I use an Ali M5283 based PCI IDE+SATA card on my 486 with i420EX chipset, only one I managed to get working on it. Promise Ultra66/Fasttrack66 didn't work without data corruption on it and SIL311x cards didn't do anything at all. No idea about VIA based cards. I don't have a SiS based PCI 486, they may or may work with these cards.

Does it require motherboard to have some kind of bios settings for such card to work?

BIOS needs to be able to map the boot ROM somewhere useful where it won't conflict with other (ISA) cards and run it (sometimes there's boot SCSI option in BIOS but usually the boot ROMs should always get ran), and the boot ROM itself may not use Pentium+ specific instructions etc.

Has anyone had success getting their CD-ROM to work in DOS when using a PCI IDE add-in card?

Pretty sure almost all PCI IDE and SATA cards only support hard drives.

The computer BIOS sees these PCI cards as SCSI devices, so it may be possible to get one to work with a CD-ROM but it would probably require a special driver.

cyclone3d wrote:

Pretty sure almost all PCI IDE and SATA cards only support hard drives.

The computer BIOS sees these PCI cards as SCSI devices, so it may be possible to get one to work with a CD-ROM but it would probably require a special driver.

IDE and SATA RAID cards only see Hard Drives, but ATAPI control cards see and control opticals no problem. An example is ITE IT1282 which can be configured either way via a BIOS flash. I recently made a thread begging for the ATAPI BIOS for that thing, and nobody seemed to have it, and after persistently begging to ITE I got the BIOSes and the datasheet.

Um, has anybody here tried this before ? I mean, are these kind of controller's firmwares still compatible to i386/i486 processors,
or do they use 586 instructions already (I'm asking because PCI became popular with the Pentium generation) ?

Jo22 wrote:

Um, has anybody here tried this before ? I mean, are these kind of controller's firmwares still compatible to i386/i486 processors,
or do they use 586 instructions already (I'm asking because PCI became popular with the Pentium generation) ?

I have only used it on Socket 7 and onwards, so I can't vouch for this..

appiah4 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

IDE and SATA RAID cards only see Hard Drives, but ATAPI control cards see and control opticals no problem. An example is ITE IT1282 which can be configured either way via a BIOS flash. I recently made a thread begging for the ATAPI BIOS for that thing, and nobody seemed to have it, and after persistently begging to ITE I got the BIOSes and the datasheet.

I've got one (It's ITE8212)... SIL0680 also has an ATAPI BIOS. I had to desolder the parallel flash to program the ITE8212, because their utility didn't work. I hot flashed it in a motherboard BIOS socket.

Neither chips are anything to write home about. Nothing touches Intel when it comes to a perfect implementation of ATAPI standards.

mockingbird wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

IDE and SATA RAID cards only see Hard Drives, but ATAPI control cards see and control opticals no problem. An example is ITE IT1282 which can be configured either way via a BIOS flash. I recently made a thread begging for the ATAPI BIOS for that thing, and nobody seemed to have it, and after persistently begging to ITE I got the BIOSes and the datasheet.

I've got one (It's ITE8212)... SIL0680 also has an ATAPI BIOS. I had to desolder the parallel flash to program the ITE8212, because their utility didn't work. I hot flashed it in a motherboard BIOS socket.

Neither chips are anything to write home about. Nothing touches Intel when it comes to a perfect implementation of ATAPI standards.

Of course, but they are still good for use in legacy systems that only have UDMA33/66 support regardless.

Can you elaborate on the BIOS flash? What was the BIOS chip on the card? My card has an SST re-programmable BIOS, but I hear there are cards out there with one time write BIOSes or cards that have BIOS flashing disabled (somehow).

So nobody has gotten DOS CD-ROM support working with PCI add-on cards in MS-DOS? CD-ROM support with PCI add-on cards works fine in Windows. CD-ROM support in DOS can be useful for DOS games which require a CD check.

Baoran wrote:

Would a card like this work in dos and boot in a 486 that has SIS496 chipset and pci slots?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATA-133-HDD-PCI-IDE- … ad/302939973967
Or are there pci options that would work better?

If 3.3v rail in PCI slot is necessary for working (that is highly possible) then the card won't work.

What about SATA to IDE adapters? Do they work with CD drives?

I haven't found one that does. Sometimes they recognize the CD drive but they still won't work.

so all those ebay sellers that advertise that sata optical drives work with their adapters are incorrect?

Baoran wrote:

so all those ebay sellers that advertise that sata optical drives work with their adapters are incorrect?

I've only tried the opposite way - PATA DVD-Writer to SATA port on mainboard (Intel H61 chipset). It just works.

Don't expect any miracles with those PATA-SATA adapters... They all use a JMB chipset which aint too great.

There does exist another PATA-SATA chipset other than JMB, but don't ask me for any details, and I doubt it supports ATAPI translation at all either.

Sorry for resurrecting my old thread but I found a pci ide card that just works on my 486 motherboard. Maybe this is not so uncommon and the info of this thread is old information, but I was excited.

This is picture of my very first test that I just did. There are few things though. I am currently using kingston turbochip there so that is why it shows 5x86 there even if I normally run 486 dx4 100Mhz. Also the hard drive speeds don't seem very impressive probably because after the test I noticed I was using 40 wire ide cable that was leftover from when I didn't have the pci ide card there. Another thing is that I had warning that smartdrv was in the memory when I ran speesys, so that might also affect results. Main thing for me is though that this card supports larger than 127Gb hard drives and it just works on an old 486 motherboard.

Switching from 40 wire ide cable to 80 wire ide cable increased the reading speed from 2800KB/s to 4800KB/s. I assume the low speeds are because of DMA transfer not being enabled in dos.