CD-ROM on Xenix?

[Mike Ciaraldi]

Does anyone have experience with running a CD-ROM on a Xenix system?
Or even know if it is possible?

Here's the situation:
The system I am working on has an IBM-PC compatible 386 running
SCO Xenix/386 and DOS (not at the same time, of course!).
It has a Sony CD-ROM (compact disk/read-only memory) drive and controller.

The CD-ROM we want to access is "Books in Print" from Bowker.
It comes with DOS software for interactive 
access to the data base on the CD-ROM.
It also comes with drivers for assorted CD-ROM drives (including the 
Sony), which implement what are called "MS-DOS Extensions".
With these, we can access the disk under DOS as a 600MB drive
(which I think means the disk is in "High Sierra" format").
Everything works fine under DOS.

The problem is that we have to shut down Xenix when we want to run
this program.  So, my question is:
Is there a way to run this software under Xenix, perhaps using something
like VPix?

Some points:

The CD-ROM drive vendor was unable to give us any info on drivers
for Xenix.  But then, they couldn't tell us about cables or anything else.
If it wasn't in the catalog, they didn't know it existed, and if it
was, they didn't know what it was.  Sorry, Sony.  It's possible we could
dig deeper on this.

I don't know if any other vendors have Xenix drivers for Sony or
other CD-ROM drives.

SCO said they didn't know if this could be made to work, 
but the standard DOS add-on driver would not be any help when running
VPix.  Since a driver deals with the hardware directly, a DOS-compatible
driver can't be added to VPix; the driver would have to be linked
to Xenix.

Bowker, which makes the CD-ROM and the access software, has not
be helpful either.

So, I'm sending this out to the real experts--the net!

Thanks in advance for any help at all,
Mike Ciaraldi
uucp:   ...rutgers!rochester!ciaraldi
arpa:   ciaraldi at cs.rochester.edu