I do agree with the other posters. Just use what you have. 😀
Another "trick" is using these old coloured cables inside old PCs, which often connect switches and the speaker to the mainboard.
Just grab two of them each and wire them together. Voila, you've got about the same as these expensive Arduino/Raspberry Pi GPIO cables. 😀

IDC cables are so easy to make. A roll of ribbon cable and some various 2.54mm pitch female IDC connectors are a great investment for any retro enthusiast. Make your own to-length floppy / IDE / SCSI cables! 😁

Cuttoon wrote on 2020-02-23, 07:16:

...or you could just saw a random old floppy cable or COM breakout into pieces or go to town with a soldering iron 😉

Nobody has a pinout, ever.
Everyone has a continuity tester!

You best test continuity from one side to the other. I did this and could not get the pins to match up. The offset always made it off by one pin on a certain row.

You're much better off buying new ones. These sell for less than $1 or so shipped from China.

No luck on those chinese ones, at least not under the name "sb_link cable"

Found a German mailorder, though. Didn't test it, but should do the trick for € 1,99 + shipping:
https://www.reichelt.de/pfostenverbinder-2-54 … 66-p262788.html

No you just need a 3x2 straight through ribbon cable. They will most certainly not be called SBLINK or PC/PCI cables...that is long, long dead technology those only weirdos like us know about.

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-02, 20:32:

No you just need a 3x2 straight through ribbon cable. They will most certainly not be called SBLINK or PC/PCI cables...that is long, long dead technology those only weirdos like us know about.

Sure, which is why I looked for "Flachbandkabel 2x3" on Reichelt.
Granted, those on Ebay even ship for free and are more colourful.
Don't know about Reichelt's international shipping costs, but quite a few of us weirdos seem to reside in Germany. ;)

EDIT: To admin/moderator: Somewhere else, links to the Bay got deletet. I understand the idea behind that, but am unclear whether that applies only to auctions or also to trivial, fixed-price stuff that's merely hard to find. (And which I have no affiliation to, of course.)
If so, please delete the link, I'll take a note, sorry.

Cuttoon wrote on 2020-03-02, 20:46:

Sure, which is why I looked for "Flachbandkabel 2x3" on Reichelt. Granted, those on Ebay even ship for free and are more colour […]
Show full quote

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-02, 20:32:

No you just need a 3x2 straight through ribbon cable. They will most certainly not be called SBLINK or PC/PCI cables...that is long, long dead technology those only weirdos like us know about.

Sure, which is why I looked for "Flachbandkabel 2x3" on Reichelt.
Granted, those on Ebay even ship for free and are more colourful.
Don't know about Reichelt's international shipping costs, but quite a few of us weirdos seem to reside in Germany. 😉

EDIT: To admin/moderator: Somewhere else, links to the Bay got deletet. I understand the idea behind that, but am unclear whether that applies only to auctions or also to trivial, fixed-price stuff that's merely hard to find. (And which I have no affiliation to, of course.)
If so, please delete the link, I'll take a note, sorry.

How do I buy this cable? Just select 2 x 3p?

Xeen wrote on 2020-07-24, 03:45:

How do I buy this cable? Just select 2 x 3p?

I haven't bought those myself so far, but selecting "2 X 3P 300mm" in the upper drop-down-menu should get you a single cable with two rows of three pins. (30 cm should be ok for most boards, less might reduce clutter.)
~ 2 Dollar seems like a realistic retail price for generic, mass produced stuff like that.
Btw., the red line in the description
"( Note:You need to connector them by yourself )"
seems a bit of a catch, though. Possibly just a parts kit and you'll have to do all the fumbly bits yourself. But with some kind of plyers, that's doable with six dupont plugs, they're not that small.
(The Reichelt offer might me more convenient, if shipping isn't the issue.)

gerwin wrote on 2011-01-15, 16:34:

Behold!

