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Does anyone know of a SCSI DVD drive that is confirmed to work with an x68000?

Thunder Storm and Road Blaster come on DVD, so it's a real pain to get them running on real hardware without having a compatible SCSI drive.

I already bought a couple external SCSI DVD drives which I was unable to get working, but I don't have any other SCSI computers and old optical drives are very often simply dead in 2025, so I don't know if they're incompatible or simply busted...

Edit:  It turns out those games come with CD-ROM iso images on the DVDs, which you're expected to burn to CD-Rs.  So there's a good chance DVD drives simply don't work at all.

Edit 2: The documentation for the game actually suggests using a SCSI DVD-RAM drive as an alternative installation method, so I guess it actually should work?  Has anyone tried this?

Pretty sure some of those SCSI emulation devices support CD-ROM drive emulation as well. Why bother with a real drive at all?

Same reason I bother with real x68000 hardware at all, I suppose.  Because it's fun.

Okay, so I'm not a big x68000 guy and I'm open to being corrected if any of my post here turns out to be wrong in any way. With that said, it's my impression just based on a little research that you won't be able to get any DVD drive to run on the real hardware.

DVD optical storage standards were first codified in 1995. The Sharp hardware had its latest revision in 1987, and the SCSI hardware in it uses SCSI Multimedia Command (MMC) interface version 1. That accommodates CD-ROM but not DVD. SCSI MMC-2 didn't get out into the world until 1997 or so after the DVD format became commercially available, and as far as I know there was no hardware mod or flash update that permitted the x68000 to work with MMC-2 instructions or data handling. So if you just configure termination, connect the cables and power it up, the x68000 will look at a DVD drive as if it's some kind of unknown device that doesn't play well with the standards it knows how to use.

Now. Could an ambitious person with some programming skills (and a PIC or an embedded system like a Raspberry Pi) configure some kind of translation layer? You could possibly get a DVD drive to talk to a device that just presents the filesystem (or the raw data) to the SCSI backplane in the x68000 as just one implausibly large CD-ROM that needs out-of-spec addressing. Such a setup would permit file access but not binary access, meaning that you could probably run games but not stuff like Redbook audio or anything that would need to stream off of the disc. But it's hypothetically possible. I'm not nearly smart enough to figure out how that would work though.

I found DVD driver stuff here: http://www.cityfujisawa.ne.jp/~fumiki/x68k/softs/softs.html

It seems like it is limited, but strongly suggests that using DVD is indeed possible.

This stuff is also on my Thunder Storm DVD, by the way.

Quote from: z964 on September 26, 2025, 09:53:28 AMEdit:  It turns out those games come with CD-ROM iso images on the DVDs, which you're expected to burn to CD-Rs.  So there's a good chance DVD drives simply don't work at all.

You should be able to copy the CD-ROM image to an SD card, pop it into BlueSCSI/ZuluSCSI and it should boot on the X68K with correct CD-ROM drivers. I've done this many times on the FM Towns and don't see why it won't work on X68K.

Follow the BlueSCSI docs to name the image correctly (what SCSI ID to use is part of the filename)

Well, I got a Panasonic LF-D200J (SCSI DVD-RAM drive), set up those DVD drivers, and this drive actually does seem to work fine with CDs.  I even got an old Crysis DVD to read fine with it.  I copied a couple files off it directly on to my x68030.

However, my Thunder Storm DVD does NOT work in that drive, for whatever reason.  How perplexing.

The Thunder Storm DVD, is it a retail pressed DVD or a burned DVD-R? In case of the latter it makes sense that it cannot be read as your drive might either not be compatible with DVD-Rs or it just has problems with DVD-Rs of its manufacture.

I know CD drives had such problems, perhaps DVD was the same.

It's a retail pressed DVD.

Edit: I tried reading a DVD-R I burned myself, and that reads.  The problem seems to be something specific to the official Thunder Storm DVD, which is ironic since it is one of very few products released on DVD and intended for use on an x68k.

Interesting where do you find this games on DVD ?

Thunder Storm and Road Blaster.  They were released on DVDs which contain both a Windows version and an x68030 version.  You see them on Surugaya and yahoo auctions regularly.  Here's a few:
https://buyee.jp/item/jdirectitems/auction/m1135577705
https://www.fromjapan.co.jp/japan/en/special/order/confirm/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.suruga-ya.jp%2Fproduct%2Fdetail%2F124000688%3Fbranch_number%3D0069/11_1/
https://www.fromjapan.co.jp/japan/en/special/order/confirm/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.suruga-ya.jp%2Fproduct%2Fdetail%2F124000689%3Fbranch_number%3D0069/11_1/