The definitive Macrosystem Casablanca hack thread!

[retromax]

Thanks for your input today guys what it gave me was hope and the will to try again with this!, I’d given up on the drives as I thought I’d tried everything, I just ended up removing all jumpers from one of the headers on the drive and that was it!!

[jaesonk]

Do you have another computer with SCSI that you can test the 36GB external drive on? The 36GB drive could be faulty. Does it sound like it is spinning up ok? Any unusual clicking?

What model 36GB drive do you have?

Always good to check the cabling. Are there any adapters in the mix?

Are you using active termination?

Some general SCSI info:
https://www.datapro.net/techinfo/scsi_doc.html

The jumper sheet is for a Cheetah 10K 36GB SCSI drive. Usually ID jumpers are near the SCSI cable. Sometimes there's another jumper block along the side somewhere.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by jaesonk

Do you have another computer with SCSI that you can test the 36GB external drive on? The 36GB drive could be faulty. Does it sound like it is spinning up ok? Any unusual clicking?

What model 36GB drive do you have?

Always good to check the cabling. Are there any adapters in the mix?

Are you using active termination?

Some general SCSI info:
https://www.datapro.net/techinfo/scsi_doc.html

The jumper sheet is for a Cheetah 10K 36GB SCSI drive. Usually ID jumpers are near the SCSI cable. Sometimes there's another jumper block along the side somewhere.

Thanks for all that info, I did get it working by removing all the jumpers from the headers. I’d tried different combinations of jumpers and the selection switch that is on the enclosure that also plugged into the back of the drive, the last thing I hadn’t tried was to just remove them all and it worked!. I did post the drive model number above though as you were asking and yeah there’s a scsi terminator in use but thanks for the reply and I’m very happy it’s sorted now

[jaesonk]

Glad you got it working!

[retromax]

Originally Posted by jaesonk

Glad you got it working!

Thanks!, I posted in this very thread when I first got the Casablanca and managed to obtain install disks and software from the great folk on here, it was only recently that I was thinking seeing as it’s very hard to get hold of a 50 pin scsi drive these days to replace the internal one with a bigger one and there seems to be quite a few 68 pin drives around I’d go down that route as I already had the external enclosure and cables that I could just pop a drive into.
Very happy!, I love playing around with this old tech as I would have loved one of these back in the day.

[jaesonk]

You can alternatively opt for SCSI adapters that use flash media.

There are also bridge adapters that let you use IDE and SATA drives.

Everything SCSI related tends to be expensive though.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by jaesonk

You can alternatively opt for SCSI adapters that use flash media.

There are also bridge adapters that let you use IDE and SATA drives.

Everything SCSI related tends to be expensive though.

Sounds interesting, I did once try a scsi to sd adapter, it was fine in my akai sampler but not fast enough for the Casablanca and kept crashing

[retromax]

So here’s what I did today
As I said I have 2 identical 36gb drives and now I managed to get them working I was thinking of getting another external enclosure for the other drive and then have 2 separate external drives for the Casablanca, well… that got me thinking ?? the enclosure I have is from a dat backup drive so is quite big and could easily hold another hand drive. Now people might think this is silly but I just made up a power cable wired to a DPDT switch so when the switch is in one position the power goes to one drive and in the other position the other drive, so before I power on I simply select which hard drive I want to use then power up the system!.
People may say that this is crazy but I was just gonna get another identical enclosure and mount the spare drive in there but would have had to mess around swapping them over where this way I simply select my hard drive with the rocker switch on the back of the enclosure and I’m good to go!.
Oh and if I don’t power the external drive I can use the internal drive in the Casablanca
So all my software is installed on the 3 drives now!!

It’s been fun!!

