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First post, by voidstar

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I'm using a Creative Labs CT2950 (on chip is CT1749-DAO), 1995 vintage.

It came with a CD-ROM drive and the original Creative 3.5 disks. Using MS-DOS 6.22 and installed Creative's CD-ROM driver (SBCD.SYS under the SB16\DRV folder).

Says version 4.15 and dated 1993 when loading that driver from CONFIG.SYS. And it passes /P:220 (is that supposed to be the port of the SB16? it's A parameter?). This is a PNP juermpless card.

Audio (FX and background) are all working fine on this SB16. Just for the High DMA I used DMA 1 (normal for these systems). In Creative's own DIAGNOSE.EXE both 8-bit and 16-bit digitized audio is working fine, and the FM audio.

This SB16 has a 40-pin header off the end. Since this is the CD-ROM it came with, and that CD-ROM has the Master/Slave/CS jumpers at the back, I'm sure it's regular IDE. But this driver isn't detecting or loading when the CD-ROM is connected to this SB16 through the 40-pin.

I do have a regular IDE controller card, so I tried connecting the 40-pin to that instead - but same result, the CD-ROM isn't detected. I do have an XT-IDE 2GB CF for C: drive, don't think it's causing a conflict. But then it runs in my mind, might I have to configure "drive D" to some kind of IDE type in the BIOS ? Or maybe I need to disable the IDE controller in the controller card, in case it is conflicting with the one on the SB16? (that same card also has serial port, game port, and disk drive connector).

The drive is getting power and I can open the tray door. But no luck getting a MS-DOS driver to detect it. I've tried two different IDE cables, and I did try using the CS (cable select) jumper - but SB16's own manual actually says to ignore that. I tried with the Master jumper set and unset.

Anyone aware of any other drivers to try?

I do have a couple Backpack devices, to enable CD-ROM through the parallel port.

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Reply 1 of 21, by voidstar

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To add, I also tried SBIDE.SYS that was on the Creative CD-ROM 3.5 posted at winworldpc, and same result. Actually I'll go try it one more time to be sure.

EDIT: SBIDE.SYS /P:1e8,11

Basically same result, doesn't detect the drive being present. But this driver refers to Oak Tech, and so far I don't have guidance on what to set the /P: argument to.

Reply 2 of 21, by MikeSG

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What kind of CD-ROM are you using?

The port on the Creative sound card is not IDE, it's 99% likely a Matsushita (MKE)/panasonic interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panasonic_CD_interface

Last edited by MikeSG on 2025-01-07, 11:27. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 3 of 21, by myne

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This says ide.
https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturer … tive/ct2950.php
Try the drivers there

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Reply 4 of 21, by Disruptor

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MikeSG wrote on 2025-01-05, 09:12:

What kind of CD-ROM are you using?

The port on the Creative sound card is not IDE, it's 99% likely a Matsushita (MKE)/panasonic interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panasonic_CD_interface

The port on the CT2950 is IDE.

Reply 5 of 21, by Anonymous Coward

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I would think Sbcd.sys from 1993 is likely too early to support IDE/atapi. I’ve never used a creative card with an ide port, but it’s probably a matter of finding the correct driver.

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Reply 6 of 21, by weedeewee

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any chance this is a PnP issue ?

edit: do a simple test, of setting the cdrom to master and hooking it up as the ONLY ! device ( NO cf card NOR CF card adapter )on the multi IO / IDE controller card, NOT the soundblaster, then booting from a dos bootdisk with cdrom support.

Is the cdrom detected, Yes or No ?
If No. It's likely dead.
If Yes, further troubleshooting wrt the soundblaster interface is warranted.

Last edited by weedeewee on 2025-01-05, 13:37. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 8 of 21, by darry

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a) SBCD.SYD only works with MKE interface CD-ROM drives and interfaces

b) The CT2950 has an IDE interface, NOT an MKE one (both MKE and IDE interfaces have 40 pins but are NOT compatible)

c) The CDROM drive needs to be IDE for this to work. Please share the model. Unless you know the history of the machine, you can't assume, for example, that a previous owner/seller did not swap in an incompatible drive and you happen to be first person trying to test it.

Assuming everything is IDE compatible and in working state, oakcdrom.sys or most any IDE CDROM driver should work, but it might be necessary to specify the the port address of the IDE controller used (which is not 220h), though oakcdrom.sys may be able to autodetect it ( going from memory).

EDIT: SBIDE.SYS should work too.

Reply 9 of 21, by darry

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weedeewee wrote on 2025-01-05, 12:09:

any chance this is a PnP issue ?

