Definitely. There were other flavours of PAS26. I had one which accepted the weird Philips/LMSI interface which supported a specific 1X drive (CM 205) that di

Definitely. There were other flavours of PAS26. I had one which accepted the weird Philips/LMSI interface which supported a specific 1X drive (CM 205) that didn't work on mainline Linux without a patch that didn't really make it past the 1.3 kernel series. By putting the interface on the sound card, they could sell you a "multimedia in one box" kit without dealing with too many footguns of compatibility. Eventually, by the late 486/Pentium era, most newer machines had two ATA/IDE channels and you could more or less sell basre drives and expect people could support them without too much hassle.