A570 and PC cds?

[mepmepmep]

Does the a570 support reading from regular pc cd-roms?

[hnl_dk]

it did when I had mine ... did not try CD-R

[amigamad]

I should tjhink so my old cdtv can.

[DonnyEMU]

I think it's very important to remember there are several types of CDROM filesystems, ISO-9660 , 9660 with rockridge, Joliet (the pc standard), HFS (from the mac world), and UDF (which works with higher density drives and DVDs)..

Make sure your CDFS can handle the encoding.. If it can't read the cd it's likely that you need an updated CD filesystem

[darksun9210]

given that the A570 doesn't rely on software drivers, but its burnt into rom so its available on start up, i think its really more of a question of getting the filesystem right first time. also given that it took comodore 3 years! to realease the damn thing you'd hope so.

but anything that conforms to ISO-9660 and rock ridge. you may find that files on joliet CD's bigger than 1 megabyte are split into multiple files of the same name.
ie, 2.5 meg file = 1mb, 1mb, 0.5mb.
pain in the arse? yes.

when i had one, it read PC CD's, Sega MegaCD CD's, CDi CD's, playstation CD's.... ok so most of that was pretty pointless, but i thought at the time it was cool to play the audio tracks, and a laugh to be able to copy entire Mega CD games onto a floppy disk

[Tenacious]

You didn't mention how you are booting your machine, from A570, from floppy, or from a hard drive (like the Amitrix expansion).  If you boot from floppy or hard drive, you can use AmiCDFS from Aminet to update and expand the variety of CDs that are readable.

[Erwin-K]

Remember that the CD-ROM is a single speed unit. It could not play multi-session CD's IIRC.

One thing it can do is read CD + G. That's sound plus graphics. It never caught on with the music industry, but a lot of karioki (spelling?) disks used the format. Become your own K-DJ.

[darksun9210]

sorry, booting from floppy.... the A570 auto config'ed itself with drivers and filesystem etc.
you obvisiously can't boot from any CD other than CDTV disks that carry the custom boot code.

i did try to build my own scsi card for it, but ended up frying the connector in the back. D'oh! it may have been power shorted to an earth line, but i never had the guts to try it again. just happy the A570 still worked.

considering it came out for 399 originally, then 149 a year or so later, i did kinda expect it to have a built in scsi controller.... did anyone figure out how to upgrade it with the 2Mb of fast ram? or what that row of pins like an internal scsi connector was down the side of the board?

oh and BTW, CD-Rs are multisession if files are written to them in more than one sitting, ie, you do an initial burn, and then add some stuff later before finalizing (closeing) the CD.
but if you only burn then finalize (close) there shouldn't be a problem. if you do try a multisession CD, you'll only see the files written in the first burn, if at all.