Firewire DVD-ROM Emulator

[c0t0d0s0]

I figure this is a pretty long shot, and it doesn't even have to be a Mac app specifically, but I'm going to ask here anyway --

I am looking for a way to emulate a DVD-ROM that can mount a disc image (ISO, etc.) and present it over FireWire and it appear on another machine just as if I had directly attached via FireWire a DVD-ROM with a CD or DVD physically in it. Kind of like a FireWire target disk mode for read-only disc images.

I have an IODD ST400 portable device that does almost exactly what I want, and I love it, except that it's USB and not FireWire. The systems I am working with are all of the G3 and G4 generation and do not boot from USB (yes, I know of the Open Firmware workaround). If there was a device like the IODD ST400 that did FireWire that was reasonably priced I would buy one in a heartbeat but I have not found anything similar in my searches.

Since I have not found anything hardware, that leads me down the software path. Has anyone seen or done anything like this? Does anyone have a better method other than burning CD/DVD images to physical media and booting them via physical drives? That's exactly what I am trying to avoid here.

 

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

Do you want this for PowerPC, Intel, or Apple Silicon and on what OS do you want it to be supported?

 

[c0t0d0s0]

Do you want this for PowerPC, Intel, or Apple Silicon and on what OS do you want it to be supported?

If you are asking what the target/remote/destination system that would use the emulated drive, I am targeting PowerPC, but I would think that the exported virtual/emulated DVD-ROM drive presented from the source system would be system agnostic.

If you mean source system, the one that mounts and exports a disc image as an emulated FireWire DVD-ROM drive TO a remote system, it can be anything at all. It doesn't even have to be Apple hardware or macOS if that opens my options. That said, specific to modern-ish Apple hardware, I have two Apple Silicon Macs (Sonoma) and two Intel Macs (High Sierra & Ventura). I also have various Windows and Linux systems that have FireWire ports as well as older PowerPC hardware (iMac G3, PowerMac G4 (MDD, QuickSilver & Sawtooth), PowerMac G5).

 

[joevt]

Does FireWire Target Disk Mode actually present itself as a FireWire Mass Storage Device? Check the Mac io-registry.
In other words, can it connect to a Windows or Linux PC which probably don't have a FireWire Target Disk Mode driver?
Or, can FireWire Target Disk Mode on one Mac be used to boot another Mac?
An answer of yes means it may be possible to do the same from macOS or Linux or Windows but it doesn't mean the software to do that exists.

 

[Eriamjh1138@DAN]

Holy crap, I never expected it to be for PowerPC.

This is a question you should ask on the PowerPC sub-forum. I thought that Leopard supported remote DVD drives over network, but if you need to use target disk mode, you need a FireWire device that isn’t another Mac.