There is no "IDE or ATAPI". ATAPI is an extension to IDE that allows devices other than hard disks. A CD-ROM drive is found no matter where you connect it - sound card, on-board IDE, or multi i/o card.

Afaik, however, the SB Pro has a Panasonic interface, it's not IDE at all. You can not connect any ATAPI devices on that, only early Panasonic/Creative CD-ROM drives.

ok, but my question is not on the ide-atapi hardware but on functionality using one device instead of the other as i have ask in my exhample.

SEcon question in my mind: Iomiega ZIP internal IDE, sometimes i have read it called IDE/ATAPI, that means it work connected to the Sound Blaster PRO2?

Sorry, but then I don't get your question. You asked if there's a difference between connecting to IDE or ATAPI - even stating that you would buy an ATAPI drive instead of an IDE one. But there is no such thing as an ATAPI interface. It's all IDE. ATAPI is a software layer.

As wrote above, the SB Pro has no IDE afaik, it's a proprietary Panasonic interface. You can not connect anything but early Panasonic/Creative CD-ROM drives to that.

ok, you clarify some thing that i not know, i be more direct. Booting pc from a Windows95 original floppy 1.44Mb boot, the system load automatically the driver (like it do for the IDE drive) that allow to install windows 95 from the cd inserted in the atapi cd-rom or i must modify the config.sys??

The Sound Blaster Pro 2 could have a number of interfaces.

CT1600 - Matsushita/Panasonic
CT1610 - SCSI
CT1620 - LMSI
CT1690 - Sony
CT2600 - Mitsumi

No IDE/ATAPI AFAIK

While it is mostly true whats said above about ATAPI being IDE extension, there are some caveats:

- there are ATAPI compliant drives with non-IDE physical interfaces
- there are early IDE connected drives with no ATAPI support (they used a special driver)

ok, mine is a CT1600 with a connector the same size of IDE. if it is a mitsum for example, the floppy win95 cd boot load is driver or not??

Well depends on your cd-rom drive. Unless it is the actual Matsushita/Panasonic drive (model number 531 or like) then it won't work. With driver or not. Even if it is using the same 40pin cable. The bus protocol is different.

Unfortunately, even if you had a sound card with the actual IDE, you will likely won't get any free channels if you already have two IDE ports on your motherboard. There are IRQ and I/O port limits. These interfaces were a stop gap solution to allow multimedia upgrade for computers in days where most computers had only one IDE port.

If you want to use many peripherals at the same time, SCSI is the way to go.

AlessandroB wrote:

ok, mine is a CT1600 with a connector the same size of IDE. if it is a mitsum for example, the floppy win95 cd boot load is driver or not??

The same size connector doesn't help if the interface is different.

Mitsumi interface supports a Mitsumi drive, NOT IDE/ATAPI. I also doubt if a default Win95 boot floppy supports it, but as I don't have a Mitsumi drive I can't check that for you. For an IDE/ATAPI drive you need an IDE controller and no other.

If you have a sound card with an IDE interface, it depends on the ID of the interface. The PC BIOS supports 4 drive channels. Most sound card IDE drives are configured to channel 3 or 4. Most boot floppies only support channels 1 and 2, so you need a separate driver that supports a CD on channel 3 or 4. However some cards allow you to set the interface manually. If you only have one channel on your multi I/O (or IDE) controller, you can set the interface on your sound card to channel 2. Then the default boot floppy driver will support it.

but i have only 1 port, 1 port two device.

I have tried hooking up various IDE devices to sound cards with an IDE-CDRom header many years back. My experience:
I got no other device than CD drives working. Maybe I simply missed something since back then I was basically just a total noob experimenting with little knowledge. But thinking back I wouldn't really know what else to try.
Even CD drives performed poorly on those interfaces.
Some cards wouldn't accept two drives on the interface.
Obviously you can't boot from a CD drive connected to a sound card since BIOS doesn't see it.
I was able to start the Win98 setup from CD (IDE drive on sound card IDE interface) after booting from the Win98 boot floppy with some cards. On other cards the drive could not be found.
All of this may totally be related to the specific sound cards though and I have no idea which cards I used back then.

So coming from this experience my recommendation to AlessandroB would be to get a regular IDE interface controller card to hook your devices up to.

AlessandroB wrote:

but i have only 1 port, 1 port two device.

