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

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

 Seriously doubt it. The jack is quite _tight_ to the plug,
 tighter than many I've used and add to that it just _behaves_
 like corrosion rather than a broken solder joint from the
 feel for things you develop from experience.
 Than again if I'm wrong the cable I make up for the sound card will 
 do quite nicely instead and I can use the jack on the stereo.
 Again the price on this drive was right ;-)
 
 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> I'll hack the Turtle Beach Sound card cable and solder the female
 WC> CD plug to the SoundBlaster cable.

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

Not without doing the custom solder job on the cable.
SoundBlaster white plug cable red, black, white, blank. 
Turtle Beach plug black red, black, blank, white.
I need to go from SB white plug to TB black on the drive end.
No big deal to whip up the cable in the next couple of days.

 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?

 RJT> You wanna take the connector off the card?  Why?

The _plug_ off the drive end of the Turtle Beach card cable so I can
correct wiring order by hooking  the pigtaill up to the
cable from the Soundblaster cable thus fitting the drive.
I'll hack back far enough to allow me to reverse the procedure
in case that OEM Win 95 CD recognizes the  Turtle Beach Sound
card and installs on the new hard drive I'm getting.
 
 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.

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

 The cables I've got, three, two fit SoundBlaster card and proprietary
 CD drive and one fits Turtle Beach as yet unused sound card and
 Acer CD drive. The CD-Drive cable that fits at that end does not at 
 the sound card end.
 Were the plugs to have fit SB - Acer the left channel would have stood
 on one of the two center grounds on the Acer drive, not good.
 Thus I hack the cable for the correct plug and wiring order 
 at the drive end.
 
 WC>  BTW thanks for the heads up regarding the lithium coin cell's
 WC> relation to part number.

 re: Turtle Beach sound card
 WC> 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.

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

Me either as this was a much talked about item when it
was first introduced.

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

Boot disks for various flavors of Windows in case it craps out
on you and you need to load it.

WC> For a box I had very little hope for it's working out rather well!
 
 RJT> Sounds to me like you're having fun all right.


Well I'd rather be all setup and running various Linux distros
with my Windows as fallback until  Linux does what I require it to.
 Rather impressed with my own hardware hacking, three for three now
 with the last being the best box of them all.
 Only the original was bought new with many components added,
 everything else has been successful parts swapping.

 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.

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

 Moneys tight until the third of the month or I'd have jumped on 
 a Pentium LPX form factor board _with_ 64 meg EDO on it in 
 computers for sale echo just yesterday, 10 dollars and shipping.
 I believe the LPX is the Packard Bell form factor so I could have
 had a backup box in my other case as well as the RAM had I snagged it.

 
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