BlueSCSI V2

[nogginthenog]

This popped up and looked interesting.

https://www.applefritter.com/content...-now-available
https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI-v2

I bought one of these boards this week and even though these are aimed at classic Macs it seems to be working well in my Amiga.

Mine cost £32 as I already had some the Raspberry PI Pico and was shipped fast from the UK seller.
All I had to do is solder the Pico & SCSI connector (you can buy them pre-soldered).

Performance is good and comparable to a real SCSI HD. I'm getting 5.4Mb/s read speed in sysinfo (20% faster than a real drive). Writing is slower.

I was originally using a Kington SD card but a modern SanDisk is much faster.
On that 32Gb ExFAT card I have a 30Gb partition.

My setup: CyberStorm MkII with CyberSCSI. OS3.2.
So far, I'm really liking this board. I need to figure out where to mount it.

It even supports a 1692kb ROM drive using the Pico's flash so I used WinUAE to create a small emergency boot drive. Nice

SysSpeed:

• Create 88 Operations/s
• Open 203 Operations/s
• DirScan 489 Operations/s
• Delete 329 Operations/s
• Seek/Read 2875 Operations/s
• CreateFile 1.23 Mb/s
• WriteFile 0.69 Mb/s
• ReadFile 1.67 Mb/s
• RawRead 5.60 Mb/s

Write speed looks slow here but in reality it's OK. I tested by copying large files or lots of files etc.

[Snoopy1234]

At some time i was looking for an Aztec Monster II SCSI=>Sata adapter for my A3000D. I did try an ACARD 68pin scsi to SATA adapter cradle but couldn't get it working with the SSD I had. That adapter is only compatible with a few specific ssd models. This looks like it might be a solution if there is a sata version.

[TheGouldFish]

I had tested out the BlueScsi V1 in the early days and had a bunch of issues with it.
so was interested to see how the V2 worked.

and its been a massive improvement, no need to tweak anything or change the code.
it just booted first time on my A500+ with the GVP HD8 (4mb of ram).

I ran the same "real world" tests that I did on the Blue SCSI v1.
(which was 3mb of files and folders being copied to and from the ram disk).

and these were the results.
mechanical read 177 kb/s
mechanical write 181 kb/s

BlueSCSI 1 read 179 kb/s
BlueSCSI 1 write 186 kb/s

BlueSCSI 2 (cheap card) read 233 kb/s
BlueSCSI 2 (cheap card) write 286 kb/s

sysinfo gave a speed of

BlueScsi 1: 1,238,475
BlueScsi 2: 1,876,926

So its a nice speed bump from the older device and more stable as well.

[Fery]

I ordered two pieces. One for my Macintosh SE. And the other one I'd like to try in the Amiga. Does anyone have any experience with blueSCSI in A590?

[nogginthenog]

It's been reported that the A590 works with the V2 on the Open Retro SCSI Discord channel.

I've noticed I get a nice speed boost when I enable synchronous transfers. 6.5Mb/s vs 5.4Mb/s in sysinfo.
Careful if you do this as some utilities don't recognise large disks and can trash the RDB!

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Boing-Ball

Don’t the new ZuluSCSI RP versions trump these? I’m still using the SCSI2SD drives and get around 8.5MB with my Blizzard 603 plus cards…..

The BlueSCSI v2 is based on the same controller as the ZuluSCSI RP, so performance should be better than with the old bluepill one.

It's a bit too expensive to buy them all for the sake of a test. :-)

[nogginthenog]

BlueSCSI v2 is about half the price if you don't mind some fairly easy soldering.

[Kin Hell]

0ld Blue SCSI or New Blue SCSI.....

Just don't talk about, "Blue Waffle"

[Fery]

I bought two pieces to try out. Does anybody have a finished image for Amiga and Macintosh? Or a link?

[nogginthenog]

Finished image? You can create a hard drive image in Winuae and just copy it to the SD card. Same for BasiliskII for a Mac image.

