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Creative CD drive and interface card (CT 1810 with CR 521C)

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First post, by wbahnassi

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In my 386 build, I'm adding multimedia support, in the form of a 1x Creative CD drive (model CR 521 C), caddy loader.

The attachment CR-521-C-lg.jpg is no longer available

This drive uses the Panasonic interface. Typically it's used with an SB Pro or SB16 card, which have the Panasonic connector on them.
But for my 386, I wanted to use a classic Sound Blaster, which has no CD support. So I needed a separate interface card that supports the CD drive.

Enter the CT1810 interface card.

The attachment Screenshot_20241128_201313_eBay.png is no longer available

The card has only one jumper that controls whether the address is A250 or A260.

With the SB Pro, I used SBPCD.SYS and CDMKE.SYS with the parameter /SBP:220 and the driver works fine.

However, with the interface card, things didn't work when replacing /SBP:220 with /SBP:250. The driver just couldn't locate the CD drive.

The non-Creative driver CDMKE.SYS accepts another type of address parameter /P. Using that as /P:250 allowed the driver to find the CD drive and MSCDEX loads successfully... except... I can't access any files on the CDs. The drive just hangs with a green light. That was strange because the documentation of CDMKE.SYS said that for a SoundBlaster, use the SBP parameter, and for a dedicated interface card, use the P parameter... which is my case with the CT1810.

After reading around, I found someone mentioning that on a Sound Blaster Pro or 16, the address of the CD interface is 10 above the SB's base address. Meaning if the card is A220, then the CD interface is at A230. It makes sense, but for my case I'm not using the sound card.

Still, I tried passing /P:240 to CDMKE.SYS such that it can find the CD interface at A250 (as the CT1810 is jumpered). This resulted in the driver not finding the drive any more... however... when I used /SBP:240, the drive was found by the driver, but moreover, I can now access the files normally!

So it seems /SBP also causes the driver to talk somewhat differently to the drive than /P.

Now the 386 has a working 1x CD drive along with the Sound Blaster. Just wanted to document the process here for any people wanting to use the CT1810 interface card with a Creative drive like the CR521c or CR563B.

Enjoy

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, TSeng ET3000, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 1 of 4, by Horun

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Nice !

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 4, by wbahnassi

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You know, the only bummer about the CT1810 is its CD audio connector. It uses the Panasonic header (beveled edges and long-slit pins). This is the same header on the back of the CD drive as well. It requires a cable with this header:

The attachment WAL78-INT-CDSB-1-2.jpg is no longer available

I have a cable which has one end like this, but its other end is made to fit in an SBPro. Whereas for the CT1810 you need the cable to have the same Panasonic connector on both ends. I don't think I came across anything like this before, so it seems my only option is to buy two Panasonic-SBPro audio cables and splice them into one that has two Panasonic heads.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, TSeng ET3000, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 3 of 4, by chinny22

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Panasonic drives are fairly uncommon and people not just using the soundcard even less so I doubt many people will need this guide.
But I love this setup for exactly this reason! thankyou for troubleshooting and documenting the process before it was lost to time.

PS
I'm slightly jealous you even have a working Panasonic drive, mine died years ago and was replaced with a boring IDE drive.
The fact it's a caddy drive makes it even cooler!

Reply 4 of 4, by wbahnassi

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I try to avoid the faster speed drives for all my retro machines. They're noisy without a be quiet utility, and they mess up the period of the machine. The only thing I miss is that most older drives fail to recognize CD-RWs, but that's alright.
So my pool of drives is 1x (for 386), 2x (for 486 DX2) and 4x (for P90).

And trying to stick to Creative here to keep in shape with the Sound Blaster cards used in each system (SB2, SBPro2, SB16). Both 1x and 2x drives I have are Panasonic interfaces, and only the 4x drive is IDE ATAPI.. so for me I spend more time on Panasonic-interface drives than IDE.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, TSeng ET3000, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

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