[retromax]

The other day I ordered a Greaseweasle V4 and it arrived today, I’d already discovered a while ago that I couldn’t write floppies for my Casablanca and the way to do it was to get a kryoflux which was way more than I was wanting to spend to back up a few disks so that never happened. For some reason last week I was looking at a kryoflux again then discovered something called a greaseweasle so I had a read and thought for £20 it doesn’t really matter if it does what I want and was worth a try, I’m pretty sure everyone around here knows about them so I don’t need to go into that. So as I said above it arrived today and I’d been spending the last few days making a box to house it in with a floppy drive too, I’d upload pictures of my little box but not sure how to do that here.
So anyway after plugging it in and downloading the software within 5 minutes I’d backed up my Casablanca install disks to nice new floppies!, I’m sure there’s more I could do with it and will learn that but the main thing I ever wanted to be able to do was backup my Casablanca disks and I’m very happy I could do that!

[Jope]

Which image format did you use when reading them with the Greaseweazle?

[retromax]

I’m at work now so can’t check but I used a gui version called GreaseweasleGUI and just selected ‘read disk’, it read 81 tracks (I think) and I simply did the reverse and it wrote the disk which I popped into the Casablanca and all was good, I’m really new to this so I can’t really comment yet.
I would like to learn more such as writing the disks you uploaded and trying them out but I don’t know what I’m doing yet.
Hopefully I’ll find help here??

[Jope]

Was it this one https://desertsagesolutions.com/greaseweazlegui/?

Please provide more info on what you saw when you navigated the GUI.. The screenshots on that site imply that there was a few more steps than just clicking read disk.

[retromax]

So on the first screen that opens it’s already selected for read disk so you click the select box at the bottom, the screen that pops up is the read disk screen, I didn’t change anything on there and simply selected launch which brought up the command prompt window and showed the progress, the second time I tried I did change the file name which I had just left default before. Whatever the default file type was it just did that I’m not sure until I’m back at my pc in the morning of what the file type was.
Once it had read the disk and created the image file I closed the command prompt box and went back to the start screen and this time selected the write to disc option and went to the write disk screen then selected my image and clicked launch and it wrote it back to another disk. I didn’t change any parameters as I wasn’t sure what to do but still ended up with backups of my disks

[retromax]

The image file was possibly SCP but I’ll confirm that when I can get to my computer tomorrow morning

[retromax]

Yeah definitely an SCP image, I just tried a protected Atari ST game disk just to see what happened and not changing any settings and everything was fine. Don’t know if I can mention Atari around here lol but it’s just something I had to hand.

[Jope]

Thanks for the info!

[Jope]

Based on the wiki, gw can write KF raw images, so the ones on the Google drive should work.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by Jope

Based on the wiki, gw can write KF raw images, so the ones on the Google drive should work.

Yeah I’ve been trying to work out how to do that this morning, no luck yet

[retromax]

I get the error message ‘list index out of range’ when trying to write the raw files from the google drive, there’s an option to convert them to an image and I tried that too and get the same error message.
I tried the hxc floppy emulator software to convert the raw files to an image and was able to write a disk but unfortunately the Casablanca tells me it’s ‘not a Casablanca disk’

[retromax]

this is the text from the window:

Converting c=0-81:h=0-1 -> c=0-81:h=0-1
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Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\runneradmin\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python38\site-packages\cx_Freeze\initscripts\__startup__.py", line 113, in run
File "C:\Users\runneradmin\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python38\site-packages\cx_Freeze\initscripts\Console.py", line 15, in run
File "gw.py", line 3, in <module>
File "C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\Python\3.8.10\x86\lib\site-packages\greaseweazle\cli.py", line 69, in main
File "C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\Python\3.8.10\x86\lib\site-packages\greaseweazle\tools\convert.py", line 135, in main
File "C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\Python\3.8.10\x86\lib\site-packages\greaseweazle\tools\convert.py", line 67, in convert
File "C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\Python\3.8.10\x86\lib\site-packages\greaseweazle\image\scp.py", line 274, in emit_track
IndexError: list index out of range

C:\Users\russr\Desktop\GreaseweazleGUI-v2.99>