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Announcing ZuluSCSI - A file-based SCSI device emulator

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
Solved my issue for the moment.

On the SE/30, for me at least formatting with Apple HD SC Setup (either patched or unpatched) leads to a driver partition that doesn't seem to like the ZuluSCSI.

Formatting with Lido however works perfectly. I dropped it onto a 6.0.8 Disk Tools image with the help of an emulator before writing it to a floppy.
How strange. Thanks for sharing this information. This isn't something we've ever run in to in testing, but we'll be working on replicating the problem, and we'll see if it's something we can get to the root cause of.
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
Solved my issue for the moment.
On the SE/30, for me at least formatting with Apple HD SC Setup (either patched or unpatched) leads to a driver partition that doesn't seem to like the ZuluSCSI.
Formatting with Lido however works perfectly. I dropped it onto a 6.0.8 Disk Tools image with the help of an emulator before writing it to a floppy.
Can you share the exact version of HD SC Setup you were using, so we can attempt to replicate? Thanks!
 

loplop

Well-known member
@rabbitholecomputing : with a Powerbook 145B incoming, I'm in search of a SD-based SCSI solution. I'm very happy with my ZuluSCSI mini, and curious if you know when the ZuluSCSI PowerBook Edition will be available?
@rabbitholecomputing I'm still looking for a SD-Based SCSI for my Powerbook. Can you comment on when the ZuluSCSI PowerBook Edition will be available?

I also emailed your shop last week, with no response.
 

frankz

Member
Thanks for the logs, @frankz . I was able to get my Mac Plus to power up, after some surgery, and can now replicate the same behavior here, with my Mac Plus. Stay tuned. We'll get this figured out. It may not be until Tuesday/Wednesday next week though, as I'll be going off-grid to go camping for the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
I was wondering if you had found anything on this. I looked at the firmware code, and it seems to inherit most of the SCSI protocol handling from SCSI2SD, which works with my Mac Plus – so it’s puzzling why it wouldn’t work in ZuluSCSI.
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
@frankz yes, it's quite bizarre. According to the logfile analysis we've done, the commands match the SCSI2SD V5 exactly, until one command hangs at the STATUS phase. Everything looks perfectly as it should up until that point, so the reason for the hang is still a mystery. Another person with an SE/30 reported that they had had success using a disk image initialized with Lido7, so that may be worth trying. Our Mac Plus is currently misbehaving, and we need to re-cap the analog board so we can get it back to. fully-functional state.
 

mosspa1

New member
I know that this is probably not the best place to ask this question, but I've been going down the proverbial "rabbit hole" (sic) for several days now trying to get my two Zulus working. I read through this thread thoroughly, I've read the GitHub documentation pages as well as the "Zulu Manual", and I've even looked in on a few Amiga clubs. I think I understand how the Zulu devices work, I've had a lot of experience with SCSI since the 90s, and I currently have several SCSI2SD implementations running. My application is in using the Zulus with Kurzweil K2xxx synthesizer/samplers with SCSI interfaces, not with attaching them to M68000-based computers. From my perspective, SCSI is SCSI so the host system shouldn't be of much concern since the host Kurzweils work fine with any SCSI device I have ever attached to them. So, like the SCSI2SD packages, I assume that once everything is properly configured, the Kurzweil OS sees the ZuluSCSI as a SCSI HDD and doesn't "care" that is is an emulator. In reading from all of the sources I have inferred that everything that is needed to allow the emulator to perform is tied to a filename and, apparently, the contents of the file. In practical application I know what an .img file is and I have played around with them in the past for various reasons. However, I have no idea about how I would go about creating one from scratch, and what it would need to include so that it would allow the SD card to function as an emulated 2GB SCSI HDD. Fufthermore, I have never heard of or played with an HDA file before, nor do I know how to create one of those, either. To make matters even more different for me, I am, pretty much, tied to Windows systems and I would most like to get access to the card using Windows 7 (that I use for things that might require applications that will no longer run on Windows 10). If it makes any difference, I recently acquired a Mac Mini M1, but I'm guessing that won't do me much more good than any of my Windows machines. Anyway, I know this is probably much more fundamental that the kinds of things that are being discussed here by M68000 "pros", but I can't believe that I would be the only person who was flummoxed by the realization that they didn't have the knowledge necessary to enact what appears to be a simple and straightforward set of instructions.

Thanks in advance,

John
 
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rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
John,

Please open up a discussion at https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/discussions/new so we can have this conversation in an appropriate setting.

For others who may find this thread, the 68kmla forum is a place for Macintosh users. Please respect that. This thread isn't an open invitation to anyone on the Internet who has purchased a ZuluSCSI to post here for technical support. See above URL for a suitable place to have a dialogue.
 
