Hard drive and CD-ROM on one IDE cable will work, however, it breaks 32-bit disk access in Windows 3.x. In Windows 95 it is fine. And on 486 and early Pentium systems, Win9x doesn't take full advantage of primary vs. secondary IDE anyway, because of bugs in the CMD640 and the like. That's the single fifo vs. dual fifo notation in the driver.

You can get ISA cards that are nothing but an extra IDE connector, that be not just secondary but tertiary or quaternary too if you want.

I would venture to guess that during the sound card CD-ROM era, CD-ROM penetration had not yet broken into 50% of systems shipped, but I would like to hear others' ideas on that. All hand me down systems I had used either ATAPI or no CD-ROM drive at all.

I bought a cheap sound card with an EIDE/ATAPI interface for my low profile 486 which only has 1 IDE port on the motherboard. The motherboard's port doesn't work with ATAPI drives.

My card is a MegaImage32 which has been discussed here on Vogons. It works great in my system with a Toshiba 12x ATAPI drive. If I had one complaint, the card's EIDE port is software initialized instead of set in hardware. You can't cold boot from a CD as a result.

When CD-ROM drives were introduced, manufacturers defined their own proprietary interfaces for the cheaper drives since there was no standard defined, but for the more expensive options they used SCSI which was well established by that point.

For a 486 if you want to use an IDE drive you have plenty of options:

• On later PCI-based boards there are usually 2 IDE channels, you can just connect the CD-ROM drive to the secondary
• If your board or controller card has only 1 IDE channel you can connect the drive as a slave on the same channel with the HDD as master (this is what I did when I got my first CD-ROM drive in 1995). This will limit the performance of your HDD but given the speed of a mid-'90s IDE hard drive on a 486 it wasn't a major problem
• You can always get one of those EIDE cards which allow you to add a secondary IDE channel
• Get a sound card with an IDE connector

By the way, I have 3 drives with the old proprietary formats (1 Sony, 1 Panasonic and 1 Mitsumi) and they all work perfectly. They require some care (capacitors on the Sony and gear replacement on the Panasonic) but otherwise they're solid, the lasers work great (they even read CD-Rs) and they are ideal for early CD-ROM games unlike those cheap chinese no-name drives that started to flood the market during the mid to late '90s and sound like a plane about to take off.

TheMobRules wrote on 2025-03-17, 03:13:

When CD-ROM drives were introduced, manufacturers defined their own proprietary interfaces for the cheaper drives since there wa […]
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When CD-ROM drives were introduced, manufacturers defined their own proprietary interfaces for the cheaper drives since there was no standard defined, but for the more expensive options they used SCSI which was well established by that point.

For a 486 if you want to use an IDE drive you have plenty of options:

• On later PCI-based boards there are usually 2 IDE channels, you can just connect the CD-ROM drive to the secondary
• If your board or controller card has only 1 IDE channel you can connect the drive as a slave on the same channel with the HDD as master (this is what I did when I got my first CD-ROM drive in 1995). This will limit the performance of your HDD but given the speed of a mid-'90s IDE hard drive on a 486 it wasn't a major problem
• You can always get one of those EIDE cards which allow you to add a secondary IDE channel
• Get a sound card with an IDE connector

By the way, I have 3 drives with the old proprietary formats (1 Sony, 1 Panasonic and 1 Mitsumi) and they all work perfectly. They require some care (capacitors on the Sony and gear replacement on the Panasonic) but otherwise they're solid, the lasers work great (they even read CD-Rs) and they are ideal for early CD-ROM games unlike those cheap chinese no-name drives that started to flood the market during the mid to late '90s and sound like a plane about to take off.

thanks for the details
From the options list you gave me i was more interested in a soundcard with IDE interface, sadly very few good SB models have it CT2290 , CT2830 and CT2910 and if i was rich a ct3900

if i don´t get one of those then i will have to find a EIDE card, can you recommend me one any easly found on ebay? so i can use a good old CT2230 without any ide cable on it.

On my 486 builds, I use controller cards with dual ISA connectors. I run the primary master IDE to my main storage, typically a CF card. Secondary master IDE I use for connecting a CD-ROM.

Our first PC was a 486 with a Panasonic interface drive off a SB16.
When this drive died, we got an IDE drive as it had become the standard.

but I found once we had a large hard drive (at least 4GB) and networking setup I didn't really need a CD drive anymore.
As long as you partition your hard drive with at least OS and drivers to get on the network you can then send any other files over the network rather than CD.
and the speed benefit from applying no-cd patches to games is also beneficial.