DDO software

Loftus · 03-31-2003, 10:25 AM

Yeah i know Dynamic Disc Overlay software has been shot to hell and back on this forum but i still have a question that i could find no answer too.
I have a single board computer that runs from a 5 slot ISA backplane. The SBC is hooked up too a 10.4" sharp LCD with touchscreen. The downside to all this is that even with the newest bios it won't recognise my 40GB slave drive full of music (master drive = 120mb running Win95). I can't use a promise card to run the 40GB drive off of since the back plane has no PCI slots.

My question is this: If the DDO software is on the master drive, will it recognise the second 40GB drive without DDO software on it?
The reason i don't want DDO software on the 40GB drive is because i read somewhere that you may run into problems with other operating systems. I update my MP3 archive with the 40GB on a removable rack so i can add songs from my home XP machine.
Anyone that has used DDO software has only used it on a one HD system from what i've read here on this forum. So i nead to hear some input on this.
Aaron, have you ever run into something like this?

MikeHunt79 · 03-31-2003, 02:05 PM

The computer i`m typing this on is now running a slave drive with DDO on it. I`m listening to OGG's from it now.

Here's how it`s done.... use windows XP!

I think theres another way, I think it involes booting from the DDO drive, then pressing a ket to make it boot from another drive... never tried that tho.

Loftus · 03-31-2003, 03:30 PM

could you clear this up a bit for me.

Quote:

The computer i`m typing this on is now running a slave drive with DDO on it. I`m listening to OGG's from it now.

okay so you can use a slave drive with DDO on it under XP if i want to transfer my music files etc... but, i'm assuming your home machine is the XP one right? What about your car player, do you use this drive as a master with the operating system on it or do you have another drive as master and this as the slave. Still my main question is this:
If the DDO software is on the master drive, will it recognise the second 40GB drive without DDO software on it?
I'd like to keep my slave 40GB free of DDO software as i use this drive with my current Win95 MP3 setup in my car and i'm building a seperate system for my Van. Both MP3 players are gonna be Win95 on the 120mb Master drives. I can't have one 40GB drive as a master and expect to use it in two different computers because it will keep changing the configuration each time it boot's up.
I hope i'm making this clear since this is not an everyday senario people would run into.

MikeHunt79 · 03-31-2003, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Loftus
could you clear this up a bit for me. okay so you can use a slave drive with DDO on it under XP if i want to transfer my music files etc... but, i'm assuming your home machine is the XP one right?

Yep

Quote:

Originally posted by Loftus
What about your car player, do you use this drive as a master with the operating system on it or do you have another drive as master and this as the slave.

Option 1. When i take the drive out my home system (with xp), and put it in the car computer, I set it to master (by changing a jumper), and the car computer boots directly from the DDO drive, straight into DOS and loads MPXPLAY.

Quote:

Originally posted by Loftus
Still my main question is this:
If the DDO software is on the master drive, will it recognise the second 40GB drive without DDO software on it?

I`m not 100% sure about this one, as I haven't tried it. BUT... I`m sure your gonna have to format your 40gig with the DDO software if your BIOS won't see the full capacity. Booting from a master drive or not, there's no way round it (afaik).

Quote:

Originally posted by Loftus
I'd like to keep my slave 40GB free of DDO software as i use this drive with my current Win95 MP3 setup in my car and i'm building a seperate system for my Van. Both MP3 players are gonna be Win95 on the 120mb Master drives. I can't have one 40GB drive as a master and expect to use it in two different computers because it will keep changing the configuration each time it boot's up.

I`m 100% sure what you mean here... do you mean you will use the same 40gig drive, and use it in both the van and car. Are you ever going to be booting from the 40 gig drive?

Quote:

Originally posted by Loftus
I hope i'm making this clear since this is not an everyday senario people would run into.

I think i`m i`m keeping up.

I've also had similar problems to this, but it was a fair while ago, so I don`t remember everything i`m afraid.

