The CD-ROM connector on sound cards etc you speak about was for particular CD-ROMs only. It was not IDE. A little search on the web found the pinouts for a Mitsumi one as an example. There were standalone cards for CD-ROM drives as well as a lot of the early sound cards integrated some type of CD-ROM connector, eventually moving to an additional IDE. Rather than a thumbdrive or trying to figure out getting USB on an old computer, it's easier to use Compactflash cards and an IDE to CF adapter you can buy everywhere really cheap. Great reuse for the smaller camera memory CF cards laying around everywhere too. I've done this a bunch with older systems, actually last using it to backup data from an old 200Mb hard drive in an old 386. "From http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/oth/mitsumi.txt" I'm making the assumption that this is a Mitsumi Drive. I have only three choices Mitsumi, Panasonic and Sony. Please note, this is NOT an IDE (ATA) interface. All even number pins 2 through 40 are GND. The remaining pins are as follows: Pin Signal 1 Address bit 0 3 Address bit 1 5 No Connection 7 No Connection 9 No Connection 11 No Connection 13 Interrupt 15 Data Request for DMA 17 Data acknowledge for DMA 19 Read enable 21 Write enable 23 Bus enable 25 Data bit 0 27 Data bit 1 29 Data bit 2 31 Data bit 3 33 Data bit 4 35 Data bit 5 37 Data bit 6 "" 39 Data bit 7 Hollandia at ccountry.net wrote:

Well, it would have needed a device driver, and the Microsoft CD-ROM extensions, but I can't see why it wouldn't ahve worked. I have a Philips CD-ROM drive (in an external unit that looks like an audio CD player, and in fact _is_ a modified audio CD player) which has its own custom interface card and device driver, and that works this way. I doubt it wa sa snadard IDE interface, there were some custom CD-ROM interfaces thast went over 40 pin ribbon cables too. I am not sure what you are asking for. If you are asking for a card that lets you connect an IDE hard drive to an ISA slot, then they exist. I am using one in this machine right now. I you are asking for some device to use more modern solid state flash memory with older mahcines, then there are a couple of solutions that spring to mind. The first is that IIRC, CF cards have an interface which is very similar to an IDE drive, so if you've got a way of linking the latter to your classic, it should be possible to use the former. The other is that I remmeber seeing adverts in Elektor magazine for a device so use USB flash memory sticks with microcontrollers. IIRC it was called something like 'Vinculum', and looked to be a panel mounting module with an IDE socket on it that you pluged the flash memory stick into. The interface to the microcontroller was SPI or something equally simple, and it should be possible to bit-bang that on most classic machines. I am not sure of the higher level bits of the protocol, but presumanly it's documenented, otherwise you'd not be able to use this thing with microcontrollers either. -tony

Hollandia at ccountry.net wrote: Not that I'm aware of, but there's always the ubiquitous CF-to-IDE adapters out there. I have one on my 5160; at VCF I saw them connected to Apple I clones, and I've heard of them connected to TRS-80s and other classic ilk. No, don't do that. Most likely an incompatible interface (soundcard CDROM interfaces were SCSI (if you were lucky) or proprietary (if you weren't)). -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/