Mac OS 9 Lives

Mac OS 9 Discussion => Mac OS 9, Hacks & Upgrades => Topic started by: danifunker on December 26, 2025, 03:31:22 AM

Title: USB CDROM Drive Audio Limitations with AppleCD API
Post by: danifunker on December 26, 2025, 03:31:22 AM

Greetings Everyone!

I'm new here!

I've been working on a USB Based CDROM drive emulator called USBODE which you can find on github under usbode-circle

It's currently working on Mac OS 9.2.1 with itunes 1.1 and USB Authoring installed and CD Audio works over Digital Audio Extraction with Mechwarrior 2 and Age of Empires. However, after doing a lot of digging and reverse engineering of different system components, I have found about the AppleCD API which is used by most games that use CD Audio like Carmageddon 2, Quake 2, The Incredible Machine 3 and none of those games are able to play CD Audio over USB.

I've tried testing this with two different physical USB CDROM drives and produced the same results with Quake 2.

Anyways, after doing a lot of investigation, I found the AppleCD resource in the DRVR section of the Apple CD/DVD Driver extension (I've tried versions up to 1.4.8) and noticed only two listed, one for ATA/ATAPI devices (IDE) and the other is for SCSI devices.

I'm trying to figure out if there is a way for me to wire-up the USB Authoring support so it can hook into the Apple CD/DVD Driver somehow, or patch the DRVR resource so it can support USB CDROM drives better.

One of the big annoyances/gotchas was that MacOS 9 never had a native way of loading bin/cue files up without burning them, but fortunately USB CDROM drive emulator does support that. I know BlueSCSI also supports bin/cue files, but since my focus is later generation PPC macs, most of them didn't ship with built-in SCSI support, so that is a bit of a showstopper.

This solution works in iMac as well as iBooks and PowerBooks that have USB 1.1 on them, so this is a great advantage.

Anyways, I'm looking for direction to help support the remaining ~30 games that are known to have redbook audio and don't have OSX ports, as indicated here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_use_Red_Book_CD_audio

Thanks in advance!

Title: Re: USB CDROM Drive Audio Limitations with AppleCD API
Post by: Jubadub on December 26, 2025, 04:12:40 AM

Hey, welcome @danifunker! Thanks for sharing and working on this passion project! I believe this is its page? https://github.com/danifunker/usbode-circle

I wish I could offer technical support there. I would also try my luck asking around 68kMLA to see if anyone there can provide additional input.

Incidentally, could this effort somehow do away with additional hardware, and become a direct BIN/CUE mounter that "tricks" Mac OS 9 into thinking you inserted a multitrack CD? (Game CD, Redbook Audio CD etc..)

Nonetheless, even if it currently requires a RasberryPi, it's great to at least have some option. Thanks again for looking into this!