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Help needed getting A2SCSI card visible on Apple IIgs

nglayton said:
It's supposed to be a 1:1 clone of the apple SCSI card. Others have cloned, you might find more info from the other clones.

With a little digging, I found these:


There also a Github page with more info.. But that may only pertain to the latest revision.
Click to expand...
Gulp, well, thats NOT good news. It appears both our cards are Rev 1.0 boards, and well, one has to wonder WHY he produced two more revs if this board was working fine. On the other hand, this does change things significantly for me. I now can assume the ROM on the board SHOULD be an exact clone of the Apple card, as this is MEANT to be an exact clone. Also, I wonder now if my issue is to do with SCSI IDs?

There are the change notes for THIS revision...

The card is also equipped with 16K of ROM and 8K of RAM. These are mapped in the $C800-$CFFF card memory using a banking scheme. The $C0xA bank register selects the which bank of RAM and ROM are mapped. RAM is always at $C800-$CBFF and ROM is at $CC00-$CFFF. The boot code in the first 256 bytes of ROM bank 0 is also mapped in the IOSEL space ($Cn00-$CnFF).

Small modifications have been made to the original circuit. Termination power is provided to the SCSI bus through D1 and C13. A optional resistor (R14) is added to fix the controller address to 7. The active termination method has been changed from the A2SCSI-A00 to avoid the hard to find UC5606. Now it is implemented using a 2.85V LDO (U18) and two resistor arrays (RP3 and RP4).

So, I wonder, could the issue be with the hard coded ID7 of this card? As I understand it, each SCSI device needs a unique ID. I beleive the SCSI ID on a BlueSCSI is locked to 7 (I need to check this) so maybe the issue I am having is an ID conflict between this card and the SCSI card? BlueSCSI is a little odd in that it is NOT a drive, rather its kind of a host card, like the A2SCSI. So, I guess I need to read the original manual and see if the A2SCSI card CAN change its ID somehow, or alternatively if its possible to alter this via the BlueSCSI config file.

One more mystery though. Why does nglayton card JUST WORK, whilst mine is problematic...
 
KennyPowers said:
The SCSI ID(s) is determined by the filename(s) of the image(s): https://bluescsi.com/docs/Usage#image-files
Click to expand...
Sure the IDs of the DEVICES on the BlueSCSI are controlled by the file name of the device images, but the SCSI controller also uses an ID AFAIK, I think normally its ID:7 and BlueSCSI its 7 AFAIK. Not sure what happens when you have two devices on the same SCSI bus using the same ID, I would imagine it would be bad...
 
Retronaut said:
Sure the IDs of the DEVICES on the BlueSCSI are controlled by the file name of the device images, but the SCSI controller also uses an ID AFAIK, I think normally its ID:7 and BlueSCSI its 7 AFAIK. Not sure what happens when you have two devices on the same SCSI bus using the same ID, I would imagine it would be bad...
Click to expand...
I don't believe the BlueSCSI itself "consumes" a SCSI ID...just the devices it's configured to emulate. Yes, the host system's SCSI controller is usually ID 7.
 
Yes, I get it, Eric from BlueSCSI dev said the same, so... let me give a better description of my symptoms with this card as is right now.
The card requires the ID for the drive to be 6 (if you want more than 1 drive) or its ok with it as 0 if you want it to auto-boot. Once I have multiple drives on my BlueSCSIv2, it requires I use ID6,5,4 etc and I HAVE to use pr#7 (the SCSI card is in slot7) for it to boot. ID 6 is the drive that gets booted.

Once it IS booting, it complains that there is no SCSI driver for the card. Suggesting it HAS recognised its a SCSI card, but for some reason the stock IIgs driver wont dance with it.

I boot into GSOS and the single drive on ID6 appears as the boot drive BUT no other drives appear in the GSOS desktop. Using Advanced Disk tools gives another driver moan, and it then WILL NOT do anything with device 5, 4 etc.

Now IF I use SCSI Util disks from Apple, and I boot them, they DO show devices 6,5,4 and will even allow me to partition drive 5 into 3 partitions. Once I do this however I can never get the machine to boot again, even IF I use pr#7. I can only get this working again by deleting the files for ID5 and 4.

So... the default GSOS driver does NOT see my SCSI drive, even though I assume these drivers were written specifically for this Apple SCSI card (originally). I'm using the GGLabs Rev1 (clone) card that gives no mention of special drivers though, so...

