Wayne Chirnside wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

RJT> Wayne Chirnside wrote in a message to All:

WC> The old cable for the Creative CD-ROM drive is wired blank, white,
WC> black, red with red to the side of the drive while the new
WC> CD-ROM's cable goes into the drive as white, blank, black, red
WC> Same order but the blank is in a different place on each plug and
WC> the pins do not match.

RJT> The physical compatibility of the plugs is the real issue here.  Black
RJT> and blank are not a problem,  two of those pins are ground,  it doesn't
RJT> much matter which ones you use.  I've encountered two types of plugs on
RJT> sound cards that were pretty similar (small,  white plastic) but which
RJT> were wired opposite to each other -- one would work and the other would
RJT> give you silence.  

WC> But no smoke right? 

Not in my experience,  no.

WC> Both cables for the Turtle Beach and Soundblaster are rather long 
WC> if incompatable physically. I can snip them physically and rewire 
WC> to match by swapping the male that terminates in the drive. < Matt 
WC> helped here too and I now see that what you say above is correct, 
WC> I'd have lost the left channel. Problem being without magnifier  
WC> and good light I never saw the markings stamped on the drives>
WC> Drat no shrink wrap here. Hey Roy thanks you came through again.

Hey,  I just hit the same hassles earlier on is all.  

WC> I got curious and plugged headphones directly into the front of the 
WC> drive and cued up an audio CD and it played but obviously won't go 
WC> through the sound card until I rig the cable to fit. Four buttons, 
WC> sound down, sound up, jump to next track and stop - eject :-) Need 
WC> a pipe cleaner and solvent to clean corrosion off the miniplug 
WC> though as it requires a bit of jiggling to get both channels of 
WC> stereo, my guess this jack was never previously used as the drive 
WC> was only first manufactered in 1999.

Either that or it was used and the plug got bumped,  doing a number on the
solder joints.  I've sure encountered enough of that sort of thing...   :-)

RJT> If you're dealing with slightly newer hardware the connector on 
RJT> the sound card will match the one on the drive and it won't matter 
RJT> at all.

WC>  Creative 2X - Acer 40X, it matters ;-)

RJT> The card I have in the former w3.11 box here was an
"ESS1868" and had
RJT> three connectors,  the larger one that matched the drive and the two
RJT> that were wired differently.  The one I have in the linux box is an
RJT> "ESS1869",  which has one small white plastic connector
and one larger
RJT> one -- I've tried both and they're equally noisy. 

With two different cables,  of course.

RJT> The one PCI card I have here,  an SB16PCI (model CT4740) has only 
RJT> the larger style black plastic connectors on it,  but there are 
RJT> three of them with inside access.

WC> I'll hack the Turtle Beach Sound card cable and solder the female
WC> CD plug to the SoundBlaster cable.

Do you have something that'll fit both ends of what you wanna use?  I have
a bunch of these kicking around...

WC> I may even try to use the Packard Bell sound card as it's set to 
WC> the same addresses and IRQ's. Than I can pack away the still 
WC> working sound card and proprietary CD-ROM.

WC> Any opionions as to what success or disaster I might face were I to 
WC> cut off the connector from the PCI sound card and wire it to the 
WC> end of the cable coming from the sound card soldering the salvaged 
WC> connector and correcting the wiring order?

You wanna take the connector off the card?  Why?

RJT> Don't worry about the wiring order if the only thing different is black
RJT> and blank,  they're both grounds,  and it doesn't matter.  

WC> No it's the white wire that's displaced by the blank and not the
WC> black, on both cables the black and red occupy the same pins though
WC> incompatable plugs.

I'm not sure I have a clear picture of what you've got there.  Is the cable
(or are there more than one?) equipped with plugs that'll *fit* at both
ends?

RJT> If the connectors fit, try it -- it'll work or it won't.  If it 
RJT> won't,  we can probably hook you up with the right cable,  I have 
RJT> a bunch of them around here that I'll never use.

WC>  I just need to cut a pigtail off the Turtle Beach card's cable  
WC> and solder the salvaged jack to CD drive to the Creative cable. 
WC> I've one Turtle Beach cable and two that'll fit the SoundBlaster. 

WC> Sound card works everywhere but with the CD due to the lack of that 
WC> connection.

RJT> That'll do it!  :-)

WC> I figured so but with my available resources nowadays tend to err 
WC> on the side of caution.  I think I've done pretty well with this 
WC> box seeing as how it came out of a dumpster and the 40X drive 
WC> working was really welcome.

Yeah,  you lucked out there all right.

WC> Setting up the CD to operate was interesting too. The manufacturer, 
WC> Aopen, tagged Acer and now Beng out  of Taiwan had a DOS driver on 
WC> their support site.  Installed the driver, located the drive on IRQ 
WC> 15 and then snagged the address with dmesg |more from Basic Linux 
WC> :-)  Plugged in all the right values and bingo she worked out of   
WC> the gate :-)

For me,  linux has yet to fail to recognize any hardware I've thrown at it,
though getting sound working took a bit more work,  that being PnP.

WC>  BTW thanks for the heads up regarding the litium coin cell's 
WC> relation to part number.

I sorta figured that out when I was doing all that dealing with batteries
some time back.  No similar rational numbering seems to exist for watch
batteries,  or other types,  that I've noticed,  unfortunately.

WC> The PCI soundcard is Turtle Beach which I've heard of but lack 
WC> software for so I'm looking for a workaround for the Sound card I
WC> do have working software for loaded, opinions?

RJT> I've heard of them.  If you decide you don't wanna mess with it,  let
RJT> me know - I'll give it a shot here.  :-)

WC> Love to but I recall hearing very good things about that card it's
WC> just that I'm lacking an O.S. that'll support that card as yet.

I wouldn't be surprised to find support for it somewhere in linux.

WC> I want sound in the interrum period which may not be long at all.
WC> Once I grab that new hard drive I'm going to see if the Win 95 OEM 
WC> CD will recognise this drive and install or possibly I'll be able 
WC> to get the damaged drive with Win 98 on it to boot with a boot disk
WC> gotten from www.bootdisk.com.

Never hit that site,  what's it got on it?

WC> I _could_ wind up with two sound cards and two CD-Drives in this 
WC> machine and thus play one audio CD through the stereo in the other 
WC> room and one in here or use one CD for other uses and one for audio.
WC> Yet to install the voice modem and when I do I'll still have one 
WC> PCI and 1 ISA slot open.

The only problem with two sound cards is that they tend to be kinda resource hogs...

The one ISA card I have working under linux wants a couple of IRQs and a
couple of DMA channels.  Things got kinda tight in there with the stuff I
used to have in the box,  but I pulled the tape card out and don't
currently use the serial ports in the box just now...

WC> For a box I had very little hope for it's working out rather well!

Sounds to me like you're having fun all right.

WC> Only has jumpers for 200 MHz and MMX processor upgrade but expect 
WC> an overdrive would work if available. If the Turtle Beach sound 
WC> card doesn't work out for me you've got first call on it, it's PCI 
WC> however.

I can deal with that at this point.

WC> Now I need to look for someone willing to sell 4 16 meg sticks of 
WC> EDO RAM cheap and I'm really pretty hot here.

That's what I have in the linux box here,  paid something like $9 each for
them if I'm remembering right.

WC> Matt McCarthy filled out the gaps, he was more verbose, and thus 
WC> allowed me to figure out my CD - Soundcard problem. The markings I 
WC> never saw due to deteriorating eyesight stamped on the back of the 
WC> drives was the key. The cable blanks between the two would have 
WC> simply denied me the left channel audio had the plugs matched.

Eh?  (Grabbing loose drive handy...)  The one drive,  a 2x,  has a 3-pin
connector labeled L-G-R.  The other one,  a NEC 4x4 changer,  has a 4-pin
connector that matches the ones on the SB16,  the kind that has the release
tab,  and it's labeled R n L where "n" is a three-sided rectangle
pointing to the two middle pins,  with "gnd" above it.

WC> Project for another day however to get it going, have to manage and
WC> apportion my effort or pay dearly.

Yep.

ttyl

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