Do you know of any programs out there that *accurately* emulate a CD-ROM drive?

Linux (the kernel) lets you mount ISO files, but it doesn't accurately emulate the drive; rather, it just reads the filesystem on the image and presents it to userspace via the filesystem. That and any similar features found on other OSes does not qualify as accurate emulation, even though it is quite useful.

Some things that I am looking for in such software:
* Accurate emulation of the drive speed. That is, I want it to take as long to read as it would from an actual CD-ROM, rather than working at the speed of the hard disk or RAM.
* Ability to play images of audio CDs; that's something that real drives can do, but which mounting the ISO typically doesn't allow.
* Ability to use CD burning software in order to create an image (as opposed to just creating the image through nice tools like xorrisofs).

So, any ideas?

Can't tell you much in regards to the specific criteria, but usually I fall back on using WINCDEmu, in particular the portable version.

It's open-source, the portable version works out-of-the-box (doesn't need to be installed) and so far it's been capable to emulate anything I've thrown at it.

It appears that it does not run under my OS.

Also, the description doesn't mention any of the three points I raised; I am interested in *accurate* CD emulation, not just mounting of images. (Yes, for this purpose I actually *want* it to take a while to read from the emulated disk rather than getting the data off instantly.) In other words, your recommendation works well for typical use cases (for example, getting files off a disk or even playing games from them), but is useless for one who wants to test CD burning software without actual hardware, or who wants to see how well a live CD actually performs without needing to use actual hardware and burn a physical disk.

are we looking for the Linux equivalent of Daemon Tools?


Edit:
Found Acetone ISO, Furius ISO, Gmount ISO and Fuse ISO. Hope one of them is what you're after.

Not sure such a thing exists because the slow speed of actual CD ROM drives isn't because of some necessary function, but due to technical/physical limitations that didn't exist when CD-ROM drives were commonplace. That's why they got faster and faster to the point DVDs and eventually Blu-Ray were viable. It wasn't as much the technology to store on larger media, but rather the amount of time it takes to put it on there and read it from such media. So in today's world such a feature is completely obsolete, unfortunately. My advice would be to build out an old machine with old parts and use that to get those speeds you want.

CDEmu (https://cdemu.sourceforge.io/) -

CDemu is a software suite designed to emulate an optical drive and disc (including CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs) on the Linux operating system.

CDEmu consists of:

a kernel module implementing a virtual drive-controller
libmirage which is a software library for interpreting optical disc images
a daemon which emulates the functionality of an optical drive+disc
textmode and GTK clients for controlling the emulator
Optical media emulated by CDemu can be mounted within Linux. Automounting is also allowed.

It also supports DPM emulation, transfer rate emulation and bad sector emulation.

Well, that could work, but it appears to be old unmaintained software, so using it might not be so straightforward.

For transfer speed, I suppose I could setup a VM with that old kernel module and run an NBD server from within the VM, but there's the question of security; I would want it to be accessible from the host, but not from any other machines, as the old kernel version is likely to have security issues, and it may require an old userspace as well. Perhaps it could be run in a separate network namespace, along with the nbd client that would expose the nbd device outside the namespace?

Also, this solution doesn't handle audio CD emulation or CD burner emulation.

(By the way, any programs to convert between CD images (.iso or .bin/cue) and WAV files?)

Front page shows v3.2.0 but it is active, v3.2.3 is from August 2019 -
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdemu/files/
or check out the git
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdemu/code/ci/master/tree/

Careful, what your talking about is close to a TOS breech. Also CDemu does 1:1 emulation so skipped tracks, flipped bits, if imaged properly will be emulated.

How would this be close to a TOS breach?

Didn't you know? Only pirates use CD images.

True that but users who don't have optical drives in their PCs also use CD Images.

What? Why would someone want that? Unless timing is key for some reason(and such is needed to be accurate to proper timing) I see no need to slow down reads/etc in such a manner.

CRRRNXX! Driver broken, pelase buy a new digital copy of your Real-life-like-disc-driver-emulator™ Remember that, just like real life DVD drives, the program will destroy itself once in forty uses on average.

I'm surprised OP doesn't want a program that emulates the whirring sound as well as the power usage.