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From: eht@cs.cmu.edu (Eric Thayer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: CD-ROM
Message-ID: <1991Mar28.144750.27836@cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 91 14:47:50 GMT
References: <1991Mar27.120647.1302@sinix.UUCP>
Sender: netnews@cs.cmu.edu (USENET News Group Software)
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
Lines: 29

In article <1991Mar27.120647.1302@sinix.UUCP> dhg@sinix.UUCP (David Griffith)  
writes:
> Does anyone know anything about the NeXT CD-ROM drive? Can you
> play audio CD's on it, if so how? I believe some audio CD players
> have digital outputs. Is it possible to feed this into the DSP port?
> 
> I understand that there is an ISO standard for CD-ROM's, so if I buy
> a NeXT CD drive and one of the CD encyclopaedias that seem to be
> available, is there any software on the NeXT that can handle it?
> 
> Dave Griffiths
> 
> PS: Apologies if these questions are answered in the NeXT Third
>     Party Catalog or NeXTAnswers, but I don't have access to either.

The NeXT CD-ROM drive will read disks in ISO-9660 format (although I've
found a bizarre counterexample to this, but I am not sure where the
'fault' lies at this point (i.e. bug in the driver or bug in the
mastering)).  In fact, you can use a Apple SCSI CD-ROM right now
with 2.0 (I've done it) and away you go.  Be aware that this does not  
necessarily mean that you can use Apple CD-ROM's themselves.
Many (all?) are in an Apple data format that is not ISO-9660.  I
don't have an Apple CD-ROM I can borrow to test whether they work
or not.

If the SCSI commands for a Mac drive were documented somewhere I'd
whip up a music player for the NeXT, but alas, they are nowhere easy
to be found (anyone with the first Developer conference notes?
The cmd's are proportedly in them).