I am beginning a project involving the universality of CD-ROM/CD-RW drives. I need to know if there is a machine language that exists for all removable media drives and where I can learn more about the language that the disk drives use.
My hope is to understand how the CD-RW drives read and write so that I may develop software catered specifically towards removable media needs.
Thank you,
Wendell
There were lots and lots of different protocols for optical disk drives, most of which aren't relevant any more. I think modern drives are pretty much atapi, even SATA ones.
Any modern operating system will handle that level of communication for you.
Do a web search for "Mt Fuji Commands for Multimedia Devices". This industry consensus document defines a standard method for interfacing a multimedia storage device to a host using various transports including ATAPI, SCSI, and IEEE 1394.
Another useful document is the MultiMedia Command Set (MMC) standard