Blahhh!!!
So as I may or may not have mentioned, I took out the SB card and put in my ESS AudioDrive card instead. That one has a bonafide IDE interface on it.
Hooked up the cables and the computer refused to start. Not even a POST. No video, nothing. Thought I'd broken it. After a component swap root-cause analysis I traced it to the ribbon cable going from the ESS to the CD Drive (which is a 2x). No matter how much I monkeyed with the jumpers and cable direction it would not allow the computer to start so I pulled out an IBM 4x drive and tried that. Now the computer starts.
Then I followed the instructions here to the letter:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ess-audiodrive-es1868.html
and installed the drivers, making sure the IRQ, DMA and PORT selections did not conflict with anything.
Computer boots just fine but during the config.sys, when it runs the ES1868.COM driver, it does not detect the drive. No errors or anything, it just doesn't find the drive and moves on. Then my MSCDEX throws an error saying there's no drive to assign. Again, screwing with the jumpers produced nothing. I just don't get it. Seems I'm not the first person to experience this problem:
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … at_my_wits_end/
but he apparently never solved it and I don't think this is as simple as a frayed cable or something. I've gone through a couple of cables and 2 cd-rom drives now to no avail. Can't figure this out. Can anybody help?