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SCSI to Ethernet Adapter on New Hardware

saybur

Well-known member
hi saybur,
I have been absent for quite awhile due to a busy workload with school, just wanted to say that I think its great you're still working on this and have a bootloader work, also I noticed a few post later that you have some initial CD-ROM support working.
I have a couple weeks free from study atm so please let me know if you need any testing to be done on an SE/30 as I'll be happy to do so

Hey there! I feel you, I've also been pretty busy with work/life and haven't been on here much, sorry about the delay in responding.

As of now, if you want to try out the devel branch and see if things work on your SE/30 that would be awesome. I'm ready to call what's currently on that branch done as long as it works on those systems. If you do run into grief, let us know.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
In case anyone's interested, I made a backplate "PCB" (with no actual circuit on it) for an internal scuznet in a Mac SE or SE/30 It even has the snail on it:

66700750571__DF18E851-8EBB-4EF0-8B27-50678D853FEA.JPG

It uses an ethernet panel mount extension that looks like this - note the odd centering of the screw holes:


(but you can get them from other places as well)

They look great fun installed:

66707114367__800AC5C9-47DD-4158-9786-91C41919CB7D.JPG

Gerbers for them are here:


And a more generic SE backplate is in the same repo.

I'll write up the installation in a separate thread.
 

saybur

Well-known member
I haven't had much time for this project, but I wanted to chime in and say that backplate is awesome! My spouse also got a real kick out of their "scuzzy the snail" art showing showing up on new PCBs.

When I do an update on Github I'll add a link to the bracket. As long as @Chopsticks is still OK with it, I'll also add their 3D printed case design up there too.
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
@saybur that's absolutely fine, my intention was always to offer the files free to anyone who wants to print them

also @cheesestraws I love the backplate, im working on a dual PDS adaptor for my SE/30 atm so I'll make sure to add a few of these back plates to my next order
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
Also I tried the latest firmware in the dev branch as I was going to try to the cdrom iso stuff but I had no luck, I set the correct config settings for the 128 variant of the atmega and I get some flashing leds but nothing else.
I haven’t tried the boot loader yest just tried PDI programming but I wanted to see if there’s an issue firmware wise as I’ve been away awhile so I’m not exactly sure if the 128 is still supported firmware wise or if I should/need to upgrade to the 192 or 256 variant to continue with testing?
I’m not sure what your life schedule is like these days but I have the next 6 months break from uni so let my know if there’s any testing/help etc I can do over the break I have
 

saybur

Well-known member
Thanks, I'll add the STL during the next update.

I still plan to support all variants of the A3U in the firmware. I've got boards with different sizes of chips as well, and given how difficult its become to find XMegas I'd like to maximize flexibility for anyone who wants to make a copy.

For firmware bugs, the CD-ROM support is not well tested, and/or it might also be an issue with the image, or with the INI file configuration. Is the LED giving you a flash pattern or is it just blinking like regular activity? There aren't many CD-specific debugging options yet, but I can look at adding some flash codes that can give hints about what might be wrong in a future update.

I've been pretty distracted with life and other projects, but I still intend to fix bugs/add missing elements to scuznet. I've got a vacation coming up and I'm planning to sit down and hack on this during part of it.
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
it appears to be 5 slow blinks then I think 13 fast blinks then it repeats.

I totally understand the being distracted with life, being at university and then covid happening has kept me away from my Macintosh hacking for quite some time. however im glad to hear you still have plans to continue working on the scuznet, its really been my fav sci emu device to mess around with, plus the ethernet support is so handy in my setup at home.

if I can figure out what's going on with my blinking lights issue ill be able to test out CD-ROM imaged, I have a lot of Mac iso's and im interested to see how it handles duel Mac/pc CD-ROM images (I suspect it will be fine fwiw)
 

saybur

Well-known member
it appears to be 5 slow blinks then I think 13 fast blinks then it repeats.
I believe that's the INI file failing to load due to FatFS thinking the FAT volume is invalid. I have not documented it well, but on the development branch -DUSE_EXFAT must be specified during compilation or exFAT support will not be included. If it's an exFAT SD card that's like the culprit. Potentially add that flag to the Makefile, re-flash, and see if the card begins working?
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
also @cheesestraws I love the backplate, im working on a dual PDS adaptor for my SE/30 atm so I'll make sure to add a few of these back plates to my next order

Hi @Chopsticks, nice to see you posting :). I hope uni is going well.

In case you hadn't noticed, if you look in the same misc/ repo on my github there's also a PCB for a 'generic' SE backplate with no port holes but with the port hole area marked and screw holes in the right place, so if you're thinking of putting PDS cards in as well, that might be a starting point for a custom multi-port backplate :)
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
@cheesestraws thanks, yes I know I haven't posted in awhile, lifes been a bit crazy over the last year or so with time commitments.
ive still been coming here occasionally to see what's new but its only recently where I actually have free time to mess around with my vintage machines. so even if I don't post much at times im still lurking around a lot to keep unto date with the different projects people are working on here.. on that note seeing that the se/30 recreation logicboard has been completed im looking forward to getting some of those boards made (when I can afford it that it)... amazing work was done there I must say

@saybur yup that explains the issue, my sdcard is exFAT formatted, probably from my last round of testing many many moons ago, I'll edit the make file and do some testing.
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
ive done a few quick tests using the latest dev branch. the expat option in compile slowed down the boot up to a crawl where it just wasn't working so I didn't pursue that. I just reformatted using FAT32 and from what I could tell my ftp transfers are the same, disk speeds have gone up to around 1050kb/s, I think that's faster from what I got last time I was testing speeds. though the seek times are still an issue with random read/write. as for the CDROM support so far ive tried a few apple iso's, a random old macformat magazine cover disk iso as well as a Nortons Utilities v3.5.x CD.
most of the apple ISO's I tried didn't work, and would prevent the Mac from booting up. sometimes I would get an error code from the led and sometimes I didn't. One system 7.1 install cd loaded up fine, though it wouldn't let me boot from it.
the macformat cover disk from 1994 caused the same boot up hangs as above
the Nortons cd loaded up fine.

