PCem

Dear Sarah: I noticed you have been working with the CD-ROM lately, I take the opportunity to make a small request.
Maybe you don't find it useful, but I'd appreciate if one's could select the speed of the CD-ROM reader: some selectable speeds like 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x and MAX, to compare and feel how long it took to load back in the day. Thanks

Great idea.

A slower CD-ROM speed would probably benefit......certain games' installers that give out game lore by sound as the installer goes. Activision titles come to mind (Interstate '76, Battlezone, etc)

omarsis81 wrote: ↑Wed 07 Mar, 2018 4:06 pmsome selectable speeds like 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x and MAX

It doesn't have to stop at 16x. We could go all the way to 56x

leilei wrote: ↑Wed 07 Mar, 2018 7:39 pm It doesn't have to stop at 16x. We could go all the way to 56x

Maybe even those obscure 72x drives

I was quite fond of my 16x CD-ROM drive back in the day. When I upgraded to the 52x drive I never looked back. Even today with my fancy DVD burner with lightscribe technology, I never regretted the upgrade as my CDs run so quickly and smoothly.

This would be a nifty feature. We can relive the glory days when CD-ROM drives were novelties.

The appropriate whirring noises would also have to be emulated. Don't know if there can be an organized effort to sample the hardware we have for sound, like getting a drive to record a cd/diskette being copied and going through the insert/eject cycle etc.

UAE has quite interesting sounds of floppy disk drive, it is very well done , and it feel nice to.

I've committed a rough implementation of this to rev 1110. Seek times are a very rough model, transfer time is impacted by the existing ATAPI & SCSI emulation, but performance should be roughly correct, particularly for the lower speed drives.

SarahWalker wrote: ↑Sat 17 Mar, 2018 11:41 am I've committed a rough implementation of this to rev 1110. Seek times are a very rough model, transfer time is impacted by the existing ATAPI & SCSI emulation, but performance should be roughly correct, particularly for the lower speed drives.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! However I will only will be able to test it in the next release of PCem. I saw that leilei tested it and show very close results

Awesome idea, thanks for adding this! I see that 56x is missing from the list of available speeds--any particular reason for that? I realize that the accuracy is iffy toward the higher end of the speed range in this implementation, but just about every other common speed now seems to be accounted for and it would round out the list quite nicely to have 56x in there.

Added in rev 1115.