I know this is strange but... I need my Ext. DVD drive to KEEP spinning.

[SkyHighGam3r]

I know this is a weird request, and I'm not even sure if it can be done... but here's my situation.

I'm building a unique video game console out of PC parts and Windows 10. It's a lot more complex than that, but that's the gist of it. I'll spare the details on my build and get to the point...

One of the methods I have for loading games into the console is optical media. (CD/DVD/DVD-DL/BD) At the moment, these are all being loaded via an external drive. A Pioneer top-loader, to be specific.

The disc structure is extremely simple. It consists of:

autorun.inf
autorun.bat
<game>.<ext>

That's it. 3 files.

While playing these games, the disc drive will slow down/stop spinning periodically, and when you progress to a certain point, the drive has to startup again and continue reading the game-file.

Is there any way to prevent the disc drive from idling out like this?

 

[boosted1g]

Yes, the solution is to use anything else but optical media.

There is a reason why you install a game from a CD, not just run it from the CD. CDs are not designed to run an application from.

 

[little_me]

you could also have a background script doing something like dir <cd-drive letter> periodically to keep it "active" and to stop the spin-down.
since it's windows, scheduled task might work fine.

 

[SkyHighGam3r]

Plenty of devices run from CD's. Take any pre-XBOX game console with optical media for example. They all ran games from CD-ROMs without any installation.

I've got several different formats for the game media, but it's kind of pinnacle to have a disc-based method for a game console.

---------

Regarding scheduled task, is there anyway to initiate the task after launching a .bat file? If so I could throw it in the autorun.bat I use to load the game.

 

[little_me]

it seems there is:
You can start/stop scheduled tasks from command prompt just fine (provided you have privileges to do so) or.. apply username/password but since they would be in the autorun as plain text, it might not be good idea.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721884(v=ws.11).aspx

The point however is that it might be a working way to get the cd drive to not spin down.
Downside is, drive usage will slow down loading.

:stayactive
dir
sleep 10 (in seconds)
goto stayactive

in batch file would keep using dir command every 10 seconds, problem is as stated above, that usage would... slow other disk usage.


Also it seems that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DVDNavigator was no longer in use in recent windows versions, you could have set the spindown time in seconds with that.

I fear past above, I don't have any real genius ideas though.