Gary.H wrote on 2022-04-10, 14:08:
Btw, will the IDE ATAPI interface support any IDE CD drive, regardless of how modern it is ? (I've seen some E-IDE CD drives which I assume would not be supported by old hardware ?)
Do you need a specific driver for each model of CD drive or is there a generic driver that will work for all drives ((VIDE-CDD.SYS for example) ?
Any standard IDE interface (i.e. everything that's not on absurdely expensive cache controllers) will accept CD drives as well as hard disks. For any standard IDE CD drive (i.e. most 4x and all 6x or faster drives), a generic driver will work fine. There is only one kind of ATAPI standard. There are a couple of early revision CD drives that can be connected to an IDE port but were manufactured before the ATAPI standard was agreed upon - these drives use some status bits differently and might be incompatible with generic drivers.
"E-IDE" never was an officially defined standard, but the enhancements (mostly faster cycles) were formalized in the ATA standard. E-IDE improvements like PIO mode 3 and 4, or LBA addressing went into the ATA standard before ATAPI was standardized, so it makes no sense to differentiate between "IDE" and "E-IDE" CD drives.
If you want high speed CD data transfer in DOS on a PCI machine, you might want to use a DMA-capable CD driver. The choice of the driver then depends on the IDE chipset you are using, not on the CD drive.