BlueSCSI Toolbox - NeXT Edition

[eric]

As @Mu0n aptly said "Did not have active NeXT development in my 2024 bingo card"

There's been a bunch of BlueSCSI NeXT users hanging out on the OpenRetro SCSI Discord and I thought... I wonder how hard it would be to write the BlueSCSI Toolbox apps for NeXT...

First - I don't have a NeXT computer. I have some friends who might loan me one but I started looking at Previous - an emulator for NeXT. Luckily it DOES emulate SCSI. Honestly the hardest part was just figuring out the nuances of the setup of the emulator (which in the end was pretty easy). I also got a BlueSCSI HDD image loaded with all the development tools from soneone to save me from having to do a full install.

Side note if you want to just play with NeXT via Previous you can check it out on https://infinitemac.org/

Next -_- I had to read up on NeXT software development. I know it's Objective-C which I've only briefly used. It also has all the "modern" BSD/Unix libraries too which will make my life a lot easier. Reading and poking at these tools from I was reminded of the Mac OS X 10.x dev tools - Project Builder, Interface Builder, etc. I quickly whipped up a small UI for the CD changer app.

Then since I don't know objective-c I coded up a small command line c app that just sends and receives data from the SCSI bus - and low and behold it worked the first time!

Since I'm only in an emulator and no real BlueSCSI to communicate with I had to pull down the Previous emulators code (from svn... there's a tool I completely forgot how to use) and implemented some BlueSCSI Toolbox SCSI commands right in the Previous. Using an emulator to emulate a BlueSCSI

So with all that I have all the puzzle peaces to build the real BlueSCSI CD Changer - Luckily there's a ton of BlueSCSI NeXT users out there that can help me test on real hardware - once I get to that point.

No ETA as this was a "spike" to see how feasible it was - which seems to be quite feasible! We already have Toolbox apps on Mac, Amiga, and I hope NeXT is next (groan).

A picture is worth a thousand words - there's more to do but I honestly didn't think I'd get this far in just a rainy afternoon!

 

[JdM74]

@eric You'd certainly have me as a tester! I have both Slabs and Cubes with BlueSCSI's fit into them. If you want or need more, there could be some engaged on the nextcomputers.org forums as well.

 

[splorp]

I have a pair of NeXTstation boxen, but would need to nab a BlueSCSI to pop into them for testing.

Happy to help where I can.

 

[ScutBoy]

I can help with my Cube.

 

[Rob Blessin]

Now this is really cool , I recently have been comparing original SCSI2SD 5.2, 6.0 to BlueSCSI and ZuluSCSI .

As I sell a lot of SCSI solutions for NeXT hardware users. I honestly really appreciate the effort here to port the Blue SCSI tools over to NeXT.

If there is anything I can do in terms of providing you with an original NeXT Station to tinker with please let me know .

I don't have tunnel vision on products and I'm not really sure what all went on with the SCSI opensource code kafuful of late, did not know it was an issue until a few weeks ago as I've been in the dark like a mushroom. In the grand scheme of things hope we all will get along moving forward!

I've known Alex a long time so if you all would like help to find a common ground in the future to move all this stuff forward for the retro communities , I would try and applaud it .
I know competition drives demand as well; I think it is healthy and good to have friendly rivalry in developing new retro stuff and my heart has/ is into resurrecting as many of these NeXTs as possible . Thanks for helping on my youtube page as the Quirk setting did the trick and we created a custom .ini file .
Thank you all for letting me join here , I also would appreciate letting my customers have a choice of products and currently have worked with Mike scsi2sd , Alex ZuluSCSI for over a decade
and I recently purchased 5 Blue SCSI 2.0 SD's and would seek your approval to become a reseller as I like the BlueSCSI product

I'm just happy all of you hardware developers have come up with these amazing sd products that have made my life so much easier.

Years of noisy spinning, failing 30 year old drives , I nearly went mad lol and I have thousands, yes thousands of original scsi hard drives here,
then the scsi2sd McMaster miracle,
I had tinkered with acard to ide to sata flash drives around 2000 at the time the max was flash card format 120mb for the bios but the scsi2sd made a huge difference . I had other variants AZtek etc.

I still have one I should set up and video as you all would laugh but the mad science actually worked and was cutting edge for the day.

I knew there was something to the flash card inside and you geniuses have figured out elegant affordable solutions.

At the time to configure what I just described was $1200 lol.