that's all the testing ive done so far, but next step on my end is to see what's different about the handful of iso's I tried. I have some software that should allow me to look at the partition maps etc to see how the cd images are laid out and I guess to also varrify that are actually standard iso files and not renamed extensions and these days most cd image software is pretty forgiving with file extensions
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
haven't done much but I did use the CD-ROM support on my Takky Color Classic Build to boot and install MacOS 8.1, the scuznet seemed to work fine doing the install
 

saybur

Well-known member
the expat option in compile slowed down the boot up to a crawl
I've had that happen when the initial bootup scan is not complete by the time the happy Mac shows up. Perhaps look at disabling the contiguous check with mode=forcefast (if that isn't on already and the image is actually contiguous).

the seek times are still an issue with random read/write
That might also be a mode option thing - if not specified the firmware defaults to "normal", which is highly compatible but is super slow with random I/O. Could try mode=fast and see if performance improves.

I have some software that should allow me to look at the partition maps etc to see how the cd images are laid out and I guess to also varrify that are actually standard iso files and not renamed extensions and these days most cd image software is pretty forgiving with file extensions
That's been my experience too. The disks will need to be pretty simple to work. Everything tested on has been backups of physical disks I have, so I've had pretty high confidence that the format is correct. :)

haven't done much but I did use the CD-ROM support on my Takky Color Classic Build to boot and install MacOS 8.1, the scuznet seemed to work fine doing the install
Excellent!

I put the STL files for the 3D printed case you made up on Github as well, under the hardware directory. Thanks again for making those!
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
@saybur I think that was the issue, using mode=forcefast appears to have fixed the slow random r/w issue I was having. I tried mode=fast but it seems to perform the same as mode=normal. I know 100% that my the hdd image im doing my testing with is contiguous fwiw

regardless that issue is fixed, also appears to have improved my r/w speeds but abut 40kb/s.
I should probably runs some benchmarks comparing the fat32 to the exfat as I would assume exfat should allow for increased performance though the overhead on the Atmel might negate this... have you done any testing comparing the two?

Lastly thanks for putting the STL files up on GitHub, hopefully they will be helpful to others who want to build a scuznet
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
@saybur while messing around with my takky color classic system (Performa 5400 Logic Board currently overclocked from 200 to 220mhz) im using a fast compact flash card on the IDE port with the scuznet connected to the ssci port as the only device and im running Mac OS 9.
r/w speeds are around 1500/1100kb/s on the hard drive emulation, and surprisingly considering its OS 9.1 and PPC the dynaport drivers work and im averaging about 120kb's ftp transfer but it has peaked at about 132kb/s at random times
 

saybur

Well-known member
I should probably runs some benchmarks comparing the fat32 to the exfat as I would assume exfat should allow for increased performance though the overhead on the Atmel might negate this... have you done any testing comparing the two?
The speeds should be identical in fast/forcefast mode. Under the hood, the firmware is bypassing the FAT filesystem entirely and working with individual blocks within the image to achieve the higher speeds. The danger is that if the image is not contiguous it could start writing random data on the SD card.

r/w speeds are around 1500/1100kb/s on the hard drive emulation, and surprisingly considering its OS 9.1 and PPC the dynaport drivers work and im averaging about 120kb's ftp transfer but it has peaked at about 132kb/s at random times
That's really surprising! I've never tried out the driver on such a new system, I figured it just wouldn't work. Apparently the Dayna folks made a pretty good driver.

For speed, those are pretty close to what I'd imagine are maximums (absent more aggressive optimization). I'd definitely be curious if a RaSCSI in Dayna emulation and/or real hardware on PPC perform: like, how much of the speed limit comes from the Dayna driver versus the SCSI device.

Regardless, glad to hear things are working! :)
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
@saybur I wasn't expecting the dyna driver to work either, but I had the scuznet connected so I could copy some files onto the internal hd and I figured Id give the driver a go and to my surprise it worked. as for the w/r speeds fwiw the internal IDE drive (a compact flash card) peaks at around 7mb/s with an average of transfer speeds around 2-3mb/s.
Using the BlueSCSI I get almost as fast speeds as the scuznet (to be fair though both have different sd cards being used so speeds are 100% comparable) so im more inclined to this is either a SCSI bus/driver issue with MacOS itself or there's just to much overhead in these Atmel/STM microcontrollers etc to get SCSI running at faster speeds.
I believe this PowerPC has a SCSI bus of 5mb/s so there's definitely more room to go there, but again perhaps the MacOS overhead makes that theoretical speed un obtainable?
 

aladds

Well-known member
I finally got around to uploading my PowerBook version to github. Apologies to @saybur if you got any PRs during this, I initially tried to do my changes "quickly" using the web UI but after accidentally doing a PR (which I'm pretty sure I've correctly cancelled) I went back to the good old git command in the terminal.

Anyway, board is here:
 

Chopsticks

Well-known member
@aladds just had a look at you kicad files on GitHub, while I have no powerbook myself making the board shape unfamiliar to me. it looks good.
I've got a design that I made to go inside a se/30, I used the same 50pin IDC connector for the SCSI and a smaller one like you did for the ethernet to be mounted at the base of the case. ethernet has been solid for me doing that with no slow down, but I just wanted to ask if that's been the same in your case or not? really just wanting to confirm its working just as well (im still yet to release the pcbs files).
 
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