Makes me wonder, did the GGLabs Rev1 cards ever work? And for now Mr GGLabs, the vendor is still AWOL. Its quite a lot to spend, $159, for a card that appears to be junk. NOT impressed.
 
Just to verify, your own ROM dump from your card has an SHA1 of 451c85c46b92e6ad2ad930f055ccf0fe3049936d?

If that's the case, it sounds like the card is working perfectly fine, but you are missing the Apple SCSI drivers. MAME has register-level emulation of the Apple Rev. C SCSI Card (which is what the GGLabs is cloning) and the 6.0.4 image from https://whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/ boots to Finder on it with no driver warnings (it's got all the Apple drivers installed).
 
Have you ruled the BlueSCSI out as a source of trouble? Are using BlueSCSi v1 or V2
I am BlueSCSI using V1

I have one v2 that will only mount 1 image. I assembled it myself and it works, but seems locked to 1 image only and I've been too lazy to trouble shoot it.
 
I did some testing to help with this mystery.
I created an 800k GO/OS bootable floppy disk image (attached) that has the bare minimum to boot into finder. In order to put the SCSI.Manager and SCSI HD driver on this disk I had to remove the 5.25 floppy driver and the control panels. They weren't needed for this test anyway.

I set the ROM 3 GS w/TWGS to boot from slot 6 with the GGLABS SCSI card in slot 7
It will boot fine with BlueSCSI v1 attached no errors, etc straight to the finder desktop. No issues

With the BlueSCSI v2 attached, The system senses the card but complains that I need a driver and once we reach the desk top no SCSI devices are found.

I hope that helps - Looks totally like a BlueSCSi v2 issue to me.
 

Attachments

nglayton said:
I did some testing to help with this mystery.
I created an 800k GO/OS bootable floppy disk image (attached) that has the bare minimum to boot into finder. In order to put the SCSI.Manager and SCSI HD driver on this disk I had to remove the 5.25 floppy driver and the control panels. They weren't needed for this test anyway.

I set the ROM 3 GS w/TWGS to boot from slot 6 with the GGLABS SCSI card in slot 7
It will boot fine with BlueSCSI v1 attached no errors, etc straight to the finder desktop. No issues

With the BlueSCSI v2 attached, The system senses the card but complains that I need a driver and once we reach the desk top no SCSI devices are found.

I hope that helps - Looks totally like a BlueSCSi v2 issue to me.
Click to expand...
I'm also using a BlueSCSI v1 in a IIgs with the GGLabs card without issue, and I mentioned this suspicion to OP early on...glad to see it sounds confirmed.
 
What I find interesting is that if you're trying to boot GS/OS directly off the GGLabs card w/BlueSCSI v2 attached, it will boot and give you the error complaining you need a driver, but once you hit "OK" it seems to function fine once the desktop is reached. If booting from another device like a floppy drive or FEMU you get the error of no driver and you can't see the GGLABS card devices at all.

Maybe it's an easy BSv2 firmware fix/update so the existing driver is properly recognized.
 
nglayton said:
What I find interesting is that if you're trying to boot GS/OS off the GGLabs card w/BlueSCSI v2 attached, it will boot and give you the error complaining you need a driver, but once you hit "OK" it seems to function fine once the desktop is reached. Maybe an easy BSv2 firmware fix so the existing driver is properly recognized.
Click to expand...
Does a ZuluSCSI do the same thing? I don't have one handy...
 
Maybe the BlueSCSI 2 is throwing other devices onto the bus even if they aren't configured? It would be useful if there was a utility that scanned and dumped the devices detected on SCSI bus. Is there a bluescsi.ini file on the card? I would remove it if so. Stuff like the DaynaPort Wifi function may be confusing the Apple SCSI driver if present.
 
NJRoadfan said:
Maybe the BlueSCSI 2 is throwing other devices onto the bus even if they aren't configured? It would be useful if there was a utility that scanned and dumped the devices detected on SCSI bus. Is there a bluescsi.ini file on the card? I would remove it if so. Stuff like the DaynaPort Wifi function may be confusing the Apple SCSI driver if present.
Click to expand...
Initially the only file on the card is the whatever images I put on. I believe once powered up it creates the ini file? It create some file I cant remember what its named. At least that's what it does on the V1, I've never checked the V2, I assume its the same. Also, I bought my v2 unit way early when it was released, I don't believe it has wifi, but hell maybe it does. Was there a period where it was sold without wifi? IDK, it certainly isn't implemented on the IIgs that I'm aware of. I've never tried to use the v2 on any of my macs to see if it acts any differently.
 
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