Using Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive and the A500 / A2000 IDE Interface

Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive

Recently one of the people that bought an IDE interface for his Amiga 500+ contacted me because he couldn't get his Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive setup, up and running.

From experience i knew that i had it working at some time, but did not have the details of the setup by hand anymore,
So i decided to setup a build mimicing as much as possible the setup he wanted.
after some struggling and a stupid mistake (unkeyed cables give a green screen if a DVD drive has it's connector upside down, and you decide that pin 1 is always on the left side of the connector !)

Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive, why ?

Pistorm (Mushasi) has the ability to use SCSI devices and that can both be harddisk images and CD / DVD ISO files, so why the hell would you need this setup.
There's not a real single answer to this, but setting up a physical drive helps you exchange data between machines if you don't have a (fast) networking solution.
But also can be very helpful if you need to check out a handful of dvd's you've found somewhere.
Otherwise you have to create images, copy them over and mount them, just to find out it isn't what you were looking for,

It can also be nice to listen to a physical audio CD while working with your amiga

Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive , Setup

I already mentioned it somewhere, i work solely with Mushasi, 30 times speed is enough for me, it gives me additional features like networking, USB mouse support, and SCSI emulation through images.

My machine has a Kickstart 3.1 ROM  Image (A1200 version, single file, not byteswapped) in the pistorm config installed.
The bootvolume is a HDF file on the pistorm containing  a very basic setup of Workbench 3.0.

The CD-ROM drive has been setup to master (slave could work also, but is not tested in this run)

Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive, the drives

I tested 3 different drives to make sure it is not a singe CD /DVD drive that works in this setup

Benq DW1625

HP GSA-H21L

HP GCC-44808

all three drives work without issues (Set to master, single device on the IDE chain) once the config has been setup.

Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive , Setting up step by step.

Hardware :

• Remove Power over IDE jumper from IDE interface !
• connect the CD / DVD drive to a straight 40 pin ribbon cable
• Set the drive to Master (Slave could work, but is not tested in this case)

Software :

• I used a Pistorm harddisk image (*.HDF) installed with a almost clean WB 3.0 installation
• copied df0:devs/ide.device to dh0:devs/ (from IDE bootdisk)
• copied df0:L/CD-ROMhandler to dh0:L/ (from IDE bootdisk)
• copied df0:devs/ml_ffs.ml to dh0:devs/ (from IDE bootdisk)
• Copied a newer kickstart ROM Image (3.14 and up) to the Pistorm setup

Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive , Setting up step by step (Cont.).

• edit the df0:devs/ml_ffs.ml and in the CD-ROM section, set the drive ID to 0 , changing device from 1 to 0 is enough in that case.
  (If you want to test a slave setup too : create a copy of the CD-ROM section,  and set the device to 0, then rename the CD drive in the 2nd CD-ROM section device to CD1:)
• Kickstart 3.14 (and up) has newer / better support for CD-ROM drives (With older kickstarts it did not work as described, perhaps you'll need aditional drivers)

• Reboot the pistorm
• After the WB has loaded, open a shell and type cd devs, then type mount cd0: from ml_ffs.ml, then type dir CD0:

If all comes back without errors, the drive starts spinning (put a CD in the drive !!) it is ready for use, check it by typing dir CD0: and see if it displays the content of the CD.

If the display shows the content of the CD you're all setup and have a Pistorm with a CD-ROM drive setup.