MyAtari magazine : Singin' in the rain

If you're running a CD-ROM drive on your ST, TT or Falcon, there's a good chance you're using the popular ExtenDOS driver in one of its various guises.

Roger Burrows of Anodyne Software recently came on a visit to the UK. We caught up with him for a beer at the Pizza Piazza by the river in Kingston upon Thames, where it rained cats and dogs in typical British fashion!

Roger: I stole it from my brother. He had a side business in the UK of fixing up cars and reselling them. In order to get the trade discount for car parts, he had some letterhead printed up that said Anodyne Engineering. It also sounds (or did in the early '90s) vaguely futurist. And my dictionary defines anodyne as something that relieves mental distress, which I hope is what our software does :-)

Roger: The programs with a significant user interface (CD Writer Suite and bits of ExtenDOS Gold) are all written in C. We use either the Lattice C (v5.60) compiler or the Pure C compiler. The driver part of ExtenDOS Gold (EXTENDOS.PRG, CD.BOS, UNIDRIVE.DOS) is written in assembler (Devpac v3.10) for maximum performance and minimum size.

Roger: Probably not soon, although it is a future objective. At the moment (at least here in North America), there does not seem to be much available on DVD apart from movies. It's doubtful that many Atari systems could handle the data rates required for video playback, so making the files available doesn't seem to be very useful. When we start to see more Atari-friendly stuff available on DVDs (or if someone can convince me that it's useful right now :-)), I'll take another look. It is a fairly big task, since the file system implemented on DVDs is totally different from that used on other media.

MyAtari: How long does it take you to write driver support for a new CD-ROM drive and what does it involve?

Roger: It mostly depends on the documentation available. Some vendors are willing to provide programming documentation, some aren't. For the older drives (before 1994/95), this was significant. Apart from basics like reading a data sector, each vendor (and sometimes different drives from the same vendor) implemented their own set of commands.

I did add support for some drives by experimentation and/or reverse-engineering of their MS-DOS drivers, but this sometimes took months, so support for the fancier features (like audio playback ;-)) in older drives is often limited to those vendors who were willing to provide documentation. This includes Chinon, Nakamichi, NEC, Pioneer, Plextor/Texel, Sony and Toshiba.

Around 1994/95, the SCSI-2 standard was introduced, which standardised command sets for many devices including CD-ROM drives. This simplified things, although different vendors still had their own extensions for things that weren't in the standard (like reading audio tracks as data). Fortunately there wasn't as much variation in this area.

When CD recorders became available, we were back to the "no defined standard" situation again, although there were only(!) four different sets of commands (plus variations) to handle. Because of the cost of recorders, and the complication of the recording process, support for recorders from this era is limited to those that (1) I could get programming documentation for, and (2) I owned or could borrow for an extended period of time. This limited support to some HP, Philips, and TEAC drives.

In 1997/98, the SCSI-3/MMC standard was released, which provided a standardised recording interface (as well as standardised audio extraction commands). In theory, one set of commands covers all drives, so once you write code to handle that, you're done. The only fly in this particular ointment (pardon the pun) is buggy firmware implementations. This usually seems to affect the recording capabilities of CD recorders, probably because the commands are more complex, and recording technology is newer. Unfortunately there's no practical way of testing every drive that comes onto the market, so when selecting a drive, it's best to stick to the tried and true.

Roger: Assuming you're looking at a new reader, any of the better-known brand names should be OK. The best are probably Plextor (who are also probably the most expensive).

As far as recorders are concerned, I think you need to be more careful, since I have encountered more firmware bugs in this area. I prefer those who provide good documentation and conform to standards, which for me means Plextor, Yamaha and TEAC. Overall the Plextor drives seem to be the best (although I have a Yamaha myself). Drives from Sony or Ricoh should be OK. I would recommend staying away from "off-brand" names; also, although it's a well-known name, Panasonic, since they are unwilling to provide documentation and I ran into a particularly severe firmware bug on one of their drives (although I eventually circumvented it successfully).

If you look at our web site, you can see what drives are known to work with our software; if you can't find the one you're interested in, send me an e-mail, I might have more up-to-date info.

Roger: I started programming Atari software around 1990, but didn't get into CD-ROM development until late 1993. Before 1990, I had programmed on the Commodore PET (remember the keyboard :-)) in 6502 assembler and BASIC, and on an S-100 system in Z80 assembler and Small C. And before that, in various languages on mainframes...

