Comment by dylan604
2 years ago
It was all of the forked data that made dual format CDs/DVDs "interesting". In the beginning it was a trick. Eventually, the Mac burning software made it a breeze. Making a Mac bootable DVD was also interesting.
2 years ago
It was all of the forked data that made dual format CDs/DVDs "interesting". In the beginning it was a trick. Eventually, the Mac burning software made it a breeze. Making a Mac bootable DVD was also interesting.
I recall seeing CD-ROMs that had both Mac and Windows software on it, and depending on which OS it was mounted on, it would show the Windows EXE or the Mac app... I wonder how that's done. I'm guessing there was a clever trick so files on both filesystems share the same data (e.g. if the program/game had a movie, it would only store the bytes of the movie once but its addressable as a file on each filesystem), but that sounds like a nightmare.
I can probably look it up and figure it out myself, ah, the joys of learning about obsolete tech!
As it starts about 32k in, the ISO 9660 superblock doesn't inherently conflict with an Apple partition map which starts at the beginning. Apple also had proprietary ISO 9660 extensions that add extra metadata to the directory entries much like the RockRidge extension does. Those would get ignored by non-Apple implementations of ISO 9660.
Microsoft went a different route with its long filename extensions (Joliet) – they simply created a whole different (UCS-2/UTF-16 encoded) directory tree. An ISO 9660 implementation that's compatible with Joliet will prefer the Unicode directory hierarchy and look there for files.
You can hide files from windows by setting a property on the file. You can hide files from MacOS by inserting it's name in a file called ".hidden".
There were also the audio CDs that had data on them. Audio CD players would just play the audio, but a CD-ROM could access both. Some had apps that were games that would play the audio portion for the game.
If you want to know about the different types of CDs, you'll want to know about the various colors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
Some Playstation 1 were setup to also play the game soundtrack if you put them in an audio CD player.
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I remember this site from the 00's: http://cdrfaq.org
I remember listening to the Warcraft 2 soundtrack from the game CD-ROM in the living room audio CD player.
IIRC from that time, those CD-ROMs contained two tracks, one formatted with ISO 9660 and another with HFS+. Windows didn't come with HFS+ drivers so it ignored it, and probably MacOS prioritized mounting the HFS+ track.
I've seen some where the combined file size exposed on each track would be larger than a CD could hold, so there had to be something more going on. StarCraft and Brood War come to mind with the large StarDat.mpq / BrooDat.mpq files.
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