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Announcing ZuluSCSI - A file-based SCSI device emulator

fragmax

Active member
Sorry, I am so confused. I bought a AzulSCSI and just haven't had time to use it yet. I went to jump on the site to read about it and the name has changed? ZuluScsi? If so does that make my AzuleSCSI a collectors item? Lol.
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
Sorry, I am so confused. I bought a AzulSCSI and just haven't had time to use it yet. I went to jump on the site to read about it and the name has changed? ZuluScsi? If so does that make my AzuleSCSI a collectors item? Lol.
You're right to be confused. As of yesterday afternoon/evening, AzulSCSI has been re-named to ZuluSCSI. This was a direct result of legal threats. You can probably guess the origin.
 

Daniël

Well-known member
You're right to be confused. As of yesterday afternoon/evening, AzulSCSI has been re-named to ZuluSCSI. This was a direct result of legal threats. You can probably guess the origin.
Haha, well, congratulations, your product is so good, it scares the competition into desperate measures :D
 

Jinnai

Well-known member
Wow, people in this thread are psychotic about SCSI2SD vs BlueSCSI. All I know is I support competition and innovation. I've heard BlueSCSI is cheaper and better than SCSI2SD. If the new product were an effort to stamp out BlueSCSI, I guess I wouldn't support it either.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
I've heard BlueSCSI is cheaper and better than SCSI2SD

It's not. It's a badly designed board produced by arseholes.

I would invite people to closely read the STM32 absolute maximum ratings section along with the current requirements of the SCSI spec. I would invite people to contemplate self-destructing microcontrollers. I have posted about this before and been sniped at. I'll do so again if people are curious, I've got no horse in this race and nothing much to lose in it.

I would also suggest that interested parties stick a logic analyser on the scsi bus while one is plugged into a faster mac and carefully measure the timings. Some of it is amusing.

When a salesperson (which eric and androda are, let's face it) reacts to technical criticism of their project with purported personal insultedness, that means they're trying to draw attention away from the technical failure, rather than fix it. So, while generally I am in favour of Hanlon's razor, I have personally downgraded the BlueSCSI people to 'knowingly peddling defective hardware', and I'm personally fairly secure in this.

In b4 eric threatens to sue me too
 
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Daniël

Well-known member
If the new product were an effort to stamp out BlueSCSI, I guess I wouldn't support it either.

I have a feeling it's more the other way around. The history on this "rivalry" is an unfortunate tale of silly flame war drama taken far too personally, in turn taken to an extreme. The main reasons for BlueSCSI's existence as a ArdSCSIno fork were due to an argument between Eric and Alex of RHC, and the perceived close sourceness of SCSI2SD (the firmware was, and still is, open source).

I personally agreed that RHC was in the wrong at that time, chiming in to make that known, but Alex and Eric seemingly made amends with Alex sending out a free SCSI2SD to top it all off. It should have ended there, but I guess sometimes people can't let go.

The thing is, BlueSCSI has several hardware flaws, and uses cheaply made BluePill boards. In my view, there is nothing wrong with that for hobbyist use, but it doesn't seriously compete with SCSI2SD and its proven track record when it comes to high grade hardware manufacturing, design (proper voltage buffering, ESD mitigation, etc.), and compatibility with various hardware platforms. BlueSCSI's main improvement was being easier to use (disk images instead of raw SD storage), and to an extent performance when compared to the V5 models of SCSI2SD. Then there's also the matter of the F4 variant of the BlueSCSI having been kept closed source for quite a while, only recently going open source, when this was a point of contention with SCSI2SD (which, again, has always had open source firmware).

Several people have shown concern however for the longevity of BlueSCSI boards due to the flaws, and this has repeatedly been taken very poorly and personally. One of those people was, yes, Alex. He then went on to design AzulSCSI, which married the strengths of BlueSCSI (user friendliness) and SCSI2SD (performance, superior hardware design and compatibility), bringing more innovation to the SCSI flash storage market.

He was in active communication with Eric about it, who decided to instead of staying in communication, block him, then go onto Twitter to complain about it to all the people who have idolized BlueSCSI to an alarming amount, claiming Alex had "bashed" BlueSCSI rather than give valid criticism on some of the weak points of the design.

The loyal BlueSCSI followers on Twitter, it being the hellscape of a site where all nuance and reasonable discussion goes to die, of course reacted with exaggerated disgust and insanity to the misconstrued situation, having adult men ramble about their tweets getting more likes than Alex, who was defending himself against this onslaught. Yes, adult men putting far too much weight on meaningless numbers on their computer screens, working as white knights for a commercial product, it gets this sad.

This whole situation could have been kept private and personal, and resolved in an adult fashion, but it was Eric who has decided that that was far too quiet of a solution. I can't fault Alex for pushing on without further discussions, which has led to this situation regarding the name. Again, could have been resolved, but one party closed the door on it and they know who they are.

