Hi,

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:06 PM, John Hupp <free...@prpcompany.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the clarifications.  I could add though, that I tried "CDROM2
> PLAY01 F:" and it responded with something like "F: is not an audio
> drive, but < F: > is."
>
> The CD-ROM cable is known working (confirmed via Win 98), and I turned
> up the CD volume in the sound card mixer.

Do you think that's the problem?? Then try this:

http://www.bttr-software.de/products/sbmix/sbmixb.zip

But what exactly are your (Win98 and DOS) CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
relevant lines? Maybe you used some incorrect settings.

> But it may be that the drive lacks the built-in audio playing function
> that your program requires.  It has a headphone jack and volume dial,
> but no Play/Stop/Next/Previous controls like older drives did.  (It's a
> 48x CD-ROM, a Lite-on LTN-485S manufactured in 2000.)

No idea about hardware limitations.

> I hadn't thought about the CD driver as a suspect.  A couple weeks ago I
> had a thread named "For CD: Error reading from drive D: data area: drive
> not ready" in which I detailed my struggles with getting a working
> configuration.  I'm currently using a driver named ide-cd.sys.  I don't
> know where it came from originally, but I used it successfully on a
> machine a few years ago.

It could be an incorrect or buggy driver, dunno. The only way to know
would be to try something else. But I'm not sure of a "good"
alternative. I don't even know where to (reliably) find such old DOS
drivers.

As much as I think the term "Linux" is overused and less useful than
implied (*especially* for legacy hardware), there are some ancient
distros which are fairly lean. My point is that you could try and see
if they work (with their drivers), or at least to tell you more about
your actual hardware. One old (2006) but good example is the
two-floppy BlueFlops:

http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/blueflops/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/blueflops/files/blueflops/blueflops-2.0.15/blueflops-2.0.15.zip/download

I know you say Win98 works fine, but if even Linux doesn't work, then
I don't think DOS has much chance (anymore, since everyone abandons /
forgets everything old). Granted, if Win98 isn't good enough, neither
is Linux, but I'm just saying ... I'm curious whether even that works
for you!

> Your "alternative way" is also referred to as digital audio extraction?
> I understood from Mateusz Viste that mpxplay will do that, though I
> don't know how and haven't pursued that.  I think it may require a
> plugin (CDW).  He also said it would draw more heavily on the CPU -- and
> this machine only has a Pentium 150.

I could be wrong, but I think Eric means you should "rip" whatever
audio you want into .mp3 locally, which can then be played without
needing direct CD access at all. For example, this is what the DJGPP
port of Hexen2 supports (although you can't rip from DOS itself). Of
course, you'll still need a DOS-friendly soundcard (or use DOSEMU or
DOSBox or similar).

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