[Coco] Hard drive success! Now what about CD's...?

[Willard Goosey]

>From: Leon Howell <puritan_2076 at yahoo.com>
>Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 17:35:49 +0000 (UTC)
>
>IT WORKS!!! IT WORKS!!! IT WORKS!!!

Congratulations!  I finally got a hard drive running on my CoCo again
as well.

Sure is sweet, isn't it? :-)
>
>When I got done jumping up and down and yelling I copied everything to the 
>hard drive and of course I still have room for more.

And no swapping disks every two minutes! (except when you're copying
everything onto the HD :)
>
>I noticed the instructions say it's compatible with CD-ROMs, and I was 
>wondering, what good is a CR-ROM on a CoCo? 

Cloud-9 sells copies of the RTSI archive on CD for $cheap.  ISO or RBF
file-system.  They may also have CDs of the maltedmedia archives by
now.  (If not, may I suggest it?)

And Chris Hawks now sells CDman, an ISO-9660 file manager.  In other
words, with this manager, which requires Superdrivers, you can read
normal CD-ROMS directly with the CoCo.

>There's no software on CD, but tons of data, like microsoft bookshelf
>and other book collections. Are these ASCII text, html, or any other
>CoCo-readable format?

Well, I've got a copy of the RTSI archive on CD, and let me tell you,
it's a *lot* faster than having to ftp things.  With the CDROM hooked
directly to the CoCo you wouldn't have to play disk conversion games.
Don't forget, we have perfectly functional tools under OS-9 to deal
with virtual disk images, as well.  

I'm not sure what formats the book collections are in.  Probably
depends on the dealer.  A coco can do something with a CD full of
gifs, but not a CD full of jpegs. 

>What about recordable rewritable CD drives? 

My first impluse is to say that a CoCo would be hard-pressed to keep
up with the data speed demands of a CD burner.  OTOH burners have such
huge buffers built-in these days...

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko