Help needed getting A2SCSI card visible on Apple IIgs

[Retronaut]

This is a re-post from Apple Fritter forums, as this is a pretty specific problem, I thought it best to spread my net wider...

Hey, I am relatively new to the Apple IIgs, and in my enthusiasm to get it up to the level of an Amiga 2000, I decided to buy a SCSI card, and ideally install GSOS to a hard disk and boot from it. This seems to be, possibly a faster method than booting from a smart port disk?

So to do this I bought an A2SCSI card from GGLabs a couple of years back, and only now am I installing it, as I also have an Apple Squeezer card. With the two in place, the machine should be pretty sweet. But not quite yet...

So, the rub... Having installed a working GSOS 6.0.4 installation to a Smartport disk using an emulator and a FloppyEMU, I can get my IIgs to boot to GSOS 6.0.4, which is all good. When booting OS complains (at differing points on each boot) that it cant load in the hard disk, because this requires drivers... which is kind of expected. The GGLabs site, provides a disk image of those drivers, and I have installed these into the 6.0.4 install, using its supplied installer, but sadly after a reboot, the issue persists.

I have used another disk that GGLabs provided, a SCSI Utility that can check the Hard Disks, and partition them as well, but this only works AFAIK when booted as a floppy. The same utils do not appear to work when your IN GSOS, which is a little frustrating (but this was the 80s after all... )The good news is, it saw all 5 SCSI drive images I had put on a BlueSCSI and reported them all at their correct sizes, 32mb each, and one at 256mb as an experiment. And I can also choose one of the 32mb drives, and partition it, though oddly the Util only seems to allow me to add two partitions of 10mb each.....

So, now I find myself in two worlds. GSOS WITH the correct drivers installed, refuses to see the BlueSCSI's Drives during or post boot, even when partitioned. But, if I boot from the SCSI Utilities disk (floppy) I CAN see them. So it appears the A2SCSI card IS working perfectly fine, and having read the manual for the original card it was based on, it states there it CAN be used as a boot device for a IIgs.

Does anyone know what the magic sauce is here? Is it an issue with GSOS 6.0.4? I assume not as it was recommended because it fixes various bugs, so I assume it is MORE compatible with hard drives etc, not less. Did I install the drivers incorrectly in some way?

And the original manual for the original SCSI card that this card is based on, is VERY technical, but never goes into the nitty gritty of how to install it on a IIgs for example.There appears to be a missing link. You'd assume there would be an official install Floppy disk set for this card, but...Any help appreciated, its not a hardware issue here, its software (or me)

 

[iigs123]

I used the A2SCSI card with my ROM3 a while back. Is the card in slot 7, and is it set to "your card" in the control panel? Your partitions must be 32MB to use in GSOS or ProDOS.

I was able to boot and use a BlueSCSI with the card, however GSOS 6.0.4 always complained about SCSI drivers during the boot no matter what I did with the drivers, install, card, etc. The person who makes the A2SCSI card is very helpful and gave me a test utility, and offered to exchange my card but I ended up passing it to another enthusiast instead since the card tested fine. I found an Apple High Speed SCSI card instead.

Some of this old stuff, especially SCSI, certainly feels like voodoo sometimes.

 

[iigs123]

Also, is your BlueSCSI firmware up to date?

 

[Retronaut]

Hey, thanks for the feedback. Yes, the firmware is updated, well its using 8th December 2024, which I believe is the last non experimental version.

An update on the issue, and yes, its certainly VOODOO

I found 3x .hda images on the BlueSCSI site, one is a basic install of GSOS 6.0.1, one is a complete install and the 3rd is a custom install of 6.0.4. So... to confuse things, whoever made these images made them as 100mb files. So they are apparently partitioned into 3 ProDos disks, Blue1, 2 and 3. So I copied the 6.0.4 image to be BlueSCSI as ID 6 and gave it a go....

And it booted!

But... this is where it gets weirder. During the boot, it complained the device it was booting from could not be used, because of.... yes, those pesky drivers.... And yet it completed booting and on the GSOS desktop there was only one drive, Blue1. Blue2 and 3 were nowhere to be found. Very odd.

So as it was 6.0.4, it has the Advanced Disk Tools util, and I loaded it, and its started by pointing at Blue1, the boot disk. It complained that it could not do anything with this disk, because of a lack of drivers. Gah! But of course it complains about this even when I specifically INSTALLED the drivers and reboote.

This, of course is not satisfactory. Why?

1. How can I make images such as these? I cant even SEE the hard disk to install the OS to when I boot from a Floppy Emu (maybe they conflict in some way). But I guess not, its more to do with this missing (not missing) drive issue. Is there an emulator that can mount .hda files?
2. I want to SHOW people how to do this, but I cannot even do it myself, because of the heavy dose of VOODOO chilly here
3. Although this works, it does not, in some major ways, for example the boot disk cannot be seen by its own HD utils
4. Where are the other two partitions?

