HELP! -> Enhanced CD's - How to access here in 2018

[JonUrban]

So I opened my big mouth and told someone I had an enhanced CD of an album (Looking East) that had some cool rehersal video's and stuff on it, and volunteered to rip the video and put it on a USB stick for him.
BIG SURPRISE! It's Windows 95 era software and no PC I have in the house will even show the files on the CD other than the audio .cda files.

I Google'd and got nothing of merit, so I figured I'd ask the QQ crowd if anyone has ever tried or figured out how to get the data off one of these. I remember in the old days you would put the CD in the PC and you could browse to a setup.exe or something like that, and there would be a bunch of Quicktime files (or something like that) that you could actually play right off the CD without installing the interface if you had Quicktime installed on your PC.

Anyway, now if I put the CD in the drive there is no data folder, no setup.exe, nothing. It's like the PC does not even know there is a data layer or group on the disc. I tried going back to Windows XP and even an old Windows 2000 box I have tucked away for work stuff. All see just the .cda files.

Anyone have any ideas?

PS - I tried 'Total Commander' and that doesn't see the data layer either.

 

[edisonbaggins]

Are there such things as Windows 95 VMs (virtual machines)? If so, you could possibly play the VM with any number of VM players.
It can be tricky to get a VM to work with/recognize your optical drives though. There are apps that help with that, but I've never tried a 95 VM.

 

[fac23]

The earliest enhanced CDs (from around 1996 - which would apply to Looking East) use a different method to store data than later ones. That's why you can't even see files, because the data partition isn't recognised. IIRC when I switched to a faster CD drive back when I was running Win 98, that the one early enhanced CD I owned couldn't be read anymore. So if I actually remember that right, you might not only need to run Windows 95, but also find an old CD-ROM drive. Should I feel the urgent need to procrastinate extra heavily I might set up a Win98 VM and find out…

 

[JonUrban]

The earliest enhanced CDs (from around 1996 - which would apply to Looking East) use a different method to store data than later ones. That's why you can't even see files, because the data partition isn't recognised. IIRC when I switched to a faster CD drive back when I was running Win 98, that the one early enhanced CD I owned couldn't be read anymore. So if I actually remember that right, you might not only need to run Windows 95, but also find an old CD-ROM drive. Should I feel the urgent need to procrastinate extra heavily I might set up a Win98 VM and find out…

Thanks, but.........

It's not that important. What you are saying makes sense to me, but don't waste time on this.

I just downloaded a program called "IsoBuster", and it shows Track 00, but when I extract the data as an MPG file, nothing reads it, when I extract it as an .ISO file, all my ISO programs see it as corrupt, and the only other option was to extract as audio, and when I do, the resultant .wav file plays like a DTS file without an encoder - so this won't work. Interesting that is sees Track 00, but the info it extracts is useless.

 

[edisonbaggins]

Is the desired information already out on youtube, perhaps?

 

[fac23]

Too bad that the ISO option doesn't work. Would've been too easy, I guess.

 

[JonUrban]

Too bad that the ISO option doesn't work. Would've been too easy, I guess.

Yeah. I have a feeling that you are more than correct about the format of the data being totally obsolete and unattainable using modern equipment. No big deal.

I just wondered if there was an easy way to deal with this. Honestly, I can't believe how time flies as I still remember playing that Enhanced CD on my PC and thought it was very cool to see the rehearsal footage of the band learning the songs. Stuck with me for almost 25 years! It never occurred to me to save the damn thing!

So don't sweat trying to solve this mystery. Apparently the only solution would be to fire up the Delorean and go back to 1994. I just need to collect some Flux Capacitor fuel! (Where are those Libyan's when you need them!)

Thanks!

 

[ArmyOfQuad]

Sounds like a fun challenge....maybe if an iso image of this discs were obtainable somewhere, I might play around with it a bit.

 

[winopener]

View attachment 33327

So I opened my big mouth and told someone I had an enhanced CD of an album (Looking East) that had some cool rehersal video's and stuff on it, and volunteered to rip the video and put it on a USB stick for him.
BIG SURPRISE! It's Windows 95 era software and no PC I have in the house will even show the files on the CD other than the audio .cda files.

Anyone have any ideas?

PS - I tried 'Total Commander' and that doesn't see the data layer either.

Let's clear out a couple of things:
1: CD have only ONE layer - you can say data area and audio area, or data session and audio session.
2: when TRACK01 is DATA, is a MIXED-MODE SINGLE SESSION CD - a true PITA
3: when LAST TRACK is DATA, is a CD-XA MULTI SESSION.

3 is the most common, and was invented exactly because 2 was a PITA for players, both audio and pc.

Here's last post can give a couple of suggestion to try

https://club.myce.com/t/mixed-mode-cd/301923/6

Here's software 6 can be useful

https://www.geckoandfly.com/3223/fr...y-software-to-repair-scratch-or-damaged-disk/

 

[JonUrban]

Thanks Aldo. I think I'm giving up for now, until I find an old CD-ROM drive to use.

I tried CDRoller, from your list above, and it doesn't see the data session, only the audio tracks. And although IsoBuster finds "track 00", I tried it on multiple CDs and it just cannot extract whatever is in there in a usable fashion.

Oh well. Not worth the effort. Too many other things to do. As for an .ISO of the CD, I don't think that would work unless I created it with an old drive and old Nero 6 or lower software.

 

[ArmyOfQuad]

My secondary machine (which recently crashed, but I think it overheated and will probably boot up temporarily now) has an ide dvd burner that I bought in 2001. I could probably even try to do a 98 install on there......and then find out I have no drivers for the motherboard, lol. Not sure if I can do 98 to sata hard drive.....I might have an ide hard drive or two that hasn't completely seized up.


As you can see, this intrigues me. Perhaps that cd needs to find it's way into a box at some point.

 

[atrocity]

This is a real stretch, but do you have autorun turned on for the CD drive?

I may well be misremembering, but I have some thought fragment in my head about autorun interfering with non-CDDA content. Of course, as others have suggested, even if that used to be true it may be irrelevant now.

And thinking about this further, I'm not sure I don't have it backwards. I may be confusing it with autorun being a problem back when Sony was infecting some of their CDs with virus-like anti-copying software.

 

[atrocity]

Coincidentally, I just got an e-mail from the author of IsoBuster saying a new version is out. I think it's a one-person operation, for all I know he may be responsive if you ask him about what you're trying to do.