This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.
This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.
It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).
There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)
Due to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.
Never knew about the 4 pin link.