RaSCSI Development Thread

[rabbitholecomputing]

Agreed, with all of the above...however, I'd like to add that this is, in theory, also a problem that can be solved with SCSI2SD. It's a matter of firmware development (aka time and knowledge). SCSI2SD V6 (also open source firmware) has hardware support for USB devices, but has never had the implementation on the firmware side developed to enable use of it.

The biggest shortcoming of RaSCSI is that it's not capable of instant-on functionality, which is a big downside, when it comes to storage, but not at all a real issue if you're using it for connectivity.

 

[PotatoFi]

Agreed, with all of the above...however, I'd like to add that this is, in theory, also a problem that can be solved with SCSI2SD. It's a matter of firmware development (aka time and knowledge). SCSI2SD V6 (also open source firmware) has hardware support for USB devices, but has never had the implementation on the firmware side developed to enable use of it.

That is great news. If the SCSI2SD can function as a USB host, host a USB ethernet adapter, and emulate a SCSI ethernet adapter, that would be very cool. The holy grail would be providing storage and ethernet at the same time. All of this sounds like a lot of work for a microcontroller. I'm keen to discuss more, but this probably needs to broken out into another thread (e.g. Network Connectivity via SCSI2SD v6).

 

[PotatoFi]

To avoid hijacking the thread, I've started a new thread about SCSI2SD V6 ethernet support.

 

[nsputnik]

Are there any projects that would allow the Raspberry Pi to host a SCIS drive or device?  My ultimate wish is to get Basillix II or SheepShaver to see a connecte hardware SCSI device.

 

[johnklos]

Are there any projects that would allow the Raspberry Pi to host a SCIS drive or device?  My ultimate wish is to get Basillix II or SheepShaver to see a connecte hardware SCSI device.

That'd be called a SCSI card  You can give Basilisk a file device, or you can give it direct access to a block device, so all you'd need is a real SCSI card plugged in to the SCSI device of your choice.

 

[Cory5412]

Are there any projects that would allow the Raspberry Pi to host a SCIS drive or device?  My ultimate wish is to get Basillix II or SheepShaver to see a connecte hardware SCSI device.

To my knowledge: no.

To do what @johnklos said, you'd need to be running Basilisk II or another emulator that can do this on a machine with a PCI slot available, such as an x86 based PC with PCI or PCI-X slots. (PCI-X slots work with just-PCI devices.)

RaSCSI might be adaptable to this purpose, but you'd likely have to do the dev work or make a feature request with the project to make it happen.

I don't know what load RaSCSI places on the Pi, but my understanding is that doing this exceeds the compute power the Pi has. Reversing the emulation and adding an entire Mac emulation to it might be too much.

I don't know how the Pi4 will change that, however.

 

[Rodeo]

How it going with this project?

I just ordered pcbs got 12 from dirty pcb. Waiting for my paycheck and will then order the components. 

 

[Rodeo]

Hi, i just made it work on my Amiga 2000 with gvp 040 combo. Which has a scsi Controller.

I found the baremetal software for rasci.

Make the rasp zero boot within a second.

Unfortunaly the gpio pins in k55:s design does not follow the Original RASCI. soo i cheated and made a adapter board between rascsi and rasp zero and moved the gpio pins to the right place.

This design can work. In linux if you recompile the source with the pin config design is using. 

It should have follow this pinconfig (see picture)

I Think i will ask author gimons for a baremetal version for this board. If he can help i let you all know

 Cheers!

 

[buserror]

So does anyone have made one of these? do they work? I really like the fact the SD card isn't a 'special' format so I can copy/backup disk images from/on it...

 

[landoGriffin]

Hi all! I'm going to jump on the RaSCSI bandwagon here. I've order a few of the cards designed by K55 (and also tried my hand at a customized version that has both 50pin ribbon and 25-pin DB connectors). Hopefully everything will be here by the 4th of July so I can dig into this.

Just curious if anyone has successfully got this working with their 68k mac? I have a SCSI2SD v5 board that works great, but I'm intrigued about how much further the RaSCSI could be taken. If anyone else has attempted this, how far did you get? Did you have any successes? Any issues you had to overcome?

Note: I may have gone a little overboard with the silkscreen art on the board

 

[Michael_b]

Hi all! I'm going to jump on the RaSCSI bandwagon here. I've order a few of the cards designed by K55 (and also tried my hand at a customized version that has both 50pin ribbon and 25-pin DB connectors). Hopefully everything will be here by the 4th of July so I can dig into this.

Just curious if anyone has successfully got this working with their 68k mac? I have a SCSI2SD v5 board that works great, but I'm intrigued about how much further the RaSCSI could be taken. If anyone else has attempted this, how far did you get? Did you have any successes? Any issues you had to overcome?

Note: I may have gone a little overboard with the silkscreen art on the board

View attachment 35113

I have it a go a while back but I accidentally reversed the SCSI connector pinout (went off a diagram for the male rather than female...) and haven’t had the chance to revise it.

IIRC the PCB design linked to in this thread is slightly wrong and will require modifications (Cutting traces and patch wires) to work.
 

Good luck with your efforts and please report back - the only other info I have regarding RaSCSI and old Macs is someone who claimed to have it working but only on 68030 Macs - said older Macs didn’t work.

 

[landoGriffin]

I have it a go a while back but I accidentally reversed the SCSI connector pinout (went off a diagram for the male rather than female...) and haven’t had the chance to revise it.

IIRC the PCB design linked to in this thread is slightly wrong and will require modifications (Cutting traces and patch wires) to work.
 

