My first CD-Rom expierence was when I installed it into my PcPartner 486Sx-33 with 4mb ram. So the specs you have are fine.
Try using a win98 boot disk (or Phil's) and using a factory pressed (not CD-R) disc as the MSCDEX drivers should work just fine.
I recently had to retire an old ISA CD-ROM to the old desktop in the sky. It just stopped reading reliably. I think the laser died. Point being, the drive may just not work and everything in the system is fine.

What?

in config.sys load the cdrom driver mostly with a /D:CDROM1 parameter something like OAKCDROM.SYS /D:CDROM1
in autoexec.bat load the microsoft cdrom extensions with the exact same parameter ie MSCDEX.EXE /D:CDROM1

offcourse you'll need both those files. and they can be readily found on the internet, a win98 bootdisk, etc...

no idea where you got the 486 part from. To me that sounds like total bs. Cdrom drives were already in use on XT, 286 & 386.

My first PC was a 386 and I upgraded it with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 and CD-ROM kit. You could run a CD drive on a 286 or even XT.

The very first CD-ROM drives used proprietary interfaces, but later ones switched to standard IDE and later SATA. If the drive is connected to your motherboard, it very likely uses IDE.

I recommend giving Phil's DOS starter pack a try. He's included optimized CD and mouse drivers that use less memory than the common options back in the day. This makes it easier to pay the games that were more demanding in terms of free memory.

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-starter-pack.html

Hello,

As others said there's nothing special about a 486DX and DOS CD-ROM. Maybe you were reading about specifications for a "Multimedia PC"

As standards to interface a CD-ROM to a computer were in flux when DOS (and Windows 3.x) were current, the driver is split into two parts:

1. A specific hardware driver for your CD-ROM interface goes into config.sys
2. A standard component called MSCDEX which ships with DOS 6.x goes into autoexec.bat. It assigns the drive a letter and translates between programs accessing that letter and the lower-level driver you put in config.sys.

If the drive is a standard IDE drive, from about 1995 onward, it's called ATAPI and oakcdrom.sys suggested by weedeewee will work.
If it's an older, proprietary interface that connects through your sound card, you may need a particular driver for your drive.
There was a boot disk back then called the "CD-ROM God" to help locate such a driver if you end up needing it.

Windows 3.x doesn't have any special protected-mode CD-ROM support. You just set up the CD-ROM in DOS and it goes through DOS to access it. You do want to make sure SMARTDRV is caching the CD-ROM. You do that by putting mscdex before smartdrv in your autoexec.bat.

Hi there, if you have an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drive, you can try the attached driver package.
It features an MS-DOS 6 style setup program that installs vide-cdd.sys for you.
Just put the content to your floppy disk and run it (setup) from A: drive.
Good luck! ^^

SScorpio wrote on 2024-08-11, 15:04:

My first PC was a 386 and I upgraded it with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 and CD-ROM kit. You could run a CD drive on a 286 or even XT.

Got the earlier version of that kit for SB Pro back in 1993 (cost me almost US$200 😵). Still got the drive and three CD-ROM discs (Win31 + SB Pro drivers, Bookshelf 1992, SB sound samples).

SScorpio wrote on 2024-08-11, 15:04:

The very first CD-ROM drives used proprietary interfaces, but later ones switched to standard IDE and later SATA. If the drive is connected to your motherboard, it very likely uses IDE.

Prompted me to look up some dates of CD-ROM history:

Yellow Book (first CD-ROM standard): 1983
High Sierra format (first de facto CD-ROM file system standard): May 1986
ECMA-119: December 1986
ECMA-119 v2: December 1987
ISO-9660: 1988

(First Intel i486: April 1989)

MPC Level 1: 1991
MPC Level 2: 1993
Intel 430FX chipset (integrated disk controller into PIIX southbridge, promoting CD-ROM manufacturers to migrate from proprietary interfaces to standard IDE): January 1995
ATAPI officially incorporated into ATA standard (ANSI/INCITS 317-1998): August 1998

OP, lots of background info here, but it might be a bit confusing. There are multiple types of CD-Rom interfaces. You haven't given us the info to figure out exactly which yours uses. If you do that, we can give you exact instructions.

Best piece of information: the brand+model of the drive.
Failing that: is it connected to the motherboard of your computer, to the sound card or to a different controller card? If possible, ID the card.
Failing that: take a clear picture of both the CD-Rom drive inside your case, and a picture of what the other end of the cable goes into.

In any event, neither DOS version nor CPU specs are a problem here. I've got a working CD-Rom drive in an XT and they work from MS-DOS 3.1 onwards - although in some cases the CD-Rom driver requires a newer version, but all will work under MS-DOS 6.22.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-06, 11:18:

Intel 430FX chipset (integrated disk controller into PIIX southbridge, promoting CD-ROM manufacturers to migrate from proprietary interfaces to standard IDE): January 1995

I would think it wasnt the fact PIIX had integrated IDE that facilitated this transition, but the fact it had TWO independent IDE channels.
Running two drives on same channel wasnt standardized for a very long time and is a Hack in the standard - from memory its something like every drive must listen to command/status register reads for both drives and spoof answers. It wasnt obvious in early nineties that two drives from different brands would work together trouble free.