As I mentioned, I personally feel as if it's the other way around, BlueSCSI's aim was always to "dethrone" and smear SCSI2SD within the 68k and PowerPC Macintosh community by any means necessary, and perhaps even further communities had BlueSCSI had proper compatibility with non-Mac SCSI devices. AzulSCSI is a superior product, so they threw everything they could at Alex to try and stop him from releasing it, going as far as Twitter threads, putting out-of-context quotes of a few members here on the BlueSCSI site, and not wanting to resolve disputes like adults. This goes beyond the name of *zul*SCSI.

It's frankly something that I'm getting highly tired of, and I wish the BlueSCSI people could stop perceiving themselves as the center of this community. They're not acting as a connecting force, rather kicking discord across the forums at every given chance. They're dragging it ever closer to an Amiga community-like situation, where groupthought and hatred between various "camps" through flame war drama over stupid things is the order of the day, rather than reasonable discussions. Perhaps my previous comment was a bit low, but I'm just getting frustrated with how poorly things are being handled, and how misinfo is freely being spread with no recourse.

I'm hoping this post can shed a little more light for those who are wondering what caused this situation.
 

fragmax

Active member
You're right to be confused. As of yesterday afternoon/evening, AzulSCSI has been re-named to ZuluSCSI. This was a direct result of legal threats. You can probably guess the origin.
Maybe a good idea to send out an email to your customers explaining this. When I tried to update the firmware which I needed to do It was named Zulu instead of Azul so It didn’t work until I changed the name back to azul. Then it worked. Now the log files are saying Zulu and I would think it will be fine moving forward. I love my SCSI2SD products I own. They are more reliable than bluescsi. Some computers have trouble with the bluescsi. But others don’t. The ZuluScsi isn’t liking my Macintosh Se. so far it won’t work but it’s having the same issues my Bluescsi is having so I must have to do with how they work. I think there is room for all those products and a need. Thanks for making them.
 
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stepleton

Well-known member
The new device sounds like a well-designed product based on these technical details. It seems good to me that its name has changed; given the characteristics outlined here, I'm glad to have the clearer sign of a distinct creation and a bit puzzled as to why the ZS folks would even want to hazard any confusion (especially if longevity concerns are borne out).

The ZS sounds like the best choice for me the next time I want to get one of these things. I have little need now as all four of my SCSI2SDs are working just fine.
 

AndyO

Well-known member
Wow, people in this thread are psychotic about SCSI2SD vs BlueSCSI. All I know is I support competition and innovation. I've heard BlueSCSI is cheaper and better than SCSI2SD. If the new product were an effort to stamp out BlueSCSI, I guess I wouldn't support it either.

BlueSCSI is certainly cheaper, though it doesn't seem to be better in any way other than being easier to set up and use. That said, performance-wise, in many systems you might not really be able to tell the difference. A small amount of research would tell a prospective customer which of the two (now three) products would likely suit best.

It is a shame, though, that criticisms seem to quickly descend into the personal and offensive, which ought to have no place here at all, and the 'psychotic' contributions in threads of this sort are really little short of bullying. If they have the effect of chilling contributions from anyone, let alone the lesser-favored 'peddlers', it does everyone harm.

Personally, I have a BlueSCSI and two SCSI2SD devices. The BlueSCSI is the only one that has worked reliably - which is likely a 'me' thing, though that is in some ways the point, since it was easy to get it set up, where the SCSI2SDs, not so much.

It never occurred to me that the name given to the new product was an attempt to stamp out the other, 'Azul' having no known meaning to me at all. but with the degree of infantility in this apparent battle, all bets are off.
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
What about systems like the Amiga 2000 / 3000 / 4000? Will ZuluSCSI performance be better or worse than SCSI2SD V6?
ZuluSCSI was not designed as a replacement for SCSI2SD V6. It was designed due to ongoing component shortages which have made it impossible to purchase the semiconductors necessary to assemble more SCSI2D V5's. It performs better than SCSI2SD V5.x by a wide margin, and for many people, it's a very great alternative to SCSI2SD V6, particularly given that it's nearly half the cost of SCSI2SD V6.

That said, ZuluSCSI should work fine with anything SCSI2SD V5 and V6 works with. If it doesn't, that's a bug.
 

AndyO

Well-known member
Azul is the word for "Blue" in Spanish and Portuguese.
I had read that, but otherwise would not have known it. Nor would I have drawn an association anyway, though I concede that may just be a 'me' thing too.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
When I first starting looking into these type of things I explored BlueSCSI and wasn't impressed with the way it presents although I've never used one, given all this needless drama I don't think I'll be bothering to try it. I've been happy with my scsi2sd v6 and I think I'll be grabbing some of these new zscsi when I get a minute here it seems like the obvious choice. @rabbitholecomputing thanks for making this new offering I'm excited to try it.

Also just for kicks given all this dramatic nonsense about naming I went poking around looking at the BlueSCSI product again, and while I found several things I found quite amusing this was by far the most amusing thing I stumbled upon.
1652114278944.png

The only two reviews listed on the site are well, :LOL: :LOL: :LOL:
 

MacKilRoy

Well-known member
Yeah—gotta be honest, I can't even be angry about that. Kind of split between deep amusement and a kind of pity :p .

I looked up the source of the “reviews” and I can’t say I approve of the complete misuse of a quote, taken completely out of context.
 
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