Yes, it can be.
This is a 386 machine. There is no pnp BIOS and the 2950 is pnp card, if not mistaken.

CTCU/CTCM would need to be used to initialize the IDE interface before loading the CDROM driver in that case.

Reply 10 of 21, by weedeewee

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darry wrote on 2025-01-05, 13:38:
Yes, it can be. This is a 386 machine. There is no pnp BIOS and the 2950 is pnp card, if not mistaken. […]
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weedeewee wrote on 2025-01-05, 12:09:

any chance this is a PnP issue ?

Yes, it can be.
This is a 386 machine. There is no pnp BIOS and the 2950 is pnp card, if not mistaken.

CTCU/CTCM would need to be used to initialize the IDE interface before loading the CDROM driver in that case.

Well, now OP knows another possibility why it's not working.
Seems you replied to my message around the time I edited mine.

thinking out loud... Can Unisound be used to enable the ide interface ? I'll look it up when I require it.

edit: Does anyone know of any panasonic/mitsumi/sony drives that have Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers ?

Last edited by weedeewee on 2025-01-05, 14:32. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 11 of 21, by wbahnassi

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Commenting on the thread subject of 386 with CD, this is my adventure in this regard:
Creative CD drive and interface card (CT 1810 with CR 521C)

I also add my voice to inquire the CD drive model and speed. If it's 4x or faster, it's most probably IDE.
Even though a PnP SB16 is not in a 386's period, it should work fine. If you have the full driver software for the exact model you have, installing that should add the necessary config steps to init both sound and CD in the correct order.

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Reply 12 of 21, by voidstar

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Drive is Creative branded, August 1997, labeled "24Xmx CREATIVE" on the front label. I'm not sure what the "mx" means next to the "24X" speed on the front label. Top label has written "MODEL CR-585-B".

It should be the same drive that came with this SB16 card (but yes, it is possible that it inadvertently got swapped out over time). The set of disk with the card seemed to be a mixture of SB16 and AWE64 stuff (original Creative label media, but just evidence that maybe it's a mixed-bag of components here). For example, there is "Wave BLASTER High-end MIDI Subsystem" disk, is that applicable to the SB16?

Something I just noticed: The "SoundBLASTER" 3.5 disk for the CD-ROM drive is labeled "CD-ROM INSTALLATION (CR563)". Recall on the top label of this CD-ROM drive is labeled model "CR-585-B". Dunno if a CR563 is "family compatible" with a CR-585??

I did end up having to use UNISOUND.COM to get this SB16 fully working on this 386 (as far as the audio parts, like forcing the high DMA to 1; Creative's CTCU, etc. wouldn't let me change it from 5). So for example, Tyrian is working spectacularly. However, Zone66 only the background music is working, soundFX are still coming through the PC speaker. Can't figure that one out.

Will poke around with the other suggestions and report back.

Reply 13 of 21, by Horun

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According to the 1995 version manual for SB16 PNP the IDE port is "tertiary" port 1E8 and most likely IRQ11. you will probably have to use some switches on the cdrom driver to get it to work..
try something like this: DEVICE=C:\"where-ever it is"\SBIDE.SYS /D:MSCD001 /P:1E8,11, also make sure you set a drive letter like C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001 /L:E for drive E...

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Reply 14 of 21, by voidstar

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I got it working! Or at least, the drive is being recongized and getting a drive letter. I don't actually have a CD-ROM disc with any content, haha! So I'll see what I can dig up to confirm it can actually read a file directory and data content. But at least it is getting assigned a drive letter. Wil report how in a bit.

Reply 15 of 21, by voidstar

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Ok, from the site that myne suggested:
https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturer … tive/ct2950.php
I got the "DOS and Windows 3.1 Utility Disk" (from Revision 1, 7th Apr 1997)
it contains a pnpcfg folder, and in that folder is an SBIDE.SYS file (that's about 32KB; the older 1993 SBIDE.SYS is smaller at about 23KB).

Well, that disk was identical to the DOS install disk I have already - but at least good to confirm there is an archive of it out there. But the thing is, the INSTALL.EXE in that pnpcfg just copies CTCU/etc stuff, it didn't actually copy or install that SBIDE.SYS file. So nevermind the Creative "CD-ROM INSTALLATION (CR563)" disk - just go for the Plug n Play Configuration Manager Disk or the Win3.1/DOS BASIC Installation Disk (but I'm not doing any Windows stuff on this system). Just you have to manually copy over SBIDE.SYS yourself.

