That's fair. I've deliberately avoided converting all of that to devices because MAME's irritating "startup order is not guaranteed" policy means we could easily end up with a situation where sometimes it can find the media and sometimes not.
it turned out that CDDA code is indeed looking for the media before it can be found. for the time being, I see no better way to fix this than the current hack (i.e. by specifying in the interface which CDDA device should be used). I will take in any case a look at the scsi code, later...
