What are the audio cables for on cd rom drives?

[Salvador]

I've always wondered why you have to install an audio cable from the optical drive (cd rom) to the motherboard (onboard sound) or sound card? Doesn't the sound travel through the IDE cable? What's it for anyway?

Sal

 

[Chaotic42]

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

 

[Salvador]

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

What's a TSR? So.. The cable is useless now then? I've always connected it when installing a drive until recently when I questioned the need for it. I left it out in this last build and wanted to know if it was even necessary.

Thanks again.

Sal

 

[PliotronX]

Originally posted by: Salvador

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

What's a TSR? So.. The cable is useless now then? I've always connected it when installing a drive until recently when I questioned the need for it. I left it out in this last build and wanted to know if it was even necessary.

Thanks again.

Sal

IIRC, it stands for Terminate and Stay Resident. These were small portions of drivers and such and back in the DOS days, games started requiring a buttload of conventional memory. Man it was a pain go over all of the memory managers trying to get 600KB of 640KB of conventional space (boy was it worth it for some of those games though ).

But anyways yeah, that's all a thing of the past. Optical drives are equipped with their own DACs that convert the digital signal to a signal that is passed through the sound card. So for the majority of older games, rather than small compressed audio files (MP3, OGG files) of today, they sent arbitrary start, stop, forward, backward commands to the optical drive to play the game's soundtrack.

Of course you can still use it if needed, for example setting the device settings panel in WMP to playback as analog will utilize this passthrough route rather than taking the audio digitally and spitting out the sound card.

 

[Chaotic42]

You might as well connect it if you have one. I did, back when I had a smaller case. I wouldn't go out and buy one though.

 

[thunderhorse]

Boy Chaotic42, that brings back memories. I can remember going to the electronic store and seeing a 4meg stick of FPS and saying to myself, with that I'll never run out of memory. Has time gone by that fast?
Salvador, I'd just follow the easy instructions. Back then it was all trial and error. And you let everyone know the results. On some things they just can't seem to be able to get away from old terminology. Have fun.

 

[hans007]

the audio cable is not for the play button on the cdroms. those usually only worked if there was a headphone jack on front.


the reason is, computers were not fast enough , nor digital audio extraction good enough, to play audio cds. we have working DAE now, so it really doesnt matter anymore. the cables are analog though i suppose you might need them for recording since it would skip one digital conversion.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: hans007
the audio cable is not for the play button on the cdroms. those usually only worked if there was a headphone jack on front.

That's what it did on my 4x and my 16x. No cable, no audio when you hit play. With cable, audio when you hit play. Maybe they all didn't take advantage of it, but at least two of them did. I used it over and over to listen to Smashing Pumpkins while I played Prince of Persia for DOS.

 

[AIWGuru]

ATA33 wasn't enough to support digital extraction so the CDrom outputted analogue audio which was then converted BACK to digital by the soundcard. Very poor quality. Modern systems maintain a pure digital from CD to soundcard's output converters signal by transfer audio data across the IDE cable. In short, the CDrom audio cable is useless. Completely useless.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: AIWGuru
ATA33 wasn't enough to support digital extraction so the CDrom outputted analogue audio which was then converted BACK to digital by the soundcard. Very poor quality. Modern systems maintain a pure digital from CD to soundcard's output converters signal by transfer audio data across the IDE cable. In short, the CDrom audio cable is useless. Completely useless.

Not nessisarily. Older games that were built around CD audio soundtracks will still need that cable in order to make the soundtrack work.

 

[Slickone]

How new of a game still requires this?

 

[AIWGuru]

Originally posted by: Slickone
How new of a game still requires this?

Nothing since the advent of direct sound...circa 199...early 90s.

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: Salvador

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

What's a TSR? So.. The cable is useless now then? I've always connected it when installing a drive until recently when I questioned the need for it. I left it out in this last build and wanted to know if it was even necessary.

Heh that's funny knowing or not knowing what a TSR is kinda dates people I guess..... Damn I guess I must be old, I know what it is

Thorin

 

[tomstevens26]

Originally posted by: thorin

Originally posted by: Salvador

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

What's a TSR? So.. The cable is useless now then? I've always connected it when installing a drive until recently when I questioned the need for it. I left it out in this last build and wanted to know if it was even necessary.

Heh that's funny knowing or not knowing what a TSR is kinda dates people I guess..... Damn I guess I must be old, I know what it is

Thorin

I was thinking the same thing When I read 'TSR' I just had this horrible flashback of tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get just the right amount of conventional memory. I certainly don't miss the days of trying to load things high and all that jazz.

Tom

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: AIWGuru

Originally posted by: Slickone
How new of a game still requires this?

Nothing since the advent of direct sound...circa 199...early 90s.

Xwing vs. Tie Fighter is the last game I can think of that I played that used CD audio, and that was 1997/1998, so it would be some(but not all) games before 1998 that would still need it.

 

[AIWGuru]

Originally posted by: tomstevens26

Originally posted by: thorin

Originally posted by: Salvador

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

What's a TSR? So.. The cable is useless now then? I've always connected it when installing a drive until recently when I questioned the need for it. I left it out in this last build and wanted to know if it was even necessary.

Heh that's funny knowing or not knowing what a TSR is kinda dates people I guess..... Damn I guess I must be old, I know what it is

Thorin

I was thinking the same thing When I read 'TSR' I just had this horrible flashback of tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get just the right amount of conventional memory. I certainly don't miss the days of trying to load things high and all that jazz.

Tom

I had to boot from a floppy just to be able to play most games

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: AIWGuru

Originally posted by: tomstevens26

Originally posted by: thorin

Originally posted by: Salvador

CD-ROM drives used to have play, pause, and track buttons on them. You could hit play and play the CD independant of the OS, so long as the sound card was initialized. You can still play through IDE, but you need a CD player. Back in the DOS days, that took valuable resources to run as a TSR.

What's a TSR? So.. The cable is useless now then? I've always connected it when installing a drive until recently when I questioned the need for it. I left it out in this last build and wanted to know if it was even necessary.

Heh that's funny knowing or not knowing what a TSR is kinda dates people I guess..... Damn I guess I must be old, I know what it is

Thorin

I was thinking the same thing When I read 'TSR' I just had this horrible flashback of tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get just the right amount of conventional memory. I certainly don't miss the days of trying to load things high and all that jazz.

Tom

I had to boot from a floppy just to be able to play most games

you guys are giving me memmaker flash backs. stop it!!! nooo.


nah they were good times. you felt accomplished getting your games to run.

the other day a job interviewer was shocked i knew what parking heads was (im 22) . very funny.

 

[Slickone]

Originally posted by: AIWGuru
I had to boot from a floppy just to be able to play most games

Thankfully I had an Amiga during those days.

 

[Salvador]

So.. I don't need it then? The reason why I don't want to hook it up is because I'm using the onboard sound and the header on the Epox board is directly under the VGA slot. The cable is just in a bad spot.

Sal