Date   : Thu, 11 Jan 2007 13:33:36 -0600
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Domesday players and modern hardware

Richard Gellman wrote:
>> No word from the Camelion lot yet as to what they did...
> 
> We* used a PC and a SCSI card to read it, and I believe some sector 
> reading software.

Hmm, do you recall which card and which OS? Somewhere I've got an old PAS16 
sound card that has a dumb SCSI controller on it - that has no BIOS so at 
least won't get upset at boot time. Still doesn't get me around the fact that 
Linux seems to 'offline' any device that doesn't respond to Inquiry at 
startup, though (and I'd rather use some sort of Unix-a-like if possible just 
because it does allow the user raw access to the device sectors).

> Note that speed is not really relevant when it comes to data transfer. 
> The LV-ROM player is actually incredibly slow at reading data, so you 
> never really get much more than about 15K/sec at the most.

Wow - I didn't think it would be quite that slow; I was guessing at somewhere 
between 100 - 200K/sec or so.

> I built an interface to transfer the data to a PC  via a User to 
> Parallel port link, and it still took around 9 hours to do one disc.

Hmm, that's sort-of OK. I've run my system for quite a few hours before now 
without hiccups. Are details of the cable that you used and the software that 
was run at each end of the link available anywhere?

cheers

Jules