Review Atapi/IDEFix

by: Pauli Porkka

These are my experiences using this particular software/system with my Amiga setting No guarantee is given that this software/system works the same with other hardware settings.
Atapi demo package (commercially known as IDEFix) from aminet/disk/cdrom contains easy to use installation script. It seems to scatter the files all over your harddisk. Although all the installations were logical it made me wonder if uninstall script would have been usefull in case I didn't like the system.

After installing I just inserted Aminet 8 CD and voila! The Aminet 8 CD disk icon appeared to the WB screen and it was immediately usable. What I discovered was that my CDROM didn't like the default atapi speed setting (1) used by the atapi.device. This became apparent when all the bigger files I tried to read from the disk were corrupt. JPEG's were scrambled and lha archives were corrupted. It took me about an hour to discover the reason, it would have been nice to inform the user in the documentation that this atapi speed setting may cause above mentioned effect. After changing the speed to 0 with provided SetAtapiSpeed utility everything started working fine.

Cache CDFS provides quite a good usability, using cdroms was like using my old scsi hd in my A500, about as fast. I was impressed.

Provided PlayCD was usable although the apperance of it could have been nicer. Implementing playbuttons with normal characters wasn't very nice, but atleast it did what it was supposed to.

CD32 Emulation has been tested to provide cd.device to the system. I haven't played games with CD32 Emulation, but for providing cd.device the emulation succeeds well, although problems were detected with several CD DA Playing software packages it is still uncertain whether the problem is with emulation or those programs itself (I suspect the latter).

As a whole I decided to buy the software as soon as I can figure out someone selling it here in Finland.


Back to main