DOS Compatibility Card: No Support for Non-Apple CD-ROMs (2/94)

I have a DOS Compatibility Card in my Macintosh and I want to use my non-Apple brand CD-ROM player. I talked to the vendor of the CD-ROM drive about getting MS-DOS drivers for it, and they told me that their drivers were designed for a specific SCSI controller card. What SCSI controller card is the DOS Compatibility Card emulating?

The Macintosh is not emulating a SCSI controller. The CDROM.SYS CD-ROM driver is not really a SCSI driver, it simply reroutes certain CDROM calls from the DOS side to the Macintosh cdrom drive. Apple wrote CDROM.SYS specifically to reroute the calls. A standard MS-DOS CD-ROM driver will not work, because it is not written to reroute the calls to the Apple CD-ROM extension.

You may be able to use parts of a CD-ROM disc by using the folder sharing feature on the CD-ROM. This is the only way to use non-Apple CD-ROM drives unless the vendor creates a specific DOS driver to transfer CD-ROM calls from the DOS side to the third-party CD-ROM driver on the Macintosh side.

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