This cable has been evading me for many years, it was a stock cable with your CD-ROM or your soundcard. Now i cannot find it any where. It in essence connects your CD ROM to your sound card so that the direct sound from the CD can pass trough to your speakers.
Im so distressed that i cannot find those for sale on ebay (there is one be he is weird) and i am presenting this to you guys for dissection.
What happened to the good CD audio cable, and are there bad ones?
Im not making a joke – it is so long ago since i made a new PC so maybe those arent used any more? I bought a MS-DOS PC to play some old games and now im finding myself unable to find normal parts (like a SB16) from countries near me.
Well im sure ill find a Soundblaster, but the cable is evading me. I would have thought there were many left over cables.
Any tips on where i can find it? Any tips on what i should search for?
What on earth is up with that url? It’s bizarre that it needs to be so long, what information does it contain? A string that long could give a unique label to every atom in the observable universe with plenty of room to spare.
Those cables are for playing Audio CDs. You don’t need a CD audio cable to play games, because games come on CDROMs which only look the same. Game music comes from a file on the CDROM, which is played by your sound card (or motherboard sound), not played by your CD player.
That particular cable is a SB-CD cable. More recent and more common were the cables used to connect your Mother Board to the CD (to play audio CDs on your CD drive). They had a slightly different connector on one end. Those other cables are also not necessary in a modern computer: modern computers can rip audio from an audio CD, and play it through the computer, so you don’t need the CD player cable even to play music CD’s.
My memory is hazy, but didnt the quality games, in time, begin to have a separate CD track for music on the game CD? I seem to remember playing some of the game music on my regular CD player… It sort of “streamed” the music trough CD tracks while the sampled sounds came, as you say from files on the CD…
Yes, some old games had music tracks stored as Red Book CD Audio separately from the CD-ROM data. You could put the CD in your CD player and listen to it. Old computers used the CD drive audio cable as a pass-through for playing audio CDs (including those types of game soundtracks) directly to your computer’s speaker jack. That’s no longer necessary; all modern OSes can read, process, and play CD Audio directly.
Some sound cards had annoying proprietary interfaces for these cables.
If you’re building a retro system, you can probably find the cable specs for your soundcard and make the cable yourself. But if it’s a modern system, you shouldn’t need it.
I have recently bought a retro PC (win 98/ MS-DOS) and it only lacks a soundcard to be perfect, but that made me think about that old CD audio cable, that seems impossible to find. Strangely it got a CD-ROM but no sound card, and i dearly want to hear those good old DOS sounds again.