Also: Try experimenting! It`s the only way you can be truely sure if it's gonna work or not. I think your gonna have to go the DDO route.

Loftus · 03-31-2003, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Are you ever going to be booting from the 40 gig drive?

No i'd rather not, like i said i want to be able to put this drive in any machine as a slave without reconfiguring it each time.
Like you said i guess i gotta try and experiment a bit with it. Maybe this SBC setup will have to be put to a home use instead and have the music pulled through a home LAN setup.
Thanks for the info though, it did clear up some issues i thought i would run into.

MikeHunt79 · 03-31-2003, 06:29 PM

No problem....

One last thing: wtf is "Vocal Genre playlist loading"? You mention it in your sig.

bh76 · 03-31-2003, 10:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Loftus
I can't use a promise card to run the 40GB drive off of since the back plane has no PCI slots.

Another thing to consider:
http://store.firmware.com/cgi-bin/mfi/flash.html
It should do the trick as long as you have an empty ISA slot.

Loftus · 04-01-2003, 09:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by bh76
Another thing to consider:
http://store.firmware.com/cgi-bin/mfi/flash.html
It should do the trick as long as you have an empty ISA slot.

That's what i need! Wow i never heard of a extended BIOS like this before and for $40US bucks i might have to go that route. It's a piece of hardware that might always come in handy anyhow i guess. Maybe i'll wait till after the April computer show, might be able to find a backplane with PCI & ISA slot's.
Thanks for the find it gives me another option.

Loftus · 04-01-2003, 10:06 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by MikeHunt79
One last thing: wtf is "Vocal Genre playlist loading"? You mention it in your sig.

Glad you noticed that as i am quite proud of it. All 12 of my playlists are individually loaded with the announcement of their Genre in a computerized voice. I have a radio faceplate hack where the buttons are hooked up to the keyboard controller circuit board. 8 of the buttons are assigned to a Macro ( 6 for playlists, 1 for shutdown, 1 for reboot of WinAmp ). I used a program called "Advanced Text To Speech" to make wav files for each of the 12 Genre's, Alternative, Rock, Techno etc.... I then used Macro Magic to make a single button do the following example:

The buttons activate keypresses that activate Macros that i made up with Macro Magic, Example: Turn on computer and music starts playing......Push #1 button then music stops, then plays a wav file "Alternative music ...Now loading", then loads the Alternative Dir, starts playing music and then sorts alphabetically by path and filename. The same goes with all the playlist buttons, you get a computerized female voice introducing the genre your about to hear.
Radio Buttons:
SCAN=Shutdown, MODE=Hold mode button in conjunction with #'s 1-6 for 6 more Playlist Dir's for a total of 12. , REP=Reboot winamp, MIX=toggles shuffle, NUMBERS 1-6=Playlist Dir's, >=Seek forward, <=Seek backward, STOP=Stop etc.....

I do a lot of driving at night so backlit buttons were a must feature on my list, and as for the Vocal intro for the playlists..it just help's me remember what button is assigned to what playlist.

MP3DUB · 04-01-2003, 10:57 AM

Its been a looooong while since I delt with Win95 and chipsets with a 8.4gb limitation, but if its a slave drive, I know you can set the drive to none and still have Win2k find the drive, but I cant for the life of me remember if 95/98/ME can do the same.

MikeHunt79 · 04-01-2003, 11:26 AM

Loftus: All i can say is WOW. Nice work. I really like the idea of using speech as a part of the system. I guess if there was a winamp plug-in, it could even feed the song info to the advanced text to speech engine, so you could even have the song titles read out to you, if you didn`t know what you were listening to - which is often the case if you have a large amount of music.

At the moment, my system just use a keypad and MPXplay, and i seem to spend most of my time with the next and shuffle buttons on my keypad.

I also want to put everything in my stock headunit, maybe hack the faceplate aswell. It depends if I get my touchscreen or not.

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