Uncreative Labs

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

1)rarely I hear about a cd on an xt,
probably because xt ide cards were rare.
2)I know that some parts of win98 dos and dos 6.22 are not version dependent.

3) now, can we set up a scsi cd on an xt using dos 3,4,5,6 and a scsi cd? scsi 8 bit cards seem to be fairly common esp those w/o bios'
and after you boot from a floppy or the mfm/.rll
hard disk that has the drivers, will the older dos versions support mscdex?

I looked thru van wolverton's "running ms dos"
that I think supports up to dos 4.00 and there was NO mention of mscdex
.
of course
any 2,3,486 will support a cd as it has 16 bit slots and an ide-i/o card will work, even IF you have to pick just the largest drive in a small selection in the limited drive table. ( that is before we had
"user select drive types" what was it TYPE 47..

I don't have an "unburied" xt mb
I do have dos machines but they are newer pc's

what do you think?

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

CD rom drives have been around since 1985, my school had a bank of external scsi CD-roms that were driven by an xt or two depending on which workstation you were on.

Generally CDs were mainly found in libraries and schools and once and a while in the military or gov during the xt era. In fact dcs industries used to sell an external cd-rom drive with an encyclopedia packaged for Tandy 1000 machines (AKA XT)

I did have a proprietary 8 bit card for driving a cd-rom in an xt at one time, not sure where it went though.

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I have a SCSI card in my XT, It can and does recognize any SCSI device I pull up to it (mine has it's own BIOS, heck, it recognized and found the Iomega ZIP drive from the Macintosh), so I know CD-ROM's on an XT are definatley possible. Actually, I might try the one I pulled from my Mac 7100 at some point, might be cool to actually burn a single CD-ROM of all the crud I want on the hard disk rather than copy via Floppy all the time.

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

I've heard of XT's w/ CD-Rom drives too. Never tried it myself though...

Joined: 28 Nov 2006 Posts: 10

i've actually gotten my old creative labs 2x cd-rom drive working in my XT. i hooked it up to the old sound blaster pro v2 card it came with, ran MSCDEX and had no problems. (it's slower than @#$@ but it works)

i assume a newer drive would work too, as the CD interface port on the sound card just appears to be a regular ol' IDE port.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

as the CD interface port on the sound card just appears to be a regular ol' IDE port.

"Appears to be" is the key phrase here. The Creative/SB/MKE/Panasonic/et al "CR-563" ports were 40-pin, but were proprietary. A standard IDE drive won't work on them.