Roger: I wanted to be able to read CDs on my own system, but at the time the only way was to use MetaDOS, which had a few bugs and didn't support many drives. I had done some programming at an operating-system level previously, and felt that I could do better myself. For compatibility reasons, I implemented the same interface in ExtenDOS as in the original MetaDOS, although there have been a lot of extensions since. I used to do other programming on the Atari, but CD-ROM software turned out to be a full-time job :-)

Roger: Canada is (inevitably) rather like the US in this respect, although I suspect that Atari always had a higher market penetration north of the border. The last Atari store in Ottawa closed probably five years ago, and there aren't many user groups left, mostly because of the decline in people using Atari systems, but partly because of the advent of the internet. By the way, I'm sure that the internet has prolonged support for Atari systems, by providing communications between individual users who would formerly have attended user groups, and allowing small companies like Anodyne Software to advertise worldwide.

Roger: We're always working on updates of one kind or another. The next program to get a major upgrade should be ExtenDOS. I'm also trying to find time to work on a non-CD project for some hardware that I have, but I don't want to say any more until I get a little bit further. Unfortunately I got held up for a month or more by problems that turned out to be a dying SCSI chip on one of my TTs.

MyAtari: What Atari machines do you currently own? Are we correct in thinking you own two TTs?

Roger: No, actually I have three :-) I have one that I do my development on, one that is used as a test machine for running ExtenDOS on other systems (MagiC, MiNT) or with other hardware, and a spare that sits on the shelf as a backup. I also have a Falcon, a Mega STE and a 1040. Other systems include a Mac II for running MagicMac (again, mostly as a testbed).

Roger: Actually, it's a lot of fun! There's lots of stuff going on (more than I can keep up with), and I see lots of people doing interesting and challenging work and producing great programs. From a programming point of view, I don't know any other system that I'd rather work with. And I've met, talked to, or exchanged emails with lots of people that I would never have met otherwise. Back in the olden days (before the PC, before even Apple), working with microcomputers was a fun and challenging hobby. That's how I prefer it, and that's what Atari systems provide today, I believe.

Roger: Myself and Claude Labelle. I met Claude through the local user group and he was interested in doing some programming on his Falcon. Around that time I was starting to look at writing CD recording software, and realised that it was going to be a huge task for one person. Claude was interested in getting some CD recording software, and has more of an eye for user interface design than I have. So it was a good match: he wrote the user interface side of CD Writer (our audio recording program), and I designed the extensions to the MetaDOS interface, then wrote the new driver code required for the hardware.

This partnership has also helped our testing efforts, since I do most of my work on a TT under plain TOS, while Claude uses MagiC on the Falcon, giving us a range of testing environments. Of the other programs in CD Writer Suite, I wrote CDbackup and Claude wrote CD InScriptOr, so it has really been a joint development effort.

MyAtari: You mentioned your brother in the UK. Can you give us a little background about yourself?

Roger: Although I've been in Canada for many years, I was born and raised in the UK, and still have friends and family here, so I usually get over once a year for a visit. I first encountered computers at university in a physics course (this was before there were any undergraduate degrees in computer science). After graduation I worked for IBM in the UK for four years, then emigrated to Canada and continued to work in the computer field.

Photo of Roger Burrows in Kingston upon Thames

Kingston's Coronation Stone, where kings and queens were crowned. Here's Roger getting a reminder of why he left England!

MyAtari: What's your involvement in Europe Shareware North America (ESNA)? Has it been successful so far?

Roger: ESNA is a joint effort between ourselves at Anodyne and Bengy Collins. Bengy looks after the web site, we receive the money and forward the orders to ES in France. This simplifies purchases and reduces the expense for North American users, since they don't have to worry about bank transfers or buying drafts in a foreign currency. We are still in the beginning stages of ESNA; one of the issues is the language of the software, which is mostly German or French. For most users in the USA in particular, this presents a problem. We are considering translating some of the more popular packages into English, but that will take some time.

MyAtari: You're on the CT60 developer model list. What are you going to do with all that power?

Roger: Do compilations in 5 seconds instead of 30? I don't really know, but I'm looking forward to finding out. The 68060 is the end of the line as far as the 68000 architecture is concerned, so there will never be a faster (native-code) Atari system, and I figured I'd better get one now or never. The idea of no motherboard modifications appeals to me a lot, after sweating over the CT2B upgrade on Claude's machine. Anyway, you know who to go to for a hands-on review of the CT60 :-)

Roger: Coming soon to an on-line magazine near you (just got a couple of diagrams to do, honest...)

Anodyne Software is giving two lucky readers the chance to each win a copy of the latest version of ExtenDOS Gold 3, the CD-ROM driver software for Atari ST, TT Falcon and compatibles.

All you have to do is e-mail your full name and postal address (including country and ZIP/postal code) to anodyne@myatari.net. Doesn't get easier than that, does it?!

The winners will be picked at random and announced on Christmas day. Entries must be received by 00:00 GMT 20 December 2001. Neither Anodyne Software or MyAtari accepts any responsibility for delays in transmission. The judge's decision is final.