Dragaera

The Gypsy

David Silberstein davids at kithrup.com
Tue Dec 9 17:52:29 PST 2003

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, David Silberstein wrote:

>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, David Silberstein wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Jose Marquez wrote:
>>
>>>I'm running Windows XP on an Athlon 3200+ processor, 1 GB RAM, with a 
>>>DVD-ROM and CD-RW.
>
>Update: I booted from a Win98 diskette, choosing CD-ROM support of
>course, and I was able to see the data portion of the CD.
>
>So Linux is not necessary.

Furthur update:

I have been doing some more research, and I think I can explain what I
have found (skip to the end if you're not interested in the messy
technical details).

The "i-trax" format is apparantly the same as, or exceedingly similar
to, a format called "CD-ROM Ready".  This format calls for creating
the CD in such a way that the pregap area before the first track is
used for data. 

Note that this is highly non-standard!  The pregap area is supposed to
only be 3 seconds long.  The data area on the Gypsy is about 115 MB,
which comes to about 11 or 12 minutes!  But an ordinary CD player just
skips the whole thing.

Now, the reason this works in DOS & Linux is because these OSes start
reading from the index of 0 - the CD driver sees the filesystem, and
displays the files in there.  The audio tracks start at an index of 1
(and on Linux, I can play the audio tracks while looking at the
datafiles.  Pretty nifty, eh?).

But for some reason, Microsoft apparantly decided to break this
behavior.  I think it might be because they built Windows 2000, and
later Windows XP, from the Windows NT codeline.  I had severe problems
reading the CD on NT; it did not like the strange formatting at all.
So I suspect they fixed the problems NT was having with such CDs, but
did so in such a way that the CD driver would only show the audio
tracks.  I suspect they did not care about breaking i-trax because
that format is apparantly very rare, and is not longer used to create
mixed audio & data CDs.

Anyway, after trying all sorts of different searches, I found
reference to someone else who had a similarly hidden track, and said
that the tool that was able to access it was called Isobuster. 

I downloaded this program, and it works very well.  I am able to
see the data in the track 1 pregap of /The Gypsy/ in Windows 2000, no
booting tricks necessary, and copy it off.  I am nearly certain that
it will work fine on Windows XP as well.

   http://www.smart-projects.net/isobuster/