Anyway, forget partitions, what about other drives? I renamed the 6.0.4 HDA to 50, and copied the 6.0.1 basic install onto the BlueSCSI card, so now I have TWO drives on it, 6.0.1 being the boot. I flipped the switch, it booted and.... Only the first Blue1 disk appeared, I GUESS because both images have a Blue1 drive, and ONLY one drive with the same name can be shown.

So yeah, some movement forward. But still not a clear path to getting where I want to be i.e. setting it up from scratch myself, having multiple partitions appear as 32mb disks, and NOT having the driver issue.

 

[iigs123]

You can use Ciderpress - https://ciderpress2.com/ - to edit the disk images.

This sounds like my experience with the A2SCSI & BlueSCSI. My memory might be fuzzy but I recall being able to use multiple images and/or partitions despite the driver error. I do recall it just didn't seem 'right' however and it was what led me to use the Apple card instead.

At one point I suspected GSOS wasn't identifying the card correctly, so I dumped the A2SCSI ROM and compared it to the original. A couple of trailing bytes seemed to be different but not in a meaningful way. Looking at the GSOS assembly for the SCSI card ID routine seemed to indicate it would look at the first few bytes of the ROM and that matched, so I thought the card might be fine. Perhaps the BlueSCSI needs some 'quirks' mode to better identify itself to GSOS?

There is an OpenRetro SCSI discord where the blue scsi folks hang out, also a Tinker Different forum. You might pose the question there too.

 

[nglayton]

So I use the A2SCSI attached to a BlueSCSI with my IIgs's all the time. Both a ROM 01 and ROM 03. Same image used between both machines, no issues. Even between Apple and GGLabs cards no issues. From the GS/OS install disk did you make sure to install the SCSI related options?

 

[nglayton]

Also note that any hard drive used with Prodos is limited to 32mb or less. You can have a 100mb Hard drive it just needs to be partitioned in to any combination of <32mb drives. (25,25,25,25 or 32,32,32,4 etc.) You can also however have larger disks formatted with HFS. But the catch is the HFS disks are NOT bootable, nor can you run any software from them. So basically just data storage or backup storage etc. And you have to have the HFS.fst installed to see them.

 

[Retronaut]

So I use the A2SCSI attached to a BlueSCSI with my IIgs's all the time. Both a ROM 01 and ROM 03. Same image used between both machines, no issues. Even between Apple and GGLabs cards no issues. From the GS/OS install disk did you make sure to install the SCSI related options?

Hey, so yeah, I did try installing the GSOS SCSI drivers using the ALL option and no dice. I also tried installing GSOS fresh, and then ONLY installing the drivers that GGLabs list on the product page. Same result, its as if the card has a fault on it, which for some bizarre reason just will NOT allow it to be identified as being compatible with the drivers.

What I find interesting and VERY valuable, is it just works for you. This suggests a hardware issue with the card, or my BlueSCSI. I very much doubt its the IIgs. It is an early Woz edition, but I upgraded it to ROM1 soon after purchasing it.

I have an idea, lets assume ALL GGLabs A2SCSI cards are good, mine was bought direct from them, so... Maybe there is an issue with my BlueSCSIv2, you never know. Now, I DO have two other SCSI Emulator cards a ZuluSCSI v1.1 and a SCSI2SD, I MIGHT be able to get them plugged into the card to give those a test. Problem is, they both have 50pin internal connectors, so some cable-fu would be required to get either of them to plug into the A2SCSI.

 

[Retronaut]

Also note that any hard drive used with Prodos is limited to 32mb or less. You can have a 100mb Hard drive it just needs to be partitioned in to any combination of <32mb drives. (25,25,25,25 or 32,32,32,4 etc.) You can also however have larger disks formatted with HFS. But the catch is the HFS disks are NOT bootable, nor can you run any software from them. So basically just data storage or backup storage etc. And you have to have the HFS.fst installed to see them.

Yes, sadly, I cant get to that position yet. Right now, I can ONLY boot from a single ProDos partition on my BlueSCSI drive, even if it has more they wont mount. And ANY other drives I have on the SD card DO NOT appear on the desktop. The Advanced Disk Tools App refuses to touch even the boot drive, saying no SCSI drivers are installed, even when they are. Its quite bizarre...

 

[NJRoadfan]

I don't know what GGLabs changed on the card that required a change in the driver. Apple's cards are pretty straight forward, they expect drives to be partitioned with a valid Apple Partition Map. I would try the following:

-Install the SCSI card in Slot 7.
-Set a blank (zeroed out) 40MB image as SCSI ID 6 on the BlueSCSI.
-Boot GS/OS from disk, use Advanced Disk Tools to create two 20MB partitions on the drive. Give them meaningful volume names to tell them apart.
-Boot into ProDOS and verify that your two partitions are mapped to Slot 7 Drive 1 and Slot 7 Drive 2. This is to verify that the drive was partitioned correctly and the SmartPort functions on the card's ROM are mapping those drives.
-Install GS/OS from floppy.

You may get complaints about the driver, it this is the case, overwrite the stock Apple SCSI driver with GGLab's modified driver. If its still complaining, disable the driver entirely. GS/OS should still boot, but is limited to only seeing the first two partitions on a drive.

