• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Fitting a SCSI2SD in a 68k Mac

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
What was the other use?


Modem and NIC were the only two purposes AFAIK. The Modems were pretty terrible, so if you didn't have a NIC for that slot,  you'd likely pull it out to free up the plugged up serial port for use with a faster external modem.

Dial Up Networking is still, networking, even if it's only wide-area networking and not local area networking.


You got me there! l set up a sweet remote control system with one way VidCap over landline with Timbuktu Remote in the day.

It would be neat to find out that there was like a CSII sound card or a CSII SATA card.


IIRC someone made a 10/100 NIC for CSII, but that's probably the only thing that works? I doubt we'll ever find anything else. The NIC interface on CSII is a half baked PCI slot (flopped cake with mal aforethought?) that doesn't work AFAK. I took a look at the pinouts, comparing it to PCI in an attempt to hijack the PCI Slot ID for a third standard slot with a PC riser, but I think it was a dead end.

We're off topic here, but it would be great if someone would take a whack at a Gigabit NIC for CSII. That would be oh so cool, the TAM crowd would eat that right up. CSII should handle that I'd think, een if the machines can't manage wring the most out of it, it'd be one mean hack.

 

aperezbios

Well-known member
We're off topic here, but it would be great if someone would take a whack at a Gigabit NIC for CSII. That would be oh so cool, the TAM crowd would eat that right up. CSII should handle that I'd think, een if the machines can't manage wring the most out of it, it'd be one mean hack.
Agreed, way off topic, but I think it'd be very interesting to perhaps see if you could add modern wireless connectivity to CSII machines by way of an RPi Zero W, or other low cost SBC with wi-fi. It would need to use the serial interface, hopefully at a reasonably high speed, since most low end, modern SBCs don't have any sort of PCI support. Does anyone here have or know of any reference documentation from Apple for CommSlot II specs?

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Betcha, mostly I was responding to Cory, so I hope the interlude will be forgiven. If interested in the project, start a thread in hacks and I'll fill you in on the docs available there. [:)]

 

ArmorAlley

Well-known member
If I format a new SD-card on a mac with Mac OS 9 (say a G4) and create new volumes on it with Silverlining, will this work in a SCSI2SD card? Has anyone done this?

I should really open up a mac and test it. Until now I've always used SCSI2SD-Util.

 

karrots

Well-known member
Works fine. You can create volumes with SCSI2SD-util you can just create virtual scsi disks. Those then still have to have volumes created and formatted.

 

Spyffe

New member
I wanted to report a successful boot of an LC III with SCSI2SD v6 2020c (with a few issues, see "Issues").

Here's how I did it. 

My host PC was a Surface Pro running Windows 10.

My Mac is an LC III with 16MB RAM, a Floppy Emu, and an external AppleCD 600e.

Update scsi2sd firmware

  • Installed UsbDk_1.0.22_x64.msi
  • Attached the scsi2sd to my PC and used zadig-2.5.exe to ensure that the UsbDk driver was being used for the device (this took a little figuring out)
  • Then launched scsi2sd-util6 and triggered a firmware update to firmware.V6.2020.dfu

Prepare the SD card

  • Attached the SD card to my PC via a USB reader
  • Formatted it with SD Card Formatter 5.0.1
  • Put the SD card back into the SCSI2SD

Configure the SCSI2SD

scsi2sd-general.png

scsi2sd-device1.png

  • Saved this configuration to the device.

Initialization

  • I ensured the SCSI2SD was attached to the LC, with nothing connected to the power connector.  (My PC was still connected to USB.)
  • I booted 7.6.1 off the "MacOS v7.6.1 Universal" CD.  I know the "Legacy Software Recovery" CD boots too.
  • I used the Floppy Emu to mount the lido.dsk that comes with Floppy Emu and ran lido.  lido detected a 2GB drive and was able to initialize it.
  • I rebooted once (again, into the installer) to ensure that the drive continued to be recognized.
  • Then I installed 7.6.1 normally.

Issues

  • The bootable Lido-7-56-for-LCIII.dsk.zip did not work for me -- it booted okay, but Lido crashed with a "bad F-Line instruction."  I did not investigate further.
  • Even if I configured the virtual drive as a 4GB drive Lido still only saw 2GB.
  • HD SC Setup from 7.6.1 never saw the virtual drive, despite selecting model information that should have been compatible with the stock HD SC Setup.
  • After getting one 2GB virtual drive going I tried to add three more 2GB virtual drives.  Lido did not see them, no matter which SCSI IDs I assigned them.  The two things I changed from the configuration for the first volume were the SCSI ID and the serial number (last digit 2, 3, 4).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Top