CD-ROM on XL-400?

[Reti@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Kalman Reti)]

    Date: Wed, 25 Jul 90 15:57:31 MDT
    From: drstrip@cs.sandia.gov (David R Strip [1411])

    Has anyone attached a CD-ROM to an XL-400? How do
    you do it? Drivers? Comments? Thanks
    strip
    drstrip@cs.sandia.gov
How hard to do this depends upon what's on the CD rom and what
you want to do with it.  Assuming the controller is SCSI (since
that's the only one you can hardwarily connect to an XL400),
there are routines for issuing SCSI commands from user code.
Presumably the SCSI device has some other machine's file
system on it (either DOS's or the MAC's I'd guess); you'd have
to get the details of the layout of those file systems on disk
to be able to write the code to retrive data from those files.
This is not hard if the file format is simple, but I don't think
anyone has done it yet.  (The most time-consuming part is likely
to be reading/understanding/validating the documention of the
file system format. There IS someone working on an optical
read/write disk driver, but it uses the Mac partition format to
consider the whole of one partition a FEPFS, and to my knowledge
there are no CD roms in existence which use that format. ;->