Hi, Matt.  In this morning's mail, I heard you telling Wayne C. about -

 MM> The old SB - Creative CD is wired G-L-G-R (looking at the back of the
 MM> CD drive), and many times one of the "G"rounds was left out of the
 MM> cable since they are connected together on both the drive and the sound
 MM> card.

I'll confess my ignorance about that one.  AFAIK, most of those old
proprietary CDROM drive interfaces like Creative, Mitsumi and Panasonic
were only 1x or 2x, and another fellow at the shop where I volunteer
always worked with those.

 MM> Two different type of 'white' plugs were used, one fit a set of round
 MM> pins, the other fit a set of mini-square pins.  You might need a
 MM> magnifyer to tell the difference.

FWIW, and to maybe be a bit of help to Wayne, - -
Checking a SB AWE32 card with 3 different connectors for the little
white plugs, Even with mag glass, I can't see any diff between the
shape of the pins.  I see that "CD IN" has pins 1 and 3 connected, while
"AUX1" and "AUX2" have pins 2 and 3 connected.  The
"ground" pins on "CD
IN" and "AUX1" read high resistance to card ground, but
"AUX2" has the
"ground pins" soldered to the widespread copper of card ground.  So
your below-suggested pin-to pin measurements or direct observation are
the key to making sure which of the 4 pins are the "ground pins".

 MM> The new CDs, and sound cards as well, with the wide flat black plug
 MM> (sometimes with a locking clip) are wired R-GG-L with both G's
 MM> connected together on the sound card and in the drive.

Yes, for IDE/ATAPI type, I checked at least 4 different drives here - -
they generally even have the pinouts labeled on the back of the drive,
with the one exception I found being a kinda sick Samsung 48X, which had
no labeling for its pinouts.

 MM> Put your meter on the pins of the card and the CD to ID the grounds
 MM> first, as you wouldn't want to ground the output from the CD drive.
 MM> I can't remember whether they were protected by a resistor or not.
 MM> Any two pins that show up connected together are the grounds.

On the soundcards, they may well be protected by resistors, since check
of 2 different SB cards here with the wide, flat black connectors showed
"high" resistance between pins 2 and 3 and "card ground".

 MM> Don't trust the colors, as every supplier used different colors, red,
 MM> green, yellow, white, black, were all used interchangeably with no
 MM> rhyme or reason.

Per usual, your advice seeems to be "right on the money"  [:-D.

- - -  JimH.

... Hardware Hacker wanted.  Must be very creative and have own grubbin' hoe.
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