312 Written by Lithium For about three months now I've had the (reasonably) new Zappo CD-ROM from Indi Direct. So I thought I'd give you a little review of it, here goes. The Zappo uses a PCMCIA interface meaning it can be used on a 1200 or 600, in my case a 1200. The actual drive is a Sony CDU33A Double-Speed (300k/sec) type, with a volume control, eject button, loading tray and volume socket on the front. The drive IS multi-session this means that you are able to read data off CDs which have been written onto more than once (this requires VERY expensive h/w). At the moment the only real use for this is with Kodak's PhotoCD which requires a multi-session drive if you want to read data which has been added to the CD after the initial burning. The drive is connected to the Amiga by first connecting a cable from the Amiga's PCMCIA port on the side to the back of the drive, then audio leads are taken from the Amigas audio out to the drives audio in, leads then go from the drives audio out to your monitor, speakers or whatever. The drive then mixes CD audio with Amiga audio and sends it to the CDs Audio out. One annoying thing the Zappo doesn't do is send the mixed audio to the headphones socket as well, it just sends the CD audio so you can't here modules and other Amiga generated stuff through headphones (maybe a bit of a solder job!). Unfortunately the driver software supplied is not on ROM like the A570, it is all supplied on disk. This would normally be a big problem because it would mean you wouldn't be able to boot off cds, but Archos have thought of this so all you have to do is hold down the left mouse while booting your hard drive (or whatever), then a small window comes up allowing you to chose whether or not to boot the CD or boot using a Kickstart 3.1 ROM (not supplied) etc. The actual driver software itself is ok, it reads the discs ok but no more. It's not all that fast, the whole thing can be summarised with ok. The driver sometimes has trouble going in and out of directories, especially when you get into a very deep nested directory tree (as is the case with most CDs), and you occasionally get crap coming up in a directory listing (normally solvable by remounting the device). You can show this by doing some code to jump in and out of a large nested directory in a tight loop, watch it bomb! Maybe I'll have a go at de-bugging it. In theory if you used a program like GrabKick on a CD32 and copied the ROM, you could then use ZKick or something similar so you wouldn't have to use the Zappo driver (cos obviously the CD32 already has driver software on ROM). The only possible problem would be whether the CD32's software would support the drive being plugged in the PCMCIA or not, if anyone trys this and it works, let me know, cheers! The drive(r) supports the following: CD Audio CD's, CD+G Audio CD's and Graphic CD's. The drive does NOT support FMV and it NEVER will do! As many people will know the PCMCIA slot is only 16-bit because it had to follow the A600's PCMCIA for compatibility. This for a start would make it impossible to pull the FMV data out of the drive quick enough! There are also many other technical reasons why it can't be done. The driver emulates the CD32's Akiko chip and pretty good job it does too! Considering the Akiko is a 32-bit custom chip they did a very good job managing to succesfully do a software patch on this. Unfortunately many CD32 games still bomb and a few run to slow (back to the PCMCIA being only 16-bit again) but it's ok. My brother buys a lot of games, whenever he's got a CD32 game so far I've had to do a bit of hacking to get it up, including copying it to my HD which obviously solves the speed problem. Infact Pinball Fantasies is the only game which came straight up (funny considering it was coded by TSL, hardly legal system coders!). Also supplied on the disk are two other programs 'CDDA' and 'Carrousel'. First I'll explain 'CDDA'. Basically it's a direct ripp-off of C='s CD player on the CDTV, A570 & CD32, it looks almost identical and I'd like to say it acts in the same way but it doesn't! It's really crap! I just can't stand the bug-ridden, slow, ugly, jerky, memory-hungry, app_icon interface. So I decided to code my own 'MiniCD' (plug!), MiniCd is under 1K it's not supposed to be a complete replacement for CDDA since as it just plays CDs and nothing else (no skip, pause etc.) but it doesn't require workbench, doesn't require 8MG's of RAM, doesn't spend it's whole life crashing nor does it occupy 250K of disk space (did some one say 'AMOS', no, oh, sorry I thought they did!). Anyway if anyone else hates CDDA as much as I do, get in touch with me and I'll copy you MiniCD. Carrousel looks a bit more promising, it's a PhotoCD reader. With a nice intuition interface, unfortunately I have no PhotoCD's to try it out on but it looks the business! In the UK you can have photo's put onto CD by most processing shops (they all send off to Kodak though) it costs about 5 quid for the first blank CD, from there on about 40p for each photo you add! The quality is absolutely amazing! To summarise, the Zappo CD is good, but not that good. It does the job but nothing more. I was pretty much forced into getting one when C= where gibbing about whether they were going to release theres or not, I am pleased with it and it's pretty good when you get used to it BUT it's not really suitable for lamers (ie. gamers) as it takes a lot of fiddling to get it to work how you want it to. You might even end up having to re-code bits! Basically anyone who can't handle the CLI and scripts should not get the Zappo! At the time of writing this it's still not clear whether C= (or maybe Amiga intl. now) will be releasing the CD1200. At the future entertainment show in London recently C= were there, they said they'd abandoned the CD1200 cos the Zappo had done so well! Other sources reckon it's still going ahead, we'll have to wait and see! - Lithium end.