Forgive my ignorance, this technology is very poorly documented and here is the only place on the internet that has information. I paid to make this cable but I think it was done wrong. Is the pinout the same in both positions or is the sound card different? I ask this because my Aopen does not show this information, I only have pin numbers and I don't know if I should follow the same scheme as the motherboard or if there is something in a different position.

gundstaff wrote on 2020-12-03, 01:12:

[Is the pinout the same in both positions or is the sound card different?

Pinout is the same on both. One pin may be missing to help with cable orientation (only 5 are actually used). Just make sure that all the pins are connected to their corresponding counterparts e.g. 1 to 1 and so on.

I made mine from an old floppy drive cable and it works great on my Yamaha YMF724F-V and my Abit ZM6 motherboard.

I bought a couple of these cables from China last year. Naturally it took them a few weeks to arrive, but they were cheap and do the trick.

eBay search term: "2.54mm Pitch 6P Flat Ribbon Cable"
Right now there is this listing: 163282441356
Just select the 6 Pin variant in the dropdown and you're good to go. The ones I bought last year were even cheaper, sub-1€ per cable, but the seller doesn't seem to have them listed currently.

Here is another supplier for Germany: https://www.conrad.de/de/p/bkl-electronic-101 … st-2103789.html
And the connector for boards with missing sblink headers: https://www.conrad.de/de/p/bkl-electronic-101 … -st-741435.html

But didn't tested them yet.

Thanks for this thread, it has been most helpful, I was trying to get my SB CT4B10 to work on my mobo under win98 and it has this SB Link. The manual says it needs this to use the SB in DOS, well it appears that because the sound card itself doesn't have the SB link option it won't work anyway !
I've attached here the info on the pins from the mobo manual.

The CT4810 doesn't support either sideband option for DOS audio emulation. The driver uses EMM386 to intercept hardware calls and route them to the card. Ironically, Creative Labs only produced one family of cards which support SBLink -- AWE64 PCI or AWE64D sounds cards.

Have been looking into this when implementing an PCI-to-ISA bus controller into my emulator.
The PCI part is relatively easy to emulate (effectively already is).

Then there's this (although it's currently implemented to be handled directly on the main PCI-to-ISA interrupt controller handlings, it might be moved to some generic handling instead later, with each ISA bus connected card receiving one of such a handler (like with memory/IO handling right now)).

Is it possible to use multiple PCI cards with this PC/PCI (or SB-LINK, depending on what you call it) interface? Like PCI, but on multiple cards using a simple signal splitter/merger for example? Connecting all the cards to the same pin on the motherboard (for example the SERIRQ pins all being connected together for all the cards and the motherboard pin)? Or would that cause some sort of weird shorting?

In fact, can you even use multiple PCI-to-ISA bridges on a single system? In my case, my emulated system has one for the motherboard part (though not routing anything itself, (PCI IDE DMA is routed through the PCI adapter, if present, though) it's done by the main handling that handles the PCI configuration ports instead) and currently (this is not released with the emulator yet rn due to Windows 95 detecting issues with it somehow, it keeps giving error 2 somehow? Windows 95 RTM detects it as a PCI-to-ISA bridge, but Windows 95 "C" (OSR 2.5) detects it as a "PCI bridge" instead?) one PCI-to-ISA bridge (IT8888G PCI-to-ISA bridge emulation on the root bus, device 0Fh, function 0. The only difference being is that the subsystem vendor/device ID fields default (on PCIRST#) to 100Ch(Tseng) or 0000h, subsystem device ID being ET4000(AX or W32)(ET4000/W32P with rev 2 (for W32I) to identify the W32I instead (detected properly by UniVBE), like the card is detected as either a normal bus (VGA, thus subsystem/vendor is cleared as documented on the adapter's official documentation) or Tseng device (ID 0 for AX or 'W32P revision 2' (an officially undefined ID) for W32I. On a real card this would have been implemented by a ROM that loads those fields instead))).

Anyway, it'd be interesting if the PC/PCI cable can be used with multiple PCI devices (or PCI-to-ISA buses)? Anyone knows?