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.

Back to main