Reading CDs, listing contents

[krisk]

Hi,

I have set up an older PC (ASRock board AMD64) with an SC-200 SCSI controller and I managed to connect the ESI-4000 together with a TEAC CDROM drive (SCSI) to the SCSI Bus of the system (a FreeBSD system - for those not knowing what that is: something like Linux)

Anyway, my idea was to run EMXP under Wine to access the SCSI Bus. This doesn't seem to work.

So my next idea would be to try to dump each CD Image to the computer and analyze the dump using EMXP.

Would that work? Or can EMXP only access drives that are directly connected to the SCSI bus.

I also have some hard disk dumps on my computer. What extension does such a dump have to have, so that it can be read by EMXP?

Thanks for helping in advance,

--
Christoph

[esynthesist]

Yes, EMXP can read raw dumps from EIII/EIIIX hard disks.
They are called "hard disk images" in EMXP, and their file extension can be .ISO or .EZ3 (you can also use .IMG but then you first have to "enable" this extension as an allowed EIIIX HD image extension in the EMXP preferences menu)

Direct access to SCSI hard disks is supported only if the operating system (Windows, macOS+Wine) assigns a drive letter to the drive.
Wine never assigns drive letters to disks containing a file system which is not compatible with Windows, so Emu sampler hard disks can't be accessed directly by EMXP under Wine, no matter if the drive is a SCSI drive or not (see also the MacOSXWine manual for EMXP).
But even on Windows PCs, when trying to use SCSI hard disks, the Windows SCSI interface drivers tend not to assign drive letters to SCSI drives. This problem does not exist for removable disks, e.g. ZIP disks, CDROMs, SD cards (e.g. for use in SCSI2SD). Those typically get a drive letter assigned by Windows because those drives are almost never SCSI devices on Windows PCs - they are typically USB drives. Fortunately this is sufficient for most EMXP users.

But for those who really want to connect their original Emu SCSI hard disks to their computer with a SCSI interface card, I'm considering to add support for drive numbers in EMXP (next to drive letters). This will only work on Windows, because Wine refuses "non-Windows" file systems.

[krisk]

Thanks for your answer. What about a "raw" CD dump? Would EMXP be able to read these?

[esynthesist]

Yes, CDROM images are supported by EMXP as well.

[krisk]

Yes, CDROM images are supported by EMXP as well.

Hoped so. Well, I have produced a dump from such a CD in my Unix directory (it's FreeBSD, name it Linux).
It's 687974400 bytes in size. I named it cd1_dump.EZ3.

I ran emxp.exe (under Wine) but it says it cannot find any images.

Is there a documentation of the file/directory format of these media (hard disks and CDROMs as well?)

--
Christoph

[krisk]

Yes, CDROM images are supported by EMXP as well.

A question of understanding: when you are talking about EMU-III and EMU-IIIX, is that keyboards?

I have an ESI-4000. Where would it range in the naming scheme?

[esynthesist]

If EMXP says it can't find any images, it either means that you have the navigate to another folder in EMXP ("change folder"), or that the file extension is not correct (e.g. because .EZ3 is not really the file extension but just part of the file name...)
When using Wine, make sure the EZ3/ISO image is saved in a folder on one of Wine's "virtual" Windows drives (C:, D:, ...). It's explained in the MacOSWine EMXP manual. And the EMXP reference manual explains how to use the EMXP disk manager.
If EMXP would find the EZ3 file but the file would not be in the format expected by EMXP, EMXP would show a warning instead of saying that it can't find any images.

Please note that I've never tested EMXP in Wine on Linux, so I can't assure that Wine behaves the same on Linux as on macOS.


Regarding the sampler format (EIII, EIIIX, ESI):

While EMXP v3.09 supports the hard disk format of the ESI sampler range, it does not support native ESI v3.x banks stored on those disks yet. ESI v3 banks will be supported in the next version of EMXP (v3.10).

In practice this means that the current version (v3.09) supports hard disks (and hard disk images) used by the ESI sampler range, but only banks saved by those ESI samplers in EIII format or in EIIIX/ESI v2.x format on these disks will be accepted by EMXP. FYI this means that EMXP v3.09 supports the production CDROMs that came with the ESI samplers, because afaik these CDROMS contained banks saved in ESI v2.x format, not banks saved in ESI v3.x format.

The current version of EMXP will indicate banks in ESI v3.x format as "invalid".
The next version of EMXP (v3.10) - which will fully support ESI v3 - will be released in the next 2 months.

[krisk]

Thanks. Will try to configure out the usage of EMXP wrt the disk drives etc.

Nonetheless I'm wondering whether there is a source for a documentation of the file and directory structure of the
CD and disk images. Is there such ?

--
Christoph

[Larenzo]

Hi Esynthesist

I posted a question on this subject about an hour ago and went on reading.
So i came across this/ your message.

Is the drive nmbr for scsi implemented already in your EMXP 3.11 ?
May be me not reading/looking right, i can not find (out) where/ how to identify the SCSI nmber
of the drive that is seen by other prg.s e.g. HDDraw and Translatorfree.

I have used your EMXP for writing OS EIII to floppy and am happy with that. THNX
Now i want to put a new HD in the old EII to check functions of EIII.
And, hopefully as all goes well, be able to use it as an instrument again )
Grtzz Lars