what is the significance of that +5 v to the card? the cable you mean is this one i liked specifically? i'm just making sure i don't get info mixed up.
The cable you linked is for running 44-pin devices off of a 40-pin controller. Power lines are integrated into 44-pin cables but not 40-pin cables, so that cable has an external power input to provide power to the 44-pin devices connected to it.
I'm not familiar with the TF536, but from the description I see online it looks like it has a 44-pin controller. Assuming your CF adapter is a 44-pin device, you'd need a cable with 2x 44-pin connectors (controller and CF) and 1x 40-pin connector (CD-ROM). I think you could use your cable for that as long as you left the power plug disconnected since you'd be using the cable "backwards." Power the CD drive directly from the A2000's supply. Or you could use one of
these if you have a CF adapter with a 40-pin connector. Both CF and CD would be externally powered from the A2000's supply.
"fake Gayle" IDE implementation. ? what does that mean? there is an IDE pin setup on the card. how does this work?
On the 600 and 1200, the Gayle chip contains the IDE controller and the driver (scsi.device) is in the Kickstart ROM. Because the 500/600/2000 use the same ROM, most 500/2000 CPU socket accelerators with IDE controllers try to mimic the signals from Gayle so that they can use the existing driver in the Kickstart.
do cd ide adapters have master/slave pins? i know the cd rom would have to be the other of course.. assuming cf is master and cd rom would be slave.
Some CF adapters have master/slave jumpers, others don't. All CD drives do. I think it's a good assumption that the CF adapter will be master if there are no jumpers.
Also note that (IDE) scsi.device under 3.1 and below can't detect CD drives. The IDEfix package that Pat linked includes atapi.device, which will work. You may also want to look into AsimCDFS (3.10 is the last version), which includes asim_atapi.device. Personally, I prefer Asim, which is CD support and nothing more. IDEfix provides CD support and does a lot of other things to the IDE subsystem which you may or may not want.
3.2 (and I think 3.1.4) requires no additional software for CD support.