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z00t
02-05-2008, 09:47 AM
Not sure this belongs here, but I wanted to get some of this experience written down before I have a CRS episode...

Hopefully it's no secret to readers that you can install/run the UT99 client under Linux, thanks to a now-defunct outfit called Loki Software. Normally, the installation under Linux is pretty painless -- as long as you have the Windows CDs. Fire up a copy of the appropriate Loki installer (specific to the UT version, e.g., 436), and it prompts you to mount CDs 1 and 2 at appropriate points during the process. When the smoke clears, you should have a working Linux UT client.

Life gets interesting when you don't have access to the actual CDs, but instead, images of them. For normal ISO images, this isn't a big deal:

mount -t iso9660 image_file /mnt/point/directory -o loop,ro

Anyone notice anything strange about the size of the image file corresponding to CD 1?

$ ls -lsai UT.GOTY.CD1-ToX.bin
542083 729296 -r--r--r-- 1 rct rct 746063808 2002-12-28 03:04 UT.GOTY.CD1-ToX.bin

Yeah... It's impossibly large as far as fitting on a single CD, and yet, it does. Attempting to mount the image as above produces a "Unable to identify CD-ROM format" error.

To make a long story somewhat more bearable, one way forward is to use a (gasp!) Windows utility called "IsoBuster" that, oddly enough, works great under Wine :D. You extract the track using "read as RAW, write as USER" option, and end up with a file that is 649,633,792 bytes long. Much better, and Linux recognizes it as a legal iso9660 image when you try to mount it. Even better, the Loki installer is satisfied that you're using a legit copy.

And yes, Virginia, you have to do the same thing for the second CD image.

Question for the CD format freaks out there: what's going on here? Is there a way to use the original image file directly, maybe by specifying a session offset at mount time? Is there a pure Linux way to accomplish what IsoBuster does?

Folks who burn the images to physical CDs don't have this pain...

Waylin
02-05-2008, 05:23 PM
Quick answer, the BIN (with it's sister CUE) is a lower level file format that includes subchannel data, boot stuff, and Reed-Solomon codes that are out of band for the logical ISO9660 data stream. It's usually just redundant stuff but needed for exotically formatted disks, e.g. mixed-mode audio+data or to capture intentional flaws for write-protect schemes. Google bin+cue for more info.

z00t
02-05-2008, 10:54 PM
Thanks for the steer. Looks like the "pure play" Linux option is a utility called "cdemu", version 1.0.0 of which was released late in 2007. I've got a little more digging to do :).

z00t
02-06-2008, 06:20 PM
Final verdict: cdemu does everything I need it to do as far as handling CD images in any format I'm likely to see. I can't speak for the other binary distribution formats, but the cdemu ".deb" packages are missing a few small items of major importance that will keep the daemon and client programs from working properly. I won't bore forum readers with the details, but the problems are easily fixed. Neat utility!