I'm probably the only guy that has been in the trenches buying, trading, repairing and reselling NeXT hardware through my business Black Hole , Incorporated business continuously since 1993
and yes I've also worked for Apple, as an expert on many prior art patent litigation cases .

The last NeXT reseller after all these years still my full time job going on 31 years.

I never thought it would turn out to be a career but it has been a miracle for me with my health issues.

Eric, Thanks for porting over your BlueSCSI tools to NeXT and if OK I would like to offer BlueSCSI and your products as an alternative choice to my NeXT customers.
I also hope you have a sense of humor as we have been having a flame war over nothing, we are old and bored .

In all seriousness please keep up the good work and I look forward to doing business with BlueSCSI provided I'm authorized officially by you, tae it to the top lol.

I know people will vouch for my integrity , here is an article I wrote awhile back. Peace , Appreciate your time .



Best regards Rob Blessin Hundreds of my NeXT projects at youtube.com/robblessin

I

 

[eric]

I honestly really appreciate the effort here to port the Blue SCSI tools over to NeXT.

Thanks! NeXT was one of those things I read about in magazines like Mac User/etc that was very cool to learn about - but nothing a 15 year old kid in rural MN could use. As mentioned these NeXT developer tools really reminds me of using the Mac OSX beta.

if you all would like help to find a common ground in the future to move all this stuff forward for the retro communities , I would try and applaud

We did try this with a moderator... 6 months ago now? Unfortunately we do not have the same view on open source or events. We did agree to a few items, but those have now all broken now by him. I've moved on. Also this thread is likely not the best place to discuss - I'd rather keep focused on NeXT.

would seek your approval to become a reseller as I like the BlueSCSI product

This is a definite possibility! I did send you an email via your web contact forum, please let me know if you got it, or if not I'll send you a DM here with my email. I just learned about your store via your recent youtube video.

I also hope you have a sense of humor as we have been having a flame war over nothing, we are old and bored .

I hope you don't take my replies to your video as flames - I was just trying to correct you on the first one (which you did a follow up on, thanks) - just the facts. I'm too old for flame wars. I just build and play with this stuff for fun.

 

[eric]

Quick update - I have a working CD changer via command line app (emulated bluescsi of course) and have a few alpha testers lined up. Once it's verified functional on a real BlueSCSI I'll post a beta CLI app. After that I'll wire it up to an Interface Builder UI.

 

[TyepLex]

Very nice

happy to contribute with testing and code, I have couple of NeXT hardware and BlueSCSI around so can setup different types of setup as needed

 

[eric]

We've successfully got CD switcher working, though the NeXTStep Finder seems to be a bit confused when you switch a CD without it knowing. The same behavior happens when you eject a real CD with the button instead of through the Finder. I'll have to try to find some API's that allow me to eject a CD programmatically. Slow goings as I have to build and send and wait for logs, but it's going. Will probably try to hook up the UI now to the C programs api.

 

[eric]

While I wait for some potential black hardware I decided to try and get an Intel NeXTStep 3.3 up and running - of which I'll post about in another thread. I did succeed and was able to compile my test app on Intel as well. Frees me from the emulator so I can continue working with a real BlueSCSI.

 

[blakespot]

I would love to help in any way I can. I have a NeXTstation Turbo Color with NS 3.3 and a spinning boot disk, with the external DB25 BlueSCSI attached externally and being used mainly for CD and floppy image loading. Cheers!

(I also have an HP-9000 712/100 "Gecko" with NS 3.3 loaded on it, though at this moment it's not setup with a display, but could possibly test at some point if that is a target.)


bp

 

[blakespot]

I've got floppies mounting via BlueSCSI (like the 3-disk set of Lotus Improv). Sadly, during install, the system wants to sense the insert of disk 2, despite all being mounted as SCSI "FD" volumes and visible to the system. Would be nice if the tool being worked on here had some "spoof disk insert" capability, maybe allowing the choosing of mountable floppies from a list. Not quite sure if it's possible to have the system think a floppy was inserted; there's no floppy drive interface (other than SCSI) on the Cube, I believe.

bp

 

[eric]

Switchable floppies should be doable. I'm waiting on some real black hardware as the intel version was a bust - i could get it kind of working but the install just was odd and didn't quite work right.

 

[eric]

I now have a working NeXTStation and have CD Switching (mostly) working on it via a CLI app. Really the only thing left for me to figure out is how this whole AutoMount in Workspace Manager works... