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Presenting The CDR-ROM
nachoboy writes "Here's a cool new idea: the CDR-ROM. Allows a portion of the CD to be written and them mass produced, leaving the remaining area recordable by the user. It may sound funny, but if AOL started sending out CD's like this I might just start keeping them around."
Multi-session CD writes offer a similar functionality. The first widespread use of this was the Kodak PhotoCD - you could put your photos on the same CD again and again until it was full, because it used multi-session.
E000-VB14-G8RY
Easy...
Install once, write on the CD "I have been installed" and refuse nay other installation attempt.
I have thought about this idea before, but it's a really half-baked idea. Here's why:
Manufacutring cost:
It's more expensive to produce a disc like this than it is to manufacture a blank CDR or a pressed CD-ROM. For any application where this type of thing would be required, it could easily be written during the manufacutring process onto a regular CDR. I would imagine that there is roughly an equivalent cost to producing one of these hybrid discs versus publishing on CD-R to begin with. In addition to this, think about all that would be involved with retooling a plant to be able to manufacture discs with a different ratio of CD-ROM to CD-R, not to mention the additional burdens it's going to place on testing equipment that will have to be able to verify both the pressed disc and the blank section.
Reduced capacity:
The CDR-ROM disk will have a reduced capacity compared to a normal pressed CD-ROM or a CD-R because no data will be able to be written at the point at which the two disc types meet. The reduction in capacity would be small, but prevalent.
Drive compatibility problems:
Secondly, the huge installed base of CDROM drives out there will not have good compatibility with this kind of a disc. Most drive firmware treats CD-R and CD-ROM media differently to achieve optimum read performance with different kinds of media. When you put this hybrid thing in your 50x cdrom you got three years ago, it's going to spin up to maximum thinking it's a pressed disc then read error all over the fucking place when it hits the CDR section. The onl thing to do is to fake the cdrom into thinking that the disc is a CD-R in its entirety, but then you don't get any of the advantages of having a pressed disc anyway, such as increased read speed without new drives that cater to this special format.
Software compatibility problems:
Due to the way ISO9660 works, the table of contents (including the TOC for the data on the pressed section) will likely have to be re-burned by any software that writes to the CD-R section of the disc. Thus, a faulty burn would render the entire disk unreadable by most systems.
The only good application I can think of for this is for a console game system where you have the luxury of ensuring a uniform set of hardware capabilities between users, and the ability to break standards to accomplish this weird hybrid design stuff. A game could keep save data on the disc or extra game data or something while protecting the game data itself. The media, though, should be CDRW and not CD-R. For those of you who remember, think about the dreamcast's data format -- use some kind of DVD format for the "outer ring" of game data, and use CDRW for the inner ring of PC/CDROM compatibility. You could pop your Xbox2 game into your PC to download new levels or whatever. Unfortunately, internal storage, and fast network connections inside of future (and some present) game consoles would render this idea pretty pointless also.
~GoRK