The BlueSCSI should not have any hardware compatibility issues with Apple's cards. They are pretty vanilla in terms of SCSI implementation. I only have a RamFAST SCSI Rev. D to test with and the BlueSCSI works fine with that fussy card, driver and all. That being said, the RamFAST is quite a bit more sophisticated. It has a ROM based partitioning tool that can also manually map ProDOS partitions to a given Slot/Drive.

 

[iigs123]

Take a look:

GitHub - gorlik/a2scsi-rom: Disassembly of the APPLE II SCSI card ROM

Disassembly of the APPLE II SCSI card ROM. Contribute to gorlik/a2scsi-rom development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

The rom contains sixteen 1KB banks that are mapped at $cc00. Bank 0 contains boot code that is also shadowed at $cn00. The boot code is used by the Apple IIgs SCSI Driver to identify the card (the apple driver contains a copy of this section and performs a full compare upon load). Any changes to this section will make the driver fail to load.

I'm curious if the A2SCSI ROM is in fact slightly different and the drivers - perhaps even the patched one - don't detect the card.

It would work fine in Prodos since there is no driver.

 

[Tchucu]

I don't know what GGLabs changed on the card that required a change in the driver. Apple's cards are pretty straight forward, they expect drives to be partitioned with a valid Apple Partition Map. I would try the following:

Well, I'm not saying they HAVE made any changes to the ROM, just trying to work out why its behaving this oddly. Maybe another line of approach is to try another SCSI device. I ordered some more SCSI adapters today, so I can connect a ZuluSCSI to the card (DB25 female to internal 50pin...). It could just be an issue with the BlueSCSIv2, not likely, but...

I'll walk the path you outline above, see how it goes.

 

[Arbee]

GGLabs' page for the card says they fixed the card to ID 7 and changed the ROM and GS/OS driver to reflect that. That's likely why the stock Apple driver won't load.

 

[NJRoadfan]

FWIW, here is the original end user manual for the card: https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.a...on/hardware/storage/disks/AppleIISCSICard.pdf

Apple's description for setting the SCSI ID is pretty terrible. They call it "priority" and say nothing about it needing the ID to be unique to avoid a bus conflict. I'm guessing the ROM had code to check the SCSI ID jumper that was patched out and hard coded in the ggLABS revision of the board.

 

[Tchucu]

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[Tchucu]

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[Retronaut]

GGLabs' page for the card says they fixed the card to ID 7 and changed the ROM and GS/OS driver to reflect that. That's likely why the stock Apple driver won't load.

Well, I've tried using the stock SCSI drivers, in various version of GSOS AND also the drivers directly linked to on their product page. Which is
https://gglabs.us/sites/gglabs.us/files/a2scsi_drv.zip
And the same outcome, GSOS cannot use the supplied drivers with the card. I have reached out to GGLabs via their forum, but that appears to be totally dead. So I also emailed them directly, and so far, no reponse. Right now, I appear to have a dud card, unless I can find some step, software, config I am missing.

 

[Retronaut]

I would try the following:

-Install the SCSI card in Slot 7.
-Set a blank (zeroed out) 40MB image as SCSI ID 6 on the BlueSCSI.
-Boot GS/OS from disk, use Advanced Disk Tools to create two 20MB partitions on the drive. Give them meaningful volume names to tell them apart.

OK I have tried to walk this walk. To do it...

• I got a 5.0.4 GSOS boot disk, and removed some fonts and drivers from it to make space.
• Then I installed the GGLabs (patched) SCSI drivers onto that floppy.
• Then I copied Advanced Disk Tools from its 2nd Utils disk onto the boot disk, using CiderPressII
• I then use it to boot into GSOS using a Floppy Emu.
• During boot it complains that the SCSI drive will not work, as its needs SCSI drivers installed (sound familiar)
• Then I ran ADT and when I clicked on its DISK button to cycle to the SCSI disk no other disk, other than the Floppy Boot disk was found...

So yeah, I am stuck, I CAN get this thing to boot a SINGLE 32mb HD, but considering its SCSI and should be able to get me 8 separate 32mb HD mounted (via partioning its) then I would call this a lame duck. I have a Booti and it can mount 8 .po files, so in effect the same number of hard disks, as its also solid state, its the same speed as the SCSI device.

I have emailed GGLabs about this, but so far no response. Its really worrying me now, their Forum appears to be derelict, with posts from 5 years ago being the latest being answered. I have also emailed them for help twice now, with no reponse. Its odd as I have read other posts saying they are helpful. I wonder if something has changed?

 

[NJRoadfan]

Do not install the driver. You should be able to partition and access a drive from GS/OS without it. I suspect that the ROM on the card differs from what the patched driver has in it. Its one of the pitfalls of modifying a design.

 

[iigs123]

I suspect a slightly different ROM too. The patched driver might not work 100% either. GSOS uses its own, faster driver instead of relying on the ROM code. I think the card generally works OK on the IIE even with some minor rom differences.

I would give GGLabs some additional time. He is a hobbyist too, and might just be on vacation. His Tindie store says "This seller is taking a break. Sign up below to get an email when they're back!"