[btp]

I got a desktop BlueSCSI v2 from OneGeekArmy and have been trying to make it work without success

I have uploaded the latest firmware (v2023.04.10) to the Pico and created a 50MB image file in an SD card according to the instructions provided in the BlueSCSI v2 github wiki.

The log.txt that is created on the SD card states that the SD card and image file are recognized correctly.

My setup is an A590 with 6.1 ROMs connected to an Amiga 500 plus with 2.04 kickstart ROM. The A590 is fully populated with 2MB RAM while the Amiga is stock with an 1MB trapdoor expansion for a total 2MB chipram.

System boots fine and the 2MB fast RAM from the A590 is recognized in Workbench and also tested successfully with Amiga Test Kit.

When I run HDtoolbox from a floppy disk the emulated hard disk is detected with an unknown hard drive status (expected). I click on Change Drive Type, Define New and Read Configuration. I get a message that the track size is not found and the value 68 will be assigned. However, with the parameters automatically detected by HDtoolbox the correct size of the emulated drive (50MB) is found, so I assume there is nothing wrong here. By default HDtoolbox partitions the drive into 2 partitions of equal size which I do not change. When I click on the Save Changes to Drive after a while the error message "Error 42 on write!" appears. I tried to partition the drive in a different way but still I get the same error.

After a warm reboot the 2 partitions show up on Workbench as NDOS but if I try to format them I get again write errors and the formatting operation hangs/fails.

Anyone managed to get BlueSCSI v2 working on a setup similar to mine?
If yes, can you describe your process or any special configuration you did?

Something that I've read is that you need v7.0 roms for the A590. Is this necessary even if I don't care using large partitions? In my experiment above the emulated drive is just 50MB and each partition half of that.

Thanks for any tips or advice!

[Jope]

It is a good idea to have the latest firmware in the A590, but in the meanwhile you could try making sure that termination is working ok. Is termpower present?

[btp]

In the BlueSCSCI I have jumpers on TRM_ON and PWR_ON.
What should I do to test if termination is working correctly?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[nogginthenog]

There are some notes about the A590
https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI.../Compatibility

Amiga 500 A590 Rom V.7 Kickstart 1.3 & 3.2 
[SCSI] System="Generic" Quirks=0 ; Standard EnableSCSI2=0 ; Off PrefetchBytes=0 [SCSI0] Vendor=Blue Product=Bluedrive Version=1.0 SectorsPerTrack=32 HeadsPerCylinder=1

Also try reading the troubleshooting guide.
https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI...roubleshooting

[btp]

I have already tried the configuration options provided specifically for the A590 in the Compatibility wiki page (I've put those in the bluescsi.ini on my SD card) but didn't change anything.

Also I've flashed the latest nightly build in my Pico and still no go.

The Compatibility page mentions Kickstart 1.3 or 3.2. I don't have 3.2 but I can try with 1.3 though.

[fgh]

I’ve used some scsi-ide adapters that on some scsi controllers work fine with ready made partitions, but struggle when prepping them on the real hardware.
It might be a similar case here. (So try prepping/formatting the image in winuae first, perhaps it works then)

I have a bluescsi v2 from onegeekarmy and it works fine in my 4000T (with KS3.2.2)
Perhaps later I can try it in my 590, but it has a guru rom, so might still not be a useful comparison.

Edit:
One more thing - with virtual drives like this, the generated drive geometry might be quite exotic, and that could theoretically also be a cause of failure. IIRC i defined the bluescsi images as 1mb per cylinder. (Inspired by one of thomas rapp’s posts, perhaps this one? https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...80&postcount=8)

[Jope]

1MB per cylinder :-) Sectors will be 512 bytes

[fgh]

Originally Posted by Jope

1MB per cylinder :-) Sectors will be 512 bytes

haha, yes

[btp]

Many thanks for your suggestions!

I will try building my image file in WinUAE and then check if it works ok in my A590 with BlueSCSI.

[nogginthenog]

Maybe a silly question btp but how are you powering the BlueSCSI?