Blizzard SCSI Kit

[AmigaMark]

Hello felllow Amiga nerds,


I have a 1230 IV with a SCSI kit and cable - i also had the same with 1230 ,1240 and1260 in previous Amiga lives.


In alll these years i have never actually attached anything to it (them).


I notice bllizzard.device in my workbench ((HDTools) but I have no idea how easy it would be to connect for examplle a scsi CD or ZIP or mass storage. Can you boot from it?


I have connected every conceivablle scsi device to an A500 pllus withh GVP++ and also squirrel on a 1200 - but never to the bllizzard scsi kit.


No idea what if any additionall software would be required - allso can you get blluescsi stuff thhat connects ?


Questions questions, i feel a voyage of discovery starting.

[crazyc]

I have an scsi kit with my B1260 on a tower and have an scsi to ide converter attached to it and then the usual ide cf on the end of that. Yes you can boot from it and I get around 4 to 4.5 times the speed that I get from the plain motherboard ide. (Well, as tested with sysinfo).

[Daedalus]

Yes, you can boot from it. The device driver is in the SCSI kit's ROM so it's ready from a cold boot. I've had a setup with SCSI drives including CD drives, CD burners, Zip drives, hard drives (IDE drives with IDE-SCSI adaptors), and it has worked beautifully for years. As well as being much faster than the motherboard IDE as mentioned, it uses very little CPU speed for real-world transfer speeds of ~8-9MB/s, which is great.

[cloverskull]

+1 for all the recommendations here to use it. If you can find an ACard 7720U - http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page737.htm - you can basically take the IDE drive you've been using directly on the motherboard and connect it to the SCSI instead. I had fun doing comparisons of onboard IDE, Fast ATA MKV IDE, and then SCSI->IDE. The SCSI->IDE won this by a longshot

[jurassicman]

Interesting thread, thanks guys!
I have a scsi kit as well but I'm not using it... the AEC-7720U card seems great, which cable would I need to buy to connect it to the scsi kit?

[ElectroBlaster]

Maybe I should have a crack at this! I have the scsi kit add-on and an acard floating around.

The main drive for me is imaging old scsi drives.

[idrougge]

Today, I would just use a BlueSCSI v2; it’s very fast, quiet and easy to backup.

If you have a BlizzSCSI, using IDE is silly; the DMA of the SCSI makes your Amiga feel much faster when accessing the disk.

[LordCrass]

If you've connected the external SCSI interface, I'd recommend the ZuluSCSI. They make internal models as well.

https://store.rabbitholecomputing.co...p2040-db25.htm

I've got the previous revision (without the RP2040, so it's slower, around 3MB/sec) and it works great. You can mount up to 7 virtual SCSI devices and it does ISO files as well for CD-ROM mounting.

The only thing it's missing that I wish it had was a headphone jack to handle CD-Audio output along with bin/cue file support to match.

[AmigaMark]

wow definately a voyage of discovery - i think i might tower up my second 1200 and put the bllizzard in that with some juicy scsi stuff. i suppose first better price up some scis stuff

[Calabazam]

I have one but i am using it as a RAM expansion actually (128 MB more including double sided SIMMs are nice). Problem is there is no way to integrate a SCSI drive internally in a desktop case, unless those BlueSCSI got really miniaturized, so still using the internal IDE with my Blizzard 1260.
I am done with towered A1200s since 2010.

[idrougge]

It got really miniaturised. https://shop.onegeekarmy.eu/index.ph...maller-design/

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by LordCrass

The only thing it's missing that I wish it had was a headphone jack to handle CD-Audio output along with bin/cue file support to match.

Some revisions of the ZuluSCSI support such function using an add-on called the “DAC Attack!”: https://github.com/saybur/dac-attack

[ElectroBlaster]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Some revisions of the ZuluSCSI support such function using an add-on called the “DAC Attack!”: https://github.com/saybur/dac-attack

I wonder if this add-on would work with BlueSCSI v2?
I did not know this dac attack existed until your post!

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by ElectroBlaster

I wonder if this add-on would work with BlueSCSI v2?
I did not know this dac attack existed until your post!

Sadly, not yet. It seems it’s not a priority for the BlueSCSI Team. I guess it will happen eventually, but it might require a new revision and/or additional hardware to be possible.