Then you need an expansion card. Since your Sound Blaster Pro doesn't support IDE/ATAPI drives it is probably much easier to find an actual dual IDE controller card than upgrading your sound card and trying to get any sound card solution to work.

i have only 2 isa slot, one for the sound card and one for the net. in 1993/4 in mi dx2 i had soundblaster pro and a proper cd-rom that play games, start cd-rom, and doing all i need. i remember his driver loaded in a config.sys. But in that time i was child, not need to boot win95 installation from this drive, not boot ghost from this drive. All i want to know is that that cd-rom connected to the soundblaster pro (think matsushita) is seen by the boot floppy at the same way is seen the ide drive connected to the mainboard

Well, the question if if you actually have a compatible Matsushita/Panasonic CD-ROM drive or not. These are quite rare and many don’t work any more. As written above you cannot use your standard CD-ROM drive on your SB-PRO, it has to be a special one.

Also, If all you need is to install Win95 then you don’t need to necessarily boot from the CD or have support for it in the install disk. You can boot somehow with having the right driver and then run installer directly from the CD once driver is fully loaded. You can even copy the files from your CD to HDD and install without having any CD-ROM connected.

In fact booting from CD in early 90s was very uncommon and most BIOSes had no support for it. Most people just ran Win installer from DOS.

I vote ATAPI is better than IDE for CD-ROMs. 🤣 (Joking.)

The SB Pro CT1600 interface only works with the Creative / Matsushita / Panasonic CR-563 drive. (I think there were a couple other similar part numbers, but I've only seen this one in the wild.) That's it. Essentially one drive.

You need the SBCD.SYS or CDMKE.SYS driver in your config.sys to support this drive. You cannot boot from it, as there are no BIOSes that support booting from the MKE interface. It is not IDE. However... if your boot floppy has this driver, you can use it to install Win9x. I don't know what the Win95 boot floppy has on it, as I've always made my own boot disks.

If your PC only has one IDE channel (2 drives max), then you have a few options...

1) Get a controller card that allows you to enable ONLY the secondary IDE channel.
2) Get a sound card with an IDE CD-ROM interface. (This will allow you to use ATAPI CD-ROM drives over the IDE bus.) The sound card may treat this interface as the secondary (2nd) or tertiary (3rd) IDE channel, or it might allow you to choose via a jumper. You will probably have to tell your IDE CD-ROM driver (e.g., SBIDE.SYS or OAKCDROM.SYS) which address and IRQ to use.
3) Find a Panasonic CR-563B and use it with your SB Pro. If you shop on Ebay, they're not terribly common, and expensive, since they're sought after these days, but there are millions out there so you might run into one if you're lucky.
4) Get a SCSI card and a SCSI CD-ROM drive. This is more complicated, as now you have to have a driver for the card and the CD-ROM.

Incidentally, it sounds like your PC is probably old enough that it won't boot straight to CD no matter what you do. You will have to use a boot floppy with a CD-ROM driver. It doesn't matter much whether that's IDE/ATAPI, MKE, or SCSI. It will work the same way.

ok, not my ideas are more clear, I thought that the cd-rom drivers (apart from scsi) were universal, so they are not, I will keep my ide disks. Thanks to those who gave me information about it

If I was in your position I'd just get a sound card with an IDE interface. CT2290 has both Creative/Panasonic and IDE connecteors. Thats what may have confused you.

Next step: my PS/1 not support CD-Rom in his integrated controller.

I have three possible scenarios to choose from:

1)ide cd-rom (i have) with isa controller (i have)
2)matsushita cd-rom (to buy) in a Sound Blaster Pro2 (i have)
3) Cd-rom scsi (i have) in a scsi isa controller (to buy)

What is better to choose? Not important what i have and what i must buy, i want to know what is easy to configure or better compatible or i not know...

tell me what you think.

tnks

AlessandroB wrote:

Next step: my PS/1 not support CD-Rom in his integrated controller. […]
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Next step: my PS/1 not support CD-Rom in his integrated controller.

I have three possible scenarios to choose from:

1)ide cd-rom (i have) with isa controller (i have)
2)matsushita cd-rom (to buy) in a Sound Blaster Pro2 (i have)
3) Cd-rom scsi (i have) in a scsi isa controller (to buy)

What is better to choose? Not important what i have and what i must buy, i want to know what is easy to configure or better compatible or i not know...

tell me what you think.

tnks

What model PS/1? It should be fine with the on board controller it the correct drivers are used and it's set to slave and the hdd is set to master.

i doubt, is the one with the 486 dx33 and simm 30 pin. 99,9% not accept cd-rom