It has probably been said enough, but I'll go ahead and say it again: Indeed, the SCSI2SD and the FloppyEmu are very different tools. Both, very valuable. Ultimately, it's not a particularly bad idea to, long-term, plan on getting both. Short-term, if your focus is on Compact Macs, get a FloppyEmu first because it'll be more useful to you earlier on.
As I read this through, I have a basic question about the SCSI2SD card - let's say I buy one for a Mac SE with a bad floppy drive.
How do I load it up to boot?
It's worth noting that this core problem remains the same regardless of what type of internal scsi mass storage is installed in the system.
If you do not have a floppy diskette drive, or other external scsi mass storage, with which to install software onto the machine, there is no way to do it on that machine, at all.
You either need to connect a good diskette drive, find another method (like zip/mo/syquest/bernoulli etc), or use a machine with a good machine to put an OS configured for your machine onto the disk.
In this respect, if you have multiple machines with failed floppy drives, no source of working diskette drives or skill to repair them, and no other infrastructure (say, a working machine with a working floppy diskette or that can use two hard disks) then the FloppyEmu becomes extremely important to have on hand.
a Mac SE with a bad floppy drive.
Double quotes, but I want to call out this specifically for a moment.
In general, up through some of the later Classic series, the SE/30, and the Color Classic, if you have a compact mac, there's a good chance you are using it for system 6.
Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but in most situations, I can
easily imagine a machine like my Quadra 840av without a diskette drive. In fact, I kind of want a blank bezel to put in that spot.
However: It's a little difficult for me to imagine a Compact Mac without one. Perhaps like a Classic or something with 4 megs of RAM, booting 7 from a disk and using networking, but in general it feels like a big part of that particular experience is floppy diskettes, even if you're emulating them.
Perhaps this is a bad or limited take. I do, after all, use a floppy-less IIgs booted off of flash-based internal storage. If I had a compact Mac, I would almost certainly use it that way too, so it's really just a matter of how you like to run things.
It's the CF AztecMonster..
Thank you for the clarification!
It would be worth referring to it by its actual name. SCSI2CF or "cf-based scsi2sd" is both 1) a technically accurate description of what it
is 2) brings no or almost no results in search engines, making it difficult to find out what you mean.
The CF AztecMonster is great, and it's not super surprising that the CF works in an IDE/CF adapter, because it's just a volume on a disk. With the SCSI2SD (and by implication this is how a SCSI2CF would work, which is why I'm keen on seeing them represented accurately) you can emulate an arbitrary number of SCSI IDs and LUNs (if I remember correctly) to split the card however it's needed. SCSI2SD is also often cited as being the best solution for very specific situations where devices need to be configured differently from a normal hard disk. I don't know off hand how the AztecMonster would handle, say, being installed in a VAX.
Macs though, are generally simple enough that if you can afford one, it's probably worth going for the AztecMonster.
