Is it possible to connect a CF card to a sound card CD ROM interface?

[sean1978]

So I got this random idea. I have a ISA 16-bit sound card with a CD-ROM interface. Does this work like a regular IDE control, or as a fixed to the size of a CD-ROM IDE Control?

Could I not use it for a CF Card? My PS/2 doesn't have onboard IDE control and 500+ MB would be more than enough space for a 286.

 

[Stone]

If the sound card supports a normal, atapi cdrom drive, then yes, or maybe. But if it's like most, if not all sound cards, that only support proprietary cdrom drives, no.

 

[konc]

From my memories most sound cards cdrom controllers were not tied to specific drives. That was the usual case in the beginning of cdroms, yes, but soon controllers started to accept all drives (even with third party drivers).
To the point: I doubt that a hard disk will work when plugged to this connector (where would the drive's parameters be specified/detected?). But the main problem is that even if it does, you'd still not be able to boot from it.

 

[Maverick1978]

The easier test would be to get your XT-IDE rom working, toss a CF on the sound card, and see if it's recognized.

I'm somewhat doubtful that it would work, but man... if it did. That would be sweet.

 

[Scali]

An IDE interface is little more than a 16-bit ISA slot over a ribbon cable. The controller itself is 'dumb'.
Problem is, these IDE interfaces on soundcards were located at different base addresses, so they wouldn't interfere with regular harddisk controllers. And there is no BIOS support for them. So physically they could probably drive a harddisk, but your BIOS and OS don't know how to send the right commands to it, because they don't know the interface exists.

If you modify an XT-IDE rom to use the proper base address for the sound card, it may work, not sure. But only for software that uses the BIOS of course.

 

[lowen]

Back early on sound cards had multiple CD-ROM interfaces. More than one interface type used the 40-pin connector. That being said, it only takes a 74LS244 plus a 74LS245 plus a bit of address decode to do a non-DMA ISA IDE host bus adapter (it's not a controller; the controller is on the drive). You'd need to verify with the manual for the card that the IDE interface/HBA is at a usable address (many used the secondary IDE interface address, but there are four sets of addresses normally used). I do remember a couple of cards that were not jumperable, but were hard coded to the secondary IDE port. And then there's a good possibility that this is an ISA Plug-n-play card and the address decode is programmable. You'd need a utility of some sort to set this up.

 

[Malc]

There was a thread on using sound cards some time back with the XTIDE Universal Bios, "Aitotat" had a SB16 (CT2290) working with a Hitachi 6 Gb Microdrive, IIRC others have had some success also.

 

[Great Hierophant]

Some cards came with a SCSI CD-ROM interface, like many of the Pro Audio Spectrum 16s and the Sound Blaster 16 SCSI. Those would likely work very well, provided you had a SCSI to CF adapter and some boot software.

Many middle and late Sound Blaster 16s have an IDE interface on them, but they are typically located at the secondary, tertiary or quadenary IDE ports, so they are not likely to be bootable by the BIOS.

Sound Blaster Pros and many early Sound Blaster 16s and AWE32s have the "proprietary" CD-ROM interfaces, the Panasonic, Sony and Mitsumi interfaces were the most common but utterly useless for this purpose (and just about any other).