Exact Amiga Readable CD Format?

[LocalH]

You mean ISO9660 with Rock Ridge extensions - ISO9660, in and of itself, is even worse than MS-DOS (albeit not much). To wit:

In strict interpretations of the ISO 9660 standard, all directory entries of files must contain the file name followed by a semicolon and the file version number, ";1." Most operating systems automatically remove these two characters from the filename when accessing a file or displaying a directory, but versions of the Macintosh operating system prior to 7.5 did not. The result is that when you look at an ISO 9660 disc on a Macintosh with System 7.0 or earlier, all the filenames appear as "FILENAME;1". This could cause problems with an application that must run from CD on the Macintosh: if your application looks for a file named "MYFILE.TXT", it will only find a file named "MYFILE.TXT;1". Note: With later Mac system software, if the option key is held down while the disc is being mounted on the desktop, the System will display file version numbers.

Some UNIX systems require a setting to make the version numbers "disappear."

Also know that "ISO9660 with long file names" can be different from "ISO9660 with Rock Ridge extensions" - ISO9660 Level 2 allows up to 31 characters per file name, while Rock Ridge can also preserve Unix permissions and more characters (strict ISO compliance allows only uppercase letters, numbers, and the underscore, and also disallows a period as the first character of the filename). This all depends on the ISO9660 support of the Amiga CDFS used. If it supports only Rock Ridge extensions, chances are this type of disk may not work. If it works, then the CDFS more than likely supports ISO9660 Level 2 as well.

[LocalH]

@Wibbly:

If a disc written with DirectCD works on an Amiga, then yes, it's likely that it does - or that it supports ISO9660 Level 2 and most CDFSs support Level 2 as well (I'm not sure offhand if there are any don't, tho).

Myself, I've used a Win32 port of mkisofs to rebuild my FrozenFish-Apr94 disc from files that I had copied off in Windows. I generated the ISO, burned it with Nero, and it works perfectly with my Amiga. Of course, mkisofs is command line, so it's a bit cryptic, but it's also completely free - both as in beer and as in speech - whereas Adaptec's software is not (although it is bundled with many CD writers).

[LocalH]

I've not tried, although if there is an AmigaOS port of mkisofs (probably using ixemul), one could generate an ISO within the Amiga environment, one that *should* be able to keep the protection bits, as least as well as normal (given that Rock Ridge was primarily designed for Unix protection bits, don't you simply convert the Amiga protection bits to Unix ones?). Then you could burn that ISO with any available program. The protection bits on FrozenFish-Apr94 don't really matter, as the only script I know of on the disk that needs to be directly executable is really called by IconX. Like I said earlier, such a CD worked perfectly on my Amiga, I extracted several LHA files and also ran both Kingfisher 1 and A-Kwic, and searched the 1000 disks, and it worked fine.