Good luck with your efforts and please report back - the only other info I have regarding RaSCSI and old Macs is someone who claimed to have it working but only on 68030 Macs - said older Macs didn’t work.

Thanks Michael! Any tips on what was wrong with the circuit?

 

[Michael_b]

Thanks Michael! Any tips on what was wrong with the circuit?

See here.

 

[landoGriffin]

FYI.... status update....

Found an issue with the modified circuit board I made. I had the "ACK" and "ACT" lines swapped. Oops! This was easy enough to fix with a cut/jump on the board though.

I was able to get the RaSCSI software running on a Raspberry Pi 4. My Quadra is able to see the virtual hard disk I created, as well as format, read and write to it. I ran a quick benchmark, and the performance seems to be on par with my SCSI2SD v5. 

My current sticking point is with CD-ROMs. Using various SCSI tools, the Mac can see that there is a drive present at the correct SCSI ID, but it hasn't detected any of the images that i have "Inserted". So, I'm going to keep working that.

In the next few days, I'm hoping to run some benchmarks comparing the different versions of Rasperry Pis, and maybe on some different Mac models. But first, I'm trying to get the CD-ROM functionality working.

 

[Michael_b]

FYI.... status update....

Found an issue with the modified circuit board I made. I had the "ACK" and "ACT" lines swapped. Oops! This was easy enough to fix with a cut/jump on the board though.

I was able to get the RaSCSI software running on a Raspberry Pi 4. My Quadra is able to see the virtual hard disk I created, as well as format, read and write to it. I ran a quick benchmark, and the performance seems to be on par with my SCSI2SD v5. 

My current sticking point is with CD-ROMs. Using various SCSI tools, the Mac can see that there is a drive present at the correct SCSI ID, but it hasn't detected any of the images that i have "Inserted". So, I'm going to keep working that.

In the next few days, I'm hoping to run some benchmarks comparing the different versions of Rasperry Pis, and maybe on some different Mac models. But first, I'm trying to get the CD-ROM functionality working.

Great stuff - very interested in the results of your testing!

 

[landoGriffin]

ITS ALIVE!!!

I did some benchmarks with a few different Raspberry Pi versions (the Raspberry Pi 0 results were surprising). I compared them to the stock Seagate HD in my Quadra 840av and a SCSI2SD version 5.0a that I had from a few years back.

https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki/Benchmarks

CD-ROMs are also working! You'll need to use Resexeccence's CD-ROM driver hack. https://web.archive.org/web/20040404121044/http://www.resexcellence.com/hack_html_99/12-21-98.shtml I'm using Apple CD-ROM driver version 5.4.2.

Some other things I've learned over the past few days....

- The Mac OS sends a flush command when you reboot that crashes the RaSCSI software. When it crashes, the entire Mac freezes until you re-launch the RaSCSI software. I'm assuming the RaSCSI software is giving up in the middle of a SCSI transaction and doesn't report an error to the host.

- GIMON's host file system and Ethernet interfaces are very specific to the 68000 platform. He wrote some very custom drivers. Getting similar functionality on the Mac is going to be a non-trivial undertaking

- I need to fix my board (to correct the ACK vs ACT signal mismatch)

- A lot of the reference documentation I've been looking at is linked on my RaSCSI Github repo https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI (yes... the formatting is horrible. I'll clean it up someday)

 

[uyjulian]

For the ethernet driver, someone developed some hardware that can be used with existing driver: 







I wonder how portable it is to RaSCSI… I haven't taken a look at the sources

 

[Torbar]

ITS ALIVE!!!

I did some benchmarks with a few different Raspberry Pi versions (the Raspberry Pi 0 results were surprising). I compared them to the stock Seagate HD in my Quadra 840av and a SCSI2SD version 5.0a that I had from a few years back.

https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki/Benchmarks

CD-ROMs are also working! You'll need to use Resexeccence's CD-ROM driver hack. https://web.archive.org/web/20040404121044/http://www.resexcellence.com/hack_html_99/12-21-98.shtml I'm using Apple CD-ROM driver version 5.4.2.

  

Some other things I've learned over the past few days....

- The Mac OS sends a flush command when you reboot that crashes the RaSCSI software. When it crashes, the entire Mac freezes until you re-launch the RaSCSI software. I'm assuming the RaSCSI software is giving up in the middle of a SCSI transaction and doesn't report an error to the host.

- GIMON's host file system and Ethernet interfaces are very specific to the 68000 platform. He wrote some very custom drivers. Getting similar functionality on the Mac is going to be a non-trivial undertaking

 - I need to fix my board (to correct the ACK vs ACT signal mismatch)

- A lot of the reference documentation I've been looking at is linked on my RaSCSI Github repo https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI (yes... the formatting is horrible. I'll clean it up someday)

That is cool,  good work!  as far as I know, you're the first person with actual results of it working

Did you happen to post something in a comment on one of the vintage Mac facebook groups yesterday on a topic about scsi2sd clones?(Yesterday someone commented they were working on a RASCSI project and is working on getting the CD emulation working)

 

[landoGriffin]

That is cool,  good work!  as far as I know, you're the first person with actual results of it working

Did you happen to post something in a comment on one of the vintage Mac facebook groups yesterday on a topic about scsi2sd clones?(Yesterday someone commented they were working on a RASCSI project and is working on getting the CD emulation working)

I did post in one of the Vintage Mac Facebook groups yesterday. That was me!

Side note: I'm spending a bunch of time today trying to pull together a good documentation package for English Mac users. Feedback/comments/contributions are welcome!

https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki

 

[cheesestraws]

This looks fun.  I've been meaning to have a play with this for some time...