TIL Rainbow Books for CD formats

POSTED ON: Dec 18, 2022

TAGS: history cd data videogames

Today I learned about Rainbow Books!

These books define various aspects of the CD format, including physical dimensions, data encoding, error correction, and other technical specifications.

Several volumes of specifications covering the topic, together called the "Rainbow Books", were released over a period of 20 years from 1980 to 2000.

• The first in the series, the "Red Book", specs the original audio Compact Disk (CD).
• The "Yellow Book" is an extension of the red book, introducing CD-ROM data and ISO-9600.
• The "Orange Book" adds CD-DA specs, CD-R (Recordable), and CR-WR (Rewritable).
• The "White Book" is dedicated to Video-CD (VCD).
• The "Green Book" is about CD-Interactive (CD-I).
• The "Blue Book" is about Enhanced-CD (ECD) for multimedia support.
• The "Scarlet Book" covers Super Audio (SACD) introducing high-resolution audio.
• The "Purple Book" is about Double Density CD (DDCD) pushing capacity from 650MiB to 1.3GiB.
• The "Cyan Book" covers the 9660 filesystem specs extensively.

For reference: https://obsoletemedia.org/audio/compact-disc-rainbow-books/

For PSX Games, they're considered CD-ROM XA, part of the Yellow Book.

The PlayStation File System (PSFS) is a proprietary file system used by the PS1 that extends the CD-ROM XA format.

Via THE POLYGONS OF DOOM: PSX

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