The old Creative solution was the CR563B drive, a 2x speed CDROM - my first drive.
Sound cards tended to carry a single proprietary interface - or a set of 3 proprietary (the multi or "MCD" version), the later IDE only ones, and a few which actually had all 4

fitzpatr wrote:

Ok. […]
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Ok.

Let's hold on a minute here.

1. The CT2740 in your possession will not work with an IDE CD-ROM drive. Even attempting it can damage something because the pinouts do not match. Same cable, different interface.

2. You have a few options, most of which have been mentioned above.
A. Use a newer Sound Card that explicitly provides an IDE interface. Some AWE32s, and several newer SB16s provide this, as well as many other cards.
B. Find an old, compatible drive for your current Sound Card.
C. Find a SCSI CD-ROM drive.

Note that in addition to the data cable, an audio cable from the CD-ROM drive to the Sound Card will be required.

If you're talking about the 4-pin cable from the card to the drive, I already have that connected so no issues there. As for a replacement device, I'd rather opt for a new card than a new drive since the drive is probably more obscure and has moving parts which can fail. The CT2290 seems the ideal candidate but I'm not 100% sure it's IDE compatible... it only appears to be so.

I am referring to the 4 pin audio cable.
The CT2290, if the inside pin header is populated, is IDE compatible.

Seems I've had a small victory (maybe).

I was rummaging through my stuff and came across an ESS AudioDrive Card (1868 model, says FX-16 on the front). It HAS an IDE CD-ROM header on it! In fact, this was the original equipment in the computer before I swapped it out for a sound blaster. This means there's hope for running my CD-ROM. But at what cost?

1) How is the quality of this card vs the 2740 I have in there now?

2) Does anyone know where I can get the best dos and win3.11 drivers for this?

3) I heard this card doesn't load as a TSR. Does that mean I have to turn it on every time I boot the machine or how does this work?

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?

I managed to solve the problem after hours of trial and error. I still don't know why my original drive refused to work at all but the 4x that's in there now is functioning correctly now. Here's what I've learned:

1) The ES1868.COM file that is launched in the config.sys after you go through the setup wizard has 1 purpose and 1 purpose only: TO ENABLE THE IDE HEADER on the sound card. That's it. After that you're back to where you would have been if you'd merely plugged your drive into your motherboard. Therefore you have to use some sort of .sys driver in config.sys + MSCDEX in autoexec.bat in order to detect the drive. I started off using the Win98SE boot floppy which has CD-ROM support but did NOT work at all. That's what made me think there was some other issue. Then I looked up UIDE and found that it had been replaced with UDVD2. There are a bunch of other files listed on the main website:

http://optimizr.no-ip.org/dos/drivers.html

but I found I did not need them. Just use UDVD2 with the basic switches in your config file and the call MSCDEX in your autoexec and it should work. It's also important to note that before you even get this far you have to make sure your cable isn't reversed, as some drives aren't keyed, nor is the ESS card, and that the drive jumper is set to slave. Also make sure to pick an unused IRQ. In the ESS setup wizard it gave me only 3 options, none of which I wanted and those 3 options correspond to letters in the config.sys file where A is 10 and F is 15. It doesn't have options for C thru E though. I wanted C (12) and found I could simply change the letter manually in the config file. Using 10, 11, 13, 14 or 15 in my opinion is a bad idea because it may conflict with: SCSI host, LAN, IDE host (if any) and I didn't want to take that risk but if you know you don't need one of them it's fine.