Then I ran CTCU.EXE, picked the PNP configuration, then IDE. The PNP configuration was blank. I tried configuration #0 (168, int 10), but yea at least at first that didn't work. I changed to configuration #1 (1e8-1ef, 3ee-3ef, interrupt 11). But here's the frustrating thing: it would work once (drive recognized), then on a 2nd reboot the configuration would be blanked out again.

So I started reading unisound.txt file, and yes, it does have parameters related to IDE. Not parameters to the tool itself, but custom extensions to the BLASTER environment variable. I'm suspect that if you don't set those, then unisound.com might be squashing/resetting the IDE PNP configuration (like to 0's, which then running CTCU after that it shows the IDE parts as not being configured - I am just guessing, but something was clearing the PNP IDE configuration across reboots).

So here is what is working:

in config.sys
device=sbide.sys /P:1e8,11,3ee /v

the /V is just "verbose" and optional. To know what to put in the /P, run CTCU, select PNP, select IDE, and pick your configuration there and note down the low and high addresses.

Then on autoexec.bat, add these to your BLASTER variable before running unisound.com:
SET BLASTER=A220 ...blahblah... C1E8 Y11
(guess it just cares about the low address)

Then it shows up when you run UNISOUND.COM. Then I'm using the MSCDEX.EXE that came with MS-DOS 6.22 itself. And now I'm consistently getting a drive letter across reboots.

I do have an SDLPT that lets me use a 2GB SD across the parallel port - it's slightly slower than a physical floppy disk, but the high capacity is nice. Yea, I could FTP stuff over the network card instead like on my other PCs, but I just wanted to try to get CD-ROM support going here.

It would be even better if I could BOOT to CD-ROM on a 386- but the BIOS's might just be too old to allow that? Has anyone heard of a setup like that? I have Pentiun laptops that can boot from CD. Seems in theory if can trick a BIOS into some suitable hard drive type, it should work with a CD-ROM IDE as a bootable device? I'm trying to boot OS/2 on an original 386, just lazy to deal with 50 floppies 😁

Reply 16 of 21, by weedeewee

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@voidstar

No idea if it works on a 386 but there is Plop Boot Manager https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/intro.html

you boot it from a floppy and then hopefully boot from cdrom.

or https://www.plop.at/en/pbm6/full.html which seems to state

Minimum requirements: CPU i386, 46 MB RAM.

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Reply 17 of 21, by voidstar

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Ooof, I've only got 32MB of RAM on this 386. But that sounds interesting, a boot manager to get some initial drivers going off floppy, then kick over to a CD device. I'll check it out, but ran into another problem...

I've only got a 90W power supply, and I think I'm right at the edge of that. Sometimes the system gives extra beeps during startup, which I think are indicating "not quite enough power". Sometimes on startup it does the normal single beep - power can oscillate (constantly or just more gradually across temperatures). So even if everything isn't using 90W, if the usage is power 70W or so, the system could detect that it's on the margin.

In this case, the system became unstable as soon as I put the CD in (and it fired up the laser). I'll swap out to a large power supply and try again.

Reply 18 of 21, by voidstar

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Confirmed, it was the power supply. A 90W picoPSU wasn't adequate for whatever the CD laser added to the power usage. I swapped in a 250W and it is reading a CD-R disc just fine so far.

For testing, I picked ST:TNG Unity by Spectrum Holobyte. It is about 600MB and was one of the "last DOS games" (even in its README.TXT, they had last minute How-To added explaining that Win95 hadn't been released yet, but they had suggestions how it might be configured to work under Win95). And also, it's a game I never played before, so interested to see how it plays on this 386DX-33.

However, as it turns out, ST:TNG Unity requires a math coprocessor! I do have one, but it is only 20MHz and caused stability issues with this 386DX-33. I have another 33MHz coprocessor on order, will be a few days. Quake also requires a co-processor, so we'll see how it handles also (and it took forever to install that across the SDLPT device). Any other pre-DirectX large-DOS games to suggest? Something with BG music and FX. I guess WC4 was still MS-DOS in 1996, I'll see if that requires a co-processor as well. But dialing back a couple years, lots of good stuff in '94 (Warcraft, SystemShock, XCOM, Elder Scrolls, XWing/TieFighter).

But at least I can confirm ST:TNG Unity was installable from a CD-R that I just burned today, using that SBIDE.SYS driver that we just figured out how to setup for that original 1997 Creative 24X CD-ROM 😀

Reply 19 of 21, by darry

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Glad you're getting things to work more and more.

Playing Quake on a 386 with a 387 is a bit like trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a surf board. Expect less than 2 frames per second at 320x200.