and a "lead-out". The next
sessions contains the directory of all prevous sessions plus
the current session, then the data and the "lead out". If your
drive can not read multi-session CDs it stops searching after
the first "lead-out", so you can read the first, but not the
following sessions and their data. This applies only to the
"golden" Write-Once CDs, commercial PhotoCDs are just normal,
single-sessions CDs. (NOTE: the handling for the multi-sessions
is different. Only two drive melt the sessions internally to
one, big session (Texel/Plextor x024 and x028). Toshiba offers
a special command to access the last session (and its
directory), others leave it to the driver to combine the
sessions for the file-system.)
- EB
- Electronic Book format. Developped by Sony and propagated for
8cm 'single' CDs that carry normal lexica, thesauri and spell
checker databases upto real books like Goethe. The CD was
written in normal XA-format, but the book-files can only be read
in a special sony-build EB reader or through special Software
(e.g. PaperOut for Macintosh). The format was discontiued and
abandonned in summer 1995.