Welcome to Truman's website.

This site introduces my project of prototyping a CD reading/writing tool that I am developing, and also making available some of my code samples others to learn from.  This program is still very much in beta stage.  At the start of development I named it 'CD reader' and haven't thought of a better name since - I hope to have an appropriate name later.  I've reach to a stage where the program is just barely usable and needs a lot more work.  I plan to implement as many features in it as possible and to also get the public to test the program.  My design goal is to make an experimental tool that will have some really nice options for experiments for reading and writing data from/to CDR(W) media.  I already have a gigantic wish list of features to include, but time and knowledge will determine if they will be implemented.

A little history on how I started

When I first brought my Ricoh MPS6200 (6x CDR/4x CDRW) in 1997 I was very happy to be able to have the pleasure of backing up some of my original PC games that I owned and also, more importantly to be able to backup the vast amount of documents that I had collected on my PC that I could finally keep away from those countless floppy discs!  Those were the early days when writers were owned by only a few, and the cost of CDR media were £2.50 each!  Things have really changed since then (2005).  Now we have nice features such as high speed CD and DVD rewriters with under-run protection.

After the popularity and decreasing cost of CD writers, I've seen everyone around me began to own one, and soon the world could back up their CDs easily.  This lead to companies introducing CD copy protections, making it much more difficult for the average Joe to copy CDs.  This was an interesting topic for me, and I did some research to find out more about backing up my CDs and to how to overcome those protections.  These protections made me very annoyed and the more I delved into it, the more I learnt about the CD specifications and also other aspects that I wouldn't have even gone into.

In 1997, I tried to email several companies for programming specifications for their drives, but all I received from them were turned down responses, with requirements of having to be working at a company and being able to pay extraordinary license fees of £10000 upwards.  So I started with Microsoft's free MSDOS MSCDEX commands.  It had served me quite well for reading CDs, but it had limitations - it didn't have any special settings such as: CD-R/W writing, raw sub-channels reading, etc.  During that time I was experimenting with my MSDOS tool on those early Securom protections.

In 2000, luckily for me and others I found out that the SCSI specifications originated from SCSI committee T10 and they had available free drafts of SCSI-3 specifications, and in particular a document named MMC1 draft (MultiMedia Commands for CD devices) was a very interesting read.  Together with the free specifications of Adaptec's Win32 ASPI layer I had the necessary information for the development of my program.

My project had started development (from scratch) since Jan 2000, and I decided to use the Delphi 4 programming language.  I decided to use this because it had an advantage of being able to rapidly build GUIs and also allowed the use of pointers (in contrast to instead of VB).  I wanted to use C++, but it took too long to make proper looking GUIs to maintain - maybe later I'll port it to C++.

Contact details
 

Alias name:	Truman
Email:	trumanhi@hotmail.com

You can also find me on CD Freaks forum as member & moderator Truman.  The forum is great and had made an impression on me to develop this tool further.  Since I don't have much time at the moment I may not reply to some of your emails.