Quick summary of my adventure:
Got an Atari PC4 (286, 1MB of SIPP memory, had an old RLL drive.)

First step, I got an XT-IDE with a Compact Flash adapter.
I thought I could use the CF card for the hard drive, and then IDE for the CD-ROM. Sadly, I couldn't find anything about it supporting ATAPI devices, which I think is a short-sighted thing, as you'd have a CF card for your hard drive, and then a CD-ROM and be set!

So then I started looking for alternate methods of getting CD support.
A Multi-I/O card just made the system fart... I'm guessing IRQ issues, even though I disabled EVERYTHING on the card via jumpers, it still did that...

Somewhere online I read that a lot of Sound blaster cards had CD-ROM interfaces, and even some of them have the holes, but no header. And when this is the case, then you just need to put a header on it, and you should be golden....

Well I tried that out today and it kept saying it couldn't detect the CD-ROM (with VIDE-CDD.SYS, and UNISOUND). So then I started doing some more research and found that indeed the AWE64 I have (CT4380) has some random variations that have the IDE controller header on it, and after I did some pin traces to make sure my solder job wasn't at fault, I found there are two chips missing!

According to the image here; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common … alue_CT4380.jpg These chips are an LS244, and LS245. Eww, surface mount soldering.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share my progress on this. I also tried an HxC floppy drive, but for some reason the Win311 disk images I found, after I converted them to HFE, they would read the top directory fine, but nothing would execute on it, so something was going on with that... but I only have the 5.25" at the moment, but I have an edge connector converter to 34 pin floppy so I can hook up a Gotek or use the HxC Floppy drive.