Below is a rundown of the major new features in CDVDBurn 3 compared to the original CDVDBurn.
Ready for the new RISC OS machines
CDVDBurn 3 is compatible with all the new RISC OS 5 machines including but probably not limited to
- Raspberry Pi Zero/1/2/3/4
- ARMX6/mini.m/Wandboard
- TiMachine/Titan/RapidO Ti/Titanium
- RapidO Ig/IGEPv5
- ARMini/BIK/BeagleBoard
- ARMiniX/PIK/PandaRo/PandaBoard
This especially means that CDVDBurn 3 will run just fine on the latest ARMv8 platforms like the Raspberry Pi 4.
Much of the testing was done on RISC OS 5.24 and – on the RPi 4 – on a late development version of RISC OS 5.27, so chances are good that the recently released 5.28 won’t create any unforseen problems.
Ready for USB
While USB for optical drives like CD/DVD/BD writers works on RISC OS via the SCSI route, it took quite a few changes in CDVDBurn 3 to achieve acceptable compatibility with various drives. Thanks to the various performance enhancements over the years on the RISC OS side, CDVDBurn 3 can now operate via USB 2.0 in a much better way than it was previously possible e.g. with IDE on a Risc PC.
Ready for new media types
When CDVDBurn was first released, the various DVD formats were king, typically providing 4.7 GiB of capacity. Nowadays, many modern drives support writing the new BD-R (writable) and BD-RE (re-writable) media, starting with as much as 25 GiB capacity on a single disc. As an extra bonus, DVD-RAM is now officially supported.
Ready for modern drives
When CDBurn appeared, there was no uniform standard available that governed the command set to drive CD writers. A bit later, the MMC standard was invented – more than 20 years ago. However, with the appearance of ever more advanced technology like the various DVD media types and of course BD, new MMC standards appeared on a regular fashion, with MMC6 being the latest and greatest standard. Those standards are not 100% backwards compatible, and modern drives implement something in between MMC2 and MMC6. CDVDBurn 3 has been extensively tested on various devices to ensure good compatibility across the board. There are still drives that work in a not-exactly-optimal fashion, information on preferred drives will be published as soon as possible.
Problems with CDFS? CDVDBurn 3 might be the solution!
For a long time, choosing the right drive for RISC OS was difficult because the typical CDFSSoftXXX drivers had not very good compatibility across the board. While this has significantly improved both on the USB and the ATAPI side of things, the new CDVDBurn 3 comes with a new feature named the “Disc Extractor”. This feature leverages existing CDVDBurn code like the ISO filer and multisession import capability to provide a filer-like view on Disc data – ISO9660, Joliet, Rockridge Naming Extensions, all supported. Drives are accessed directly, circumventing all problems caused by incompatible CDFS drivers. Data can be extracted with the usual drag&drop from the filer-like view directly onto your harddisc.
As an extra bonus, the “Disc Extractor” can directly use the “large” image format CDVDBurn had to introduce to work around the RISC OS filesize limit. You no longer need CDFaker to access any disc images, just use CDVDBurn 3.