CDFaker is a module that provides a CDFS softloadable driver that is capable of "mounting" an ISO image file for use with CDFS. Instead of swapping physical CDs in real CD drives, you can keep images of your CDs on your harddrive and "swap" them by a simple CLI command or by double-clicking on them.
It is an invaluable companion for CDBurn and CDVDBurn to find out how CDFS will treat your CD content without actually writing a disc. Slight caveat: CDFaker does not understand the "large" image format used by CDVDBurn to bypass the RISC OS 2 GiB (or 4 GiB) per-file size limit.
But it is also useful for emulator usage because it is often more comfortable to "mount" images from inside RISC OS instead of switching to the emulator UI to pick the image. And it also conveniently allows accessing CD images from your NAS.
Install the module by dropping it into your predesk. Make sure that CDFS is active, configure one more CDFS drive than you have physical CD drives in your machine - either by using !Configure or by typing
*configure CDROMDrives <number of drives>
To mount an ISO image, either double-click on an image (must be filetyped &DF6) or type the following:
*cdfaker_mount 0 <filename>where 0 is the CDFaker drive number, not the CDFS drive number.
You can now look at the content by clicking on the correct CDFS drive icon. To find out which icon is the one backed up by CDFaker, type
*-cdfs-cddevicesand look for the drive number with the Product name "CDFaker".
To dismount the image, type
*cdfaker_dismount 0
Later versions by Jon Abbott even allow to put audio tracks into a cue sheet and let CDFaker handle the audio playback like it would be an audio track ony a physical CD.
Jon Abbott (creator of ADFFS and founder of the JASPP) has taken over development and has produced updated versions with a focus on getting old CD-based games running on modern machines.
You can download the latest version (at the time of writing: version 1.06) and its source code from the JASPP forum - see the links inside the posts of Releases -> CDFaker.
My initial version of CDFaker 32bit.
The original (26bit) version was previously available from here. The links seems to be dead now - so I put a copy of the slightly extended !FakeCD application as shipped with CDBurn here for you to download. This was produced by Robin Watts of WSS (if I remember correctly) - he added a WIMP filter to detect a Drag&Drop operation on a CDFS filer icon on the iconbar, which would then be automatically mounted by CDFaker.
While diving into my old harddisc content, I also found a ZIP which maybe contains the original source drop from Andy Armstrong - kept here for completeness. Anyone with a non-retro interest should use Jon Abbott's source for further adjustments and development.
CDFaker is originally written by Andy Armstrong and was distributed as freeware. I got the source from him and and subsequently made it compatible with modern 32bit RISC OS (but should still work with the old machines, but I don't remember if I tested it extensively).
My patched module has also been tested on the BeagleBoard and the Raspberry Pi and seems to work fine. Please note that the speed emulation code has not been touched and might not work.
Subsequent versions were done by Jon Abbott - I think he started from the original sources, which was a good idea because the quality of my changes - not being a seasoned ARM Assembler coder - was certainly in question.
However, most of the hard work was done by Andy Armstrong, so thanks a lot, wherever you are!
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