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macuserman

Well-known member
Where can I find ready made .hda files on the internet? All the links on the bluescsi page for either blank or ready made appear to be dead ends.
 

djhaloeight

Well-known member
Here's an excellent utility that creates disk image files for use with blue/zulu/ra scsi devices:


Creates the image in any size you want, and installs an Apple SCSI driver onto it for no fuss no muss use. Also knows the stock HD sizes of classic Macs if you want to stick to authentic sizes. Works great in my experience! I had tried creating my own HDA files before, but the problem was the SCSI driver part. This automatically does it for you!
 

dankcomputing

Active member
Is there any possibility of an optional fallback mode for using the whole SD media as before? Since this is apparently going to replace the older SCSI2SD design, it would be nice to have some backward compatibility with existing setups. Plus I hate wasting disk space.
 

JT737

Well-known member
I bought a ZuluSCSI V1.1 about a month ago and am finally getting around to setting it up for installation in a Macintosh SE/30. I bought it with the assumption that I would be able to set it up just like a standard SCSI2SD drive-using the scsi2sd utility for Windows (via USB) with it's easy to use graphical interface. All I usually do is set up the SCSI2SD using the utility, and then just plug it in and install an image/OS that suits the needs of whatever I'm doing.

But unfortunately as I've found out, the utility doesn't see the Zulu, and despite having a working image on a 2gb SD card and no matter what combination of switches I use, I cannot get the SE/30 to see it, even with the berg connector plugged in.

In the future, are their plans to have a graphical setup utility for this like there used to be? I know that for me, it seemed to be easier to set up the older SCSI2SD devices.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
I bought a ZuluSCSI V1.1 about a month ago and am finally getting around to setting it up for installation in a Macintosh SE/30. I bought it with the assumption that I would be able to set it up just like a standard SCSI2SD drive-using the scsi2sd utility for Windows (via USB) with it's easy to use graphical interface. All I usually do is set up the SCSI2SD using the utility, and then just plug it in and install an image/OS that suits the needs of whatever I'm doing.

But unfortunately as I've found out, the utility doesn't see the Zulu, and despite having a working image on a 2gb SD card and no matter what combination of switches I use, I cannot get the SE/30 to see it, even with the berg connector plugged in.

In the future, are their plans to have a graphical setup utility for this like there used to be? I know that for me, it seemed to be easier to set up the older SCSI2SD devices.
There is a graphical utility made by a third party someone linked it recently here but it didn't work for me either. I've mostly shelved it for the moment because i find the .hda files so frustrating to setup. I did manage to get one loaded that was premade but it was way to small and the OS installed there was gutted and useless. I just want a nice big multigigabyte .hda file that i can download stick on there and then install the OS the traditional way. :(
 

joshc

Well-known member
In the future, are their plans to have a graphical setup utility for this like there used to be? I know that for me, it seemed to be easier to set up the older SCSI2SD devices.
Ironically, the file-based setup that ZuluSCSI uses was originally devised as it was seen to be more widely easier for most people to set up than a SCSI2SD. The set up instructions are here, and are pretty easy to follow: http://zuluscsi.com/ZuluSCSI-Manual/
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
I bought a ZuluSCSI V1.1 about a month ago and am finally getting around to setting it up for installation in a Macintosh SE/30. I bought it with the assumption that I would be able to set it up just like a standard SCSI2SD drive-using the scsi2sd utility for Windows (via USB) with it's easy to use graphical interface. All I usually do is set up the SCSI2SD using the utility, and then just plug it in and install an image/OS that suits the needs of whatever I'm doing.

But unfortunately as I've found out, the utility doesn't see the Zulu, and despite having a working image on a 2gb SD card and no matter what combination of switches I use, I cannot get the SE/30 to see it, even with the berg connector plugged in.

In the future, are their plans to have a graphical setup utility for this like there used to be? I know that for me, it seemed to be easier to set up the older SCSI2SD devices.
How are you expecting the SE/30 to "see" the ZuluSCSI? Given that your sig says you've got plenty of other classic Macs (Ici, IIsi, Plus, Classic, Classic II, Quadra 660av, Centris 650), so does the ZuluSCSI work with any of them, or is this a problem specific to your SE/30? Without knowing how you have it configured, it's nearly impossible to offer constructive help.
 

JT737

Well-known member
How are you expecting the SE/30 to "see" the ZuluSCSI? Given that your sig says you've got plenty of other classic Macs (Ici, IIsi, Plus, Classic, Classic II, Quadra 660av, Centris 650), so does the ZuluSCSI work with any of them, or is this a problem specific to your SE/30? Without knowing how you have it configured, it's nearly impossible to offer constructive help.
I'm talking about the Windows utility that I and many other use to program the standard SCSI2SD devices. Here's a picture of it in action:
DSCN7446.JPG
Usually what I do is plug the SCSI2SD device into my Windows computer, assign it a SCSI ID, assign it a device size, and it works.

This utility doesn't see the Zulu.

And as far as which computers I've tried to use the Zulu with, I've tried with an SE/30, and SE, and a IIci- with similar results. Maybe I'm just missing something simple, I don't know. I think I'm just going to shelf it for now.
 

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