-=> ROY J. TELLASON wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

 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.  
 
But no smoke right? Both cables for the Turtle Beach and 
Soundblaster are rather long if incompatable physically.
I can snip them physically and rewire to match 
by swapping the male that terminates in the drive. 
< Matt helped here too and I now see that what you say above is correct,
I'd have lost the left channel. Problem being without magnifier 
and good light I never saw the markings stamped on the
drives>
Drat no shrink wrap here.
Hey Roy thanks you came through again.
I got curious and plugged headphones directly into the front of 
the drive and cued up an audio CD and it played but obviously
won't go through the sound card until I rig the cable to fit.
Four buttons, sound down, sound up, jump to next track and
stop - eject :-) Need a pipe cleaner and solvent to clean
corrosion off the miniplug though as it requires a bit of jiggling to
get both channels of stereo, my guess this jack was never previously
used as the drive was only first manufactered in 1999.

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

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

I'll hack the Turtle Beach Sound card cable and solder the female CD
plug to the SoundBlaster cable.
I may even try to use the Packard Bell sound card as it's
set to the same addresses and IRQ's. Than I can pack away the still
working sound card and proprietary CD-ROM.

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

 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.  
 
No it's the white wire that's displaced by the blank and not the black,
on both cables the black and red occupy the same pins though 
incompatable plugs. 
 
 RJT> If the
 RJT> connectors fit, try it -- it'll work or it won't.  If it won't,  we can
 RJT> probably hook you up with the right cable,  I have a bunch of them
 RJT> around here that I'll never use.

 I just need to cut a pigtail off the Turtle Beach card's cable 
 and solder the salvaged jack to CD drive to the Creative cable.
 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
 WC> that connection.

 RJT> That'll do it!  :-)

 I figured so but with my available resources nowadays tend to
 err on the side of caution.
 I think I've done pretty well with this box seeing as how it came
 out of a dumpster and the 40X drive working was 
 really welcome.
 Setting up the CD to operate was interesting too.
 The manufacturer, Aopen, tagged Acer and now Beng out 
 of Taiwan had a DOS driver on their support site.
 Installed the driver, located the drive on IRQ 15 and then
 snagged the address with dmesg |more from Basic Linux :-) 
 Plugged in all the right values and bingo she worked out of 
 the gate :-)
 BTW thanks for the heads up regarding the litium coin cell's
 relation to part number.

 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.  :-)

Love to but I recall hearing very good things about that card it's
just that I'm lacking an O.S. that'll support that  card as yet.
I want sound in the interrum period which may not be long at all.
Once I grab that new hard drive I'm going to see
if the Win 95 OEM CD will recognise this drive and
install or possibly I'll be able to get the damaged 
drive with Win 98 on it to boot with a boot disk
gotten from www.bootdisk.com.
I _could_ wind up with two sound cards and two CD-Drives
in this machine and thus play one audio CD through the stereo
in the other room  and one in here or use one CD for
other uses and one for audio.
Yet to install the voice modem and when I do I'll still
have one PCI and 1 ISA slot open.
For a box I had very little hope for it's working out rather well!
Only has jumpers for 200 MHz and MMX processor
upgrade but expect an overdrive would work if available.
If the Turtle Beach sound card doesn't work out for me
you've got first call on it, it's PCI however.
Now I need to look for someone willing to sell 4 16 meg 
sticks of EDO RAM cheap and I'm really pretty hot here.
Matt McCarthy filled out the gaps, he was more verbose, and 
thus allowed me to figure out my CD - Soundcard problem.
The markings I never saw due to deteriorating eyesight 
stamped on the back of the drives was the key.
The cable blanks between the two would have simply denied me
the left channel audio had the plugs matched.
Project for another day however to get it going, have to manage
and apportion my effort or pay dearly.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5