Looks like a cable to connect the analogue sound output from a CD-ROM to your motherboard/sound-card.

And yes, today the sound-info is usually transferred over the data-bus, in digital form, and then processed by the sound-drivers.

Yeah, in the days, when MIDI was slowly getting replaced by CD-Audio tracks for game music, the CD-ROM drive was used as CD-Audio player for background music. It puts out the audio analogue. As Minimax wrote this is usually connected to CD-IN of your soundcard.
The advantage is, that this kind of sound playback does not need any CPU power, since the drive plays independently.
The disadvantage is the limited flexibility. The music has to stop if the drive reloads data, and the music is limited to 74 mins minus the data track.

Yep, the cable allows the drive to send to the sound card the analog output of CD audio tracks that it's playing.

As MiniMax said, modern computers can pass the CD audio digitally through the data cable, but for DOS (and maybe Win9x) systems you will want that cable.

So the answer is: yes, you will need it if you are running DOS games natively in DOS and no, you dont need it if you are running them from Windows 98 and higher DOS prompt. 😀

I seem to remember that cable becoming obsolete mostly around the time XP arrived. In the Win9x days I always had the analog CD audio cable hooked up.

I'm not sure I ever saw that feature in Win9x. I think the DOS drivers for either my sound card or CD drive on my PII-450 did allow the audio data to be sent over the data bus in DOS though. Made Battlespire act kind of flaky if I remember correctly.

I also remember that some models of CD drive have/had a connector with only 2 pins/wires that would transfer the audio data digitally without having to send it through the data bus.

http://www.microsoft.com/taiwan/whdc/archive/cddigital.mspx

I remember 98 being able to do it. I'm not sure about 95. It's possible that the B or C revision supported it, but I doubt it.

For me, it's hard to believe that the above connector is becoming obsolete. I still connect the digital CD-Out connector from the DVD-Drive to the X-Fi, in my Quad Core based system, running Vista 64-bit. This is where I use my Dosbox too.
Correct me if I'm wrong : The above CD-Audio connector, analog or digital, is required if CD music is to be heard. This holds true too for DOS based CD Games which have Digital CD Tracks. For example, Entomorph in Win9x, Super Street Fighter II Turbo for Dos. For more common titles, Quake and Quake II.

Malik, only old DOS games that use CD audio require this wire. Windows 9x games will play digitally through the data bus. At least they will in XP. I never even tried back with 9x.

huh, i see i have a slew of of the little buggers guess i will just keep them stored away. thanks for the info guys. ai whataobut games liek shadow warrior or duke nukem 3d?

cdoublejj wrote:

huh, i see i have a slew of of the little buggers guess i will just keep them stored away. thanks for the info guys. ai whataobut games liek shadow warrior or duke nukem 3d?

They have no CD audio, only MIDI - so the cable is completely useless for them 😀

good though shadow warrior has on cd music but, not midi duke nukem 3d has a midi file but wasn't sure if it was stored on the cd as i have it ported for my smart phone and thats what i play it on thanks for the info guys i assume they aren't worth didly ?

I think I needed to manually click the checkbox in the device manager to enable digital audio feature...I'm still not sure it works with all games (X-Wing collector's series comes to my mind)

hhmm it still might not hurt to put it in but, ive never install it in any pcs and have never had any problems.

Re: Shadow Warrior - the downloadable demo has MIDI music. The commercial CD-ROM release* does not - instead, it has CD Audio for the music.

* I can confirm this from my commercial CD-ROM copy, and I've also read about this on usenet posts, but I suppose it's possible that other CD-ROM releases allow for MIDI music.

I was using that cable right up to a week ago in my system. I've only stopped because I removed the last CDRom that doesn't support digital extraction (many older units won't do it), and since DVD drives these days don't have the port for analogue transfer, the cable is now useless. However, I'm glad to report my new motherboard (top end Gigabyte AMD AM3) still has the CD in connector for its onboard audio. It is also one of the tiny handful that still has an onboard parallel and serial port.

My new systems have SATA drives so they don't have analogue or digital audio connectors... But i keep my CD audio cables for my Dos/Win9x machines for the older games.

I think Windows 98 was the first to support CD digital audio without using an audio cable of any kind.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

My new systems have SATA drives so they don't have analogue or digital audio connectors... But i keep my CD audio cables for my Dos/Win9x machines for the older games.

I think Windows 98 was the first to support CD digital audio without using an audio cable of any kind.

I'm pretty sure that is correct but you had to go into the Optical Drive properties and change the default analog output to digital to properly rip audio CD's or game discs with Hybrid formats, i.e., DATA + AUDIO tracks 😉