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SCSI Yamaha CDR400t-NB CD-R drive, Mac OS 8.1 compatible?
Posted by: Snial on 2024-07-15 10:31:51
Hi folks,

I found a SCSI Yamaha CDR400t-NB CD-R drive at my Dad's house, so I thought I'd 'rescue' it ;-) ! It was loose inside the SCSI enclosure so I spent a bit of time drilling some holes in the bottom so I could fix it in place. When I hooked it up to my PowerBook 1400c/166 under Mac OS 8.1 (with the Apple CD-ROM extension) it doesn't seem to recognise any CD inside even though Drive Setup sees it as a SCSI CD-ROM.

ScsiWithCdRom.png

The expansion bay CD-ROM worked. I guess the SCSI cable & termination is basically OK, because otherwise it wouldn't have identified the drive. Do those drives need a special driver? Of course, the drive itself might not be working properly, I didn't hear the CD spin-up. I'm not holding out much hope that the PB1400 is fast enough to write to a CD-R, though that would be an amazing bonus if I got it to work and it did!

Any ideas?
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-15 11:18:31
First question: are we sure th f drive actually can read discs? A hardware failure is very possible if the drive itself indeed shows up in drive setup. I’d also check Apple System Profiler and see what it says about the drive.
Posted by: Snial on 2024-07-15 12:52:22
First question: are we sure th f drive actually can read discs?
I don't know. I don't even know why I have a 4x SCSI CD-R drive. It doesn't come from my HP 715 PA-RISC workstation; and although I had a 90's or early 00's PC desktop given to me in the late 00's, I think it had IDE only.
A hardware failure is very possible if the drive itself indeed shows up in drive setup.
Agreed. I've never seen it working anyway, so it's a very real possibility.
I’d also check Apple System Profiler and see what it says about the drive.
I wonder if somehow, even if a disc doesn't mount, it'll play a music CD via the Apple CD player. It doesn't need to read much data then, just know it's an audio CD and play audio out the headphone socket.

I haven't tried any of these things yet, so I'll try and do that next.
Posted by: Arbee on 2024-07-15 13:17:01
A lot of versions of the CD-ROM extension would ignore CD-ROM drives that didn't return an APPLE COMPUTER INC ID string, similar to what unpatched HD SC Setup does with hard drives. I ran into that in MAME until I added the ID. Also, the Apple CD drives used proprietary audio playback commands because they pre-dated the SCSI MMC standard that made the now-standard commands exist. So audio playback is potentially the least likely thing to work.
Posted by: Forrest on 2024-07-15 13:59:43
I’d bet the drive will work if you install CDRom Toolkit compatible with MacOS 8.1
Posted by: Arbee on 2024-07-15 14:01:56
Right, a third party extension should do the trick if the drive itself is OK.
Posted by: Snial on 2024-07-15 14:18:37
A lot of versions of the CD-ROM extension would ignore CD-ROM drives that didn't return an APPLE COMPUTER INC ID string, similar to what unpatched HD SC Setup does with hard drives. I ran into that in MAME until I added the ID. Also, the Apple CD drives used proprietary audio playback commands because they pre-dated the SCSI MMC standard that made the now-standard commands exist. So audio playback is potentially the least likely thing to work.
So, you're saying that I need to add the ID... as a string in a resource in the CD-ROM extension? I suppose the Apple System Profiler has provided the string?

AppleSystemProfiler.png
OK, so I can't just see a string, but I have Vendor, Product ID. And yep, the CD audio player didn't like it:
AppleCdRomPlayer.png

I’d bet the drive will work if you install CDRom Toolkit compatible with MacOS 8.1
OK, I'll have search... Macintosh Garden?
Right, a third party extension should do the trick if the drive itself is OK.
OK, I'll try these things.
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-15 14:19:50
I mean you can try FBW CD Toolkit and all that. I honestly have had the best luck with late-release Apple CD/DVD driver extension. I have two non-Apple CD and DVD drives in my PT Pro and it drives them just fine.
Posted by: pizzigri on 2024-07-15 15:05:26
If it’s the silver grey external Yamaha drive it’s a bitch to make it work… i gave up years and years ago.
it had proprietary drivers and I believe was primarily made for pc. Also it was used in the music industry so who knows…. I remember ditching it for one of the Plextors
Posted by: Forrest on 2024-07-15 15:36:37

Looks like FWB CD-ROM ToolKit 4.0 is what you need.​
Posted by: Snial on 2024-07-16 12:58:23

Looks like FWB CD-ROM ToolKit 4.0 is what you need.​

Thanks for the advice, however, FWB CD-ROM Toolkit 4.0 doesn't seem to work. The Mac boots up OK with the extension on, but the application crashes with a type 3 error. I increased the application memory size to 2MB from 500K, but it still crashed immediately with a Type 3.
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-16 13:49:44
My go-to in this case is to try and use the Apple CD/DVD Driver extension that comes with 9.1 or something. That might work. FWB always gives me crazy errors when I have tried it, too.
Posted by: saybur on 2024-07-16 14:18:08
Lacie made external SCSI burners with Yamaha drives; those shipped with Adaptec Toast, might be worth trying out the Toast extension as well and see if that works.
Posted by: pizzigri on 2024-07-16 15:19:50
Lacie made external SCSI burners with Yamaha drives; those shipped with Adaptec Toast, might be worth trying out the Toast extension as well and see if that works.
That’s actually excellent advice - I second that. I remember having the extensions in the “must have” disc with the rest of the tools
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-16 15:31:34
Good call on toast…might work.
Posted by: Snial on 2024-07-16 15:37:01
My go-to in this case is to try and use the Apple CD/DVD Driver extension that comes with 9.1 or something. That might work. FWB always gives me crazy errors when I have tried it, too.
OK, and that'll work on Mac OS 8.1?
Lacie made external SCSI burners with Yamaha drives; those shipped with Adaptec Toast, might be worth trying out the Toast extension as well and see if that works.
OK, I'll try that if I can find it on Macintosh Garden.

Thanks for the help, so far!
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-16 16:47:00
OK, and that'll work on Mac OS 8.1?
Yes it should still work fine.
Posted by: Snial on 2024-07-17 02:31:13
OK, next update. I tried the CD DVD extension from the Mac OS 9.1 updater. As normal, it was a bit of a trial getting there! I had the Mac OS 9.1 updater on CD, which I can read from the PB1400's internal CD drive. There's a system Tome, which I couldn't read. So, I found Tome Viewer on Macintosh Garden. I'm doing all my proper transfers using a compact flash card between this Mac mini 2012 and the PB1400's PCMCIA drive, so there's extra copying stages!

It's in a later .sit format. I could unpack it using my UnstuffIt, but I couldn't open the .img file it unpacked to. So, then I booted up the PowerMac 9500 on Infinite Mac with Mac OS 8.6. Disk Copy 6.3 was on that, so I was able to mount that .img; then I compressed the application using Compact Pro (the best thing ever) and then BinHex'd it for good measure; copied it to the Compact flash card and uncompressed it onto the PB1400.

Now I could read the Tome. I found the CD/DVD extension; unarchived that and then popped it into my System Folder. The extension worked - I could still read CDs on the internal CD drive. However, the external Yamaha CD-R drive still didn't work.

Next attempt, trying Toast. If that doesn't work, I'm toast ;-) !
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-07-17 02:43:53
Sorry for the hassle there. At least you ruled something out!
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