** How I was able to get a 3X CD-ROM working for only $200 **

   After reading on Usenet that Mark O'Bryan (obryan@gumby.cc.wmich.edu) was
able to get a 3X CD-ROM working for only $200, I decided to try the same model
(a Toshiba XM5201).  At first, I could only get the CD-ROM player to work by
itself.  Whenever I plugged my Maxtor hard drive or my Insite floptical drive
into the chain, nothing worked.  I spent several unhappy days trying every
possible variation of hooking the drives up, with terminators, without
terminators and in every possible sequence.

   Previously, when I had first hooked my floptical into my hard drive, I did
so with a 50 pin Centronics to 50 pin Centronics cable that was wired pin for
pin, so that pins 1-50 equaled pins 1-50.  It was what I had lying around, and
at that time I didn't know that 50 pin SCSI cables are wired differently, with
pins 1-25 jumpered together.  The 50/50 cable worked perfectly!  I have been
using it for a couple of years with no problems.

   When I got the CD-ROM unit, I decided to play things safe and got some
"real" Centronics 50 pin to Centronics 50 pin SCSI cables to do the hookup.
No matter where in the chain I hooked the "real" SCSI cable, it took down the
system and I was left looking at a desktop with two floppy drive icons on it.

   I beeped the cable with an ohmmeter (I'm an audio tech) and other than the
jumpers across pins 1-25 it was fine.  Thinking I might have a defective cable,
I returned it for another one which also beeped fine and showed the same 1-25
pin jumpering as the first one. The second cable did the same thing to my
system as the first one - bare desktop with no indication of my hard drive,
floptical, or CD-ROM.

   In desperation,  I tried hooking the CD-ROM in with another 50/50
pass-through cable (no jumpering) and everything worked perfectly!!  I talked
to Ray (the tech at Toad who had been advising me) and he'd never heard of such
a thing.  Then I talked to a fellow audio tech who also does a lot of set-up
of computer systems.  My friend said that he had run across the same problem
when setting up other SCSI-1 systems and had found the same solution.

   With the "wrong" cables, everything works perfectly, the CD-ROM plays music
and accesses files and images.  As soon as I figure out how, I'll try running
a photo-CD seesion and let folks know how that works.  My hard drive and the
floptical are back on line and working fine.

   I'm not a heavy enough computer tech to say why this works - maybe someone
here who is more knowledgeable can do so.  But I can tell you it _does_ work,
that's good enough for me (grin).

   Be careful if you try this trick - not all "parallel" cables are
pass-through type.  Some don't have all the pins wired and some have jumpers
on other pins.  Beep the cable first to make sure of what you're dealing with.
If you don't know how, or don't have an ohmmeter, find someone who does.

   A word about termination, you are supposed to have terminators on the
_first_ and the _last_ unit in the SCSI chain with _no_ terminators on the
units in the middle of the chain.  I'm not sure how critical this really is,
my Maxtor and my floptical both had terminators in place and worked fine.  What
I found out from Ray (Toad tech) is that the Link 1 _also_ counts as a
terminator and so the drives following it should have no termination, except
for the last drive in the chain.

   I also had to add the D=10 option to my extendos.cnf file, so that extendos
would treat my Toshiba CD as an earlier model, to play audio CD's.  My current
extendos.cnf file looks like this:

; this one works -installs as drive P
*BOS, C:\EXTENDOS\CD.BOS D=10, Z:5
*DOS, C:\EXTENDOS\UNIDRIVE.DOS P=8 B=8, P:Z
*DOS, C:\EXTENDOS\UNI_BDDS.DOS P=8 B=8, Q:Z

   This sets my CD up as drive P for normal use and drive Q for CD's that are
missing one of the two standard information sets (as per the extendos manual).
It also sets my path buffer and cache sizes for a bit of performance tweaking
without eating too much memory.

   So now I can finally recommend the Toshiba XM5201 CD-ROM to my fellow
Atarians.  They are currently selling for $199 at Macwarehouse.  My model is
an XM5201B (no RCA jacks on the back, but the drive has a plug you could hack)
Mark O'Bryans is an XM5201A which has the jacks, but is currently out of stock
and 60 day backordered.  Both units have a front headphone jack.  So go get 'em
troops, CD for the masses!  Power without the price!

   The Macwarehouse number is 1-800-255-6227 and it's item #BND-0507.  Buy
your Extendos software from Toad - they deserve the business after all the
help I got from Ray to set this system up.  Toad's price for an NEC 3X CD-ROM
is $459 and Ray could have easily told me to piss up a rope since I didn't buy
the Toshiba from them.  Instead, he politely helped me to resolve my problems!