Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: barrett@cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett) Subject: REVIEW: AsimCDFS CDROM Filesystem Message-ID: <1992Oct2.033236.2658@menudo.uh.edu> Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Summary: Yup, the moderator writes reviews too. How about you? :-) Keywords: CDROM, filesystem, driver, multimedia, commercial Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Nntp-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Reply-To: barrett@cs.umass.edu Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 03:32:36 GMT PRODUCT NAME AsimCDFS, version 1.0b [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated by the author (me) on December 12, 1992, after he received AsimCDFS 1.1. See the file AsimCDFS_2 for more comments. - Dan] BRIEF DESCRIPTION AsimCDFS is a CDROM filesystem. It allows the Amiga to read CDROM discs using a SCSI CDROM drive (not included), and supports ISO 9660, High Sierra, and Macintosh HFS disc formats. The package also includes AsimTunes, a program for playing audio CD's, and FishMarket, a CDROM containing the first 637 Fish Disks. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Asimware Innovations Paul Reeves, President Address: 101 Country Club Drive Hamilton, Ontario L8K 5W4 Canada Telephone: (416) 578-4916 LIST PRICE $79.95 (US dollars) I paid $64.00 at an Amiga dealer, and I have seen mailorder prices as low as $50.00. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE The product reportedly works on "all Amiga models." Your Amiga must have a SCSI CDROM drive connected. Currently, the following drives are supported, with "more drives being added constantly" (according to the manual): Chinon CDS-431 (ROM H48) Toshiba XM-320x, XM-330x, XM-2200, XM5100 (I use an XM-3301 -- see my comments.) NEC CDR-7x, 8x, and 3x families (Old NEC drives may hang the Amiga if powered up when the Amiga is cold-booted.) Panasonic CD-501 (ROM 1.0b) (NOT RECOMMENDED due to incompatibilities.) Pioneer DRM-600 will be added in version 1.0c. Hitachi drives will be "added soon." The following SCSI controllers are supported: CDTV Commodore 2091, 590, and Amiga 3000 GVP Impact Series II and 68030 Combo (4.4 ROMs) IVS Trumpcard Classic and Professional (4.9 ROMs) AsimCDFS requires at least 512K RAM. On my system, mounted with four 48K buffers, AsimCDFS uses approximately 520K RAM. SOFTWARE AsimCDFS works under Amiga OS versions 1.3 and 2.0 (and presumably versions higher than 2.0). COPY PROTECTION None. Installs easily on a hard drive. GETTING THE LATEST VERSION If you buy AsimCDFS in a store today, the chances are that you may get version 1.0, which is NOT the latest version. Currently, the latest version is 1.0b, and the upgrade is $5.00 to cover the cost of the disk, mailer, and postage. If you have a Toshiba drive, you NEED at least version 1.0b. The NEC, Panasonic, and Chinon drives are supported by 1.0. INSTALLATION AsimCDFS uses the standard Commodore "Installer" program, making installation very easy. I used the "expert level" installation mode, so I was prompted for the location of every file installed. I encountered one problem while installing AsimCDFS. I decided to install one of the files in a directory different from the default. So, I clicked on the directory name to change it. The installation program beeped several times and then hung. The problem is that I was supposed to click on the "Change Destination" gadget to change the directory name, not edit the name directly. I do not know whether Asimware or Commodore is at fault. ASIMCDFS I tested AsimCDFS on an A3000T with a Toshiba TXM-3301B CDROM drive ($400 US by mailorder). The Toshiba has a 64K data cache, an average access time of 325ms, and a sustained data transfer rate of 150K/sec. (Burst rate is 1.5MB/sec.) [Although this does not have to do with AsimCDFS, I should note that the A3000T cannot cold-boot unless there is a disc in the Toshiba drive. This is a minor annoyance, and I believe it can be corrected by changing the SCSI ID of the boot drive to be less than the Toshiba's, but I haven't tried this.] Once AsimCDFS was installed and running, I tested it with several CDROM's: FishMarket (included with AsimCDFS), the AB20 and USENET Source Code disc from Walnut Creek CDROM, and The Fred Fish Collection version 1.5 from Hypermedia Concepts. Both Walnut Creek discs are ISO 9660 level 1 (filenames limited to 12 characters), and both Fish discs are ISO 9660 level 2 (filenames up to 32 characters). AsimCDFS makes a CDROM disc appear to be an ordinary AmigaDOS volume, usable from both the Workbench and the Shell. The program has no trouble at all reading the data from all my discs. The response time is slower than my hard drive, but much faster than floppies, and I find it acceptable. TORTURE-TESTING ASIMCDFS I decided to