Singin'
in the rain
Interview:
Anodyne Software
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!
MyAtari: Tell us, Roger,
what's in a name?
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 :-)
MyAtari: What programming
language(s) do you use?
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.
MyAtari:
Can
we expect DVD support from ExtenDOS soon?
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.
MyAtari: Do you recommend
any particular brands?
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.
MyAtari: How long have you
been programming Atari software?
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...
MyAtari: What made you decide
to concentrate on CD-ROM software?
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 :-)
MyAtari: What is the Atari
scene like in Canada?
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.
MyAtari: Do you plan to release
any new software soon?
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).
MyAtari: What is your opinion
of the Atari scene at the moment?
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.
MyAtari: Who does Anodyne
consist of?
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.
|
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 :-)
MyAtari: We'll hold you to
that. Fancy writing anything else for us?
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. |