USBODE - a guide to installing
Many have over the years looked at the Gotek and wondered why nobody made something like it for CDs. Well, that is now here - the USBODE.
The USB Optical Drive Emulator is not, however, a device you install in your pc like the Gotek. Instead, it is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (preferably) that you connect via USB. Now, you may think as I did - "how do you make anything USB work in pure DOS?" But somehow it does...
The project Github page does provide an easy-to-follow guide on how to prepare the Pi, but when it comes to "Using USBODE on the target computer", it simply states "Once the target computer boots, it should be able to see the USBODE as a standard CD-ROM drive." Well, it's a bit more involved than that, and there is no step-by-step guide (that I could find) on how to do this - so I'll take a stab at making one.
Making it work in Windows 98
Fortunately, this turned out to be fairly straight forward: Download and install nusb, reboot and you're set. Easy as that!
Making it work in DOS
I'm running DOS 6.22 - I don't now if this will work on older versions. Also, for some reason, this doesn't work every time.When I turn on the pc, on that boot it can't find the device. If i reboot immediately, it works fine. On subsequent warm boots, it can't be found.
You need usbaspi.sys which is a USB driver for DOS.