have a little fun torture-testing AsimCDFS. :-) IMPORTANT NOTE -- NONE OF THESE TESTS INDICATE ANY PROBLEM WITH ASIMCDFS. They were just for fun, to see what would happen in unusual circumstances. First, I used a program to traverse every directory on an entire CDROM disc (Fred Fish Collection version 1.5). AsimCDFS worked fine during this test. In fact, my program eventually quit after scanning 575 of the 700 directories because it detected an error on the CDROM disc! The directory cd0:FF_DISKS/571-600/FF_576/TermII/Français cannot be read. (I'll have to call Hypermedia about this....) I don't know what this test proved, but it was fun. :-) Next, I tried ejecting the CDROM disc during heavy drive activity. (Hee hee hee.) This did not cause any problems for AsimCDFS. I did discover that some other applications do not work correctly when the disc gets ejected. (This is not AsimCDFS's fault at all -- the applications have a bug.) Next, I tried running several programs that expect standard Amiga filesystems: Quarterback 4.3 (Central Coast Software), backup program AmiBack 2.0 (Moonlighter Software), backup program Zoom 4.2 (Olaf Barthel), floppy disk compresser BootBack (David Joiner), floppy boot block save/restore DiskSalv 1.42 (Dave Haynie), disk repair but asked them to read the CDROM device, CD0:, instead. Heh heh. Both Quarterback and AmiBack worked without a problem. Zoom recognized that CD0: wasn't a floppy and exited properly. BootBack simply hung until I popped out the disc; then it exited. DiskSalv hung until I popped out the disc, and then it reported that it was ready to proceed. So, what the heck, I put the disc back in and DiskSalv immediately reported an error and hung. I popped the disc out again, clicked the close box, and DiskSalv exited. Remember, these "torture tests" do not prove that anything is wrong with AsimCDFS. I intentionally did some nasty, unusual things to see if AsimCDFS would crash. It did not -- AsimCDFS performed fine. ASIMTUNES AsimTunes is a program that displays a graphic "CD player" with a few simple controls: play, stop, next track, previous track, pause, and eject. This allows you to play and control audio CD's using the CDROM drive, assuming that your CDROM drive supports this. All of these functions worked fine. AsimTunes has an ARexx port that accepts commands for most (but not all) of the CD player controls. I tested this and it appears to work fine except for the "EJECTCD" command, which caused my Amiga to crash several times. See the BUGS AND STRANGENESS section below. FISHMARKET CDROM This disc contains Fish Disks 1-637. The Fish Disks are arranged in groups of 25, each group in its own subdirectory. This is a fairly convenient organization if you know the number of the disk you want. I had no trouble writing a short ARexx script to change to the directory of any Fish Disk quickly. If you don't know the disk number, then you can use any of the three Fish Disk navigation programs included: Aquarium, NewAquarium, and FishCat. All three programs have been pre-configured to work for Fish Disks 1-637; all you need to do is click on the icons and start using them. Also included is the general file-handling program "SID". According to Asimware, "FishMarket will be updated periodically, usually coinciding with major software upgrades. Registered users will automatically be informed of updates." From talking with Asimware, I got the feeling that FishMarket will not be updated as often as, say, Hypermedia Concepts' "Fred Fish Collection", which comes out every 4 months. Asimware is not interested in competing with Hypermedia. ADVANCED FEATURES If you are mastering your own CDROM discs, you might find it useful that AsimCDFS can emulate a CDROM from a hard drive. Just write the CDROM image to the hard drive directly, change a few mountlist flags, and you can "access the hard drive exactly as if it were a CDROM." I did not test this feature. DOCUMENTATION AsimCDFS comes with a 21-page stapled booklet which briefly describes all aspects of the package. Although it contains quite a few spelling, grammatical, and typesetting mistakes, the booklet is sufficient for setting up and using AsimCDFS and AsimTunes. I wish there had been more technical information about recommended number of cache buffers, and maybe a description of how to access functions like "eject CD" from our own programs. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS There are currently two other CDROM filesystems for the Amiga: CDROM-FS by Canadian Prototype Replicas, and the filesystem by Xetec (I don't know the name). All three systems read ISO 9660 discs; this is the most common format for Amiga CDROM's. Both Xetec and AsimCDFS also read High Sierra and Mac HFS discs. I have not used the Xetec and CPR filesystems, so I can't compare their performance to AsimCDFS's. However, my friend Mike Meyer (mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us) owns both AsimCDFS and CDROM-FS, and he says that the latest version of CDROM-FS is "noticeably" faster than AsimCDFS. He also says that AsimCDFS's diskchange detection did not work for his CDROM drive, an LMSI 214, but CDROM-FS's works. (AsimCDFS's detection works fine for my Toshiba, and I notice that Mike's drive is not on Asimware's "supported" list.) I chose AsimCDFS over the other programs because (at the time) it was the only system that supported all three different CDROM formats, and because it came with a "free" Fish CDROM disc. BUGS AND STRANGENESS I encountered a number of strange occurrences while using AsimCDFS. All of them (except one) are not serious, and I have reported them to Asimware. AsimCDFS o If you use the program "WShell 2.0", you'll see that WShell appears to have problems seeing the volume name of your CDROM disc. This is due to a bug in AsimCDFS; thanks to Bill Hawes for helping me find it. The problem does not appear when using the Commodore shell. (Technical details: if ParentDir() is called on the root of a volume, it correctly returns NULL. However, AsimCDFS treats this NULL as an error, and stuffs the wrong value into IoErr() -- 211, "invalid object lock." Thus, any program that follows the chain of parents, such as WShell, will see an incorrect error condition.) [AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was fixed in AsimCDFS 1.1.] o There is a buggy interaction between AsimCDFS and Loren Rittle's "ls" version 4.5LJR. Neither Loren nor I know whether the bug lies in "ls" or AsimCDFS. "ls" is unable to list individual files on a CDROM disc when their names are given as arguments, like this: 1> ls file1 file2 file3 (does not work) "ls" prints nothing at all if these files exist. However, listing directories works, and listing using wildcards works: 1> ls (works fine) 1> ls myDirectory (works fine) 1> ls a#? (works fine) The problem does not appear when using Commodore's "List" command. [AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was fixed in AsimCDFS 1.1.] o The filesystem (cd0:) produces strange results when given to the "Version" command: 1> version cd0: Warning: pre-2.0 filesystem o CDROM discs always appear to be 100% full to the "Info" command and other similar commands. Perhaps this is impossible to prevent, but it would be nice if AsimCDFS could indicate how much of the CDROM's capacity has actually been used. o While AsimCDFS is running, the Amiga's drive activity light flashes briefly every 2 seconds. According to Mike Meyer, this is due to AsimCDFS's checking for disc insertion. [AUTHOR'S NOTE: Asimware reports that this is normal behavior.] AsimTunes o This is the only SERIOUS problem. I wrote a short script to invoke AsimTunes, eject the current CDROM, and then shut down AsimTunes. /* Eject the CDROM */ CDPORT = 'AsimTunesRexx.1' IF ~Show('P', CDPORT) THEN DO ADDRESS COMMAND 'run > NIL: < NIL: AsimTunes cd0:' WaitForPort CDPORT END ADDRESS VALUE CDPORT 'EJECTCD' 'SHUTDOWN' Unfortunately, this occasionally causes the Amiga to crash. Once, it crashed so badly that the "Insert Workbench Disk" picture appeared, even though my "Workbench Disk" is my hard drive! This worried me a lot, but a reboot made the system come up OK. I cannot see anything wrong with this script, so I blame AsimTunes for the crashes. o Typing the command 1> AsimTunes ? does not produce a usage message. Instead, AsimTunes tries to open a file called "?". Thus, AsimTunes is not compliant with Commodore's "User Interface Style Guide". o The ARexx command documentation shows the command names using mixed case. However, the commands are accepted only in upper case. [AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was fixed in AsimTunes 1.1.] SUPPORT I have called Asimware several times with questions. The person on the phone, who I believe was Paul Reeves, was courteous and helpful every time. One conversation with Asimware was quite interesting. They plan to market a CDTV emulation package, and a music librarian for your compact discs. CONCLUSIONS AsimCDFS is a good product. It installs easily, works as advertised, and has no serious bugs that I could detect. In addition, $50.00 (mailorder) for a CDROM filesystem and a Fred Fish CDROM is a bargain; in comparison, the CPR filesystem plus Hypermedia disc would cost $44 + $37 = $81 by mailorder. AsimTunes is a simple CD player which works OK, except for the "eject" mechanism, which I do not trust. FishMarket is reasonably well organized and a great resource to have around. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review is Copyright 1992 Daniel J. Barrett. All rights reserved. It may be freely distributed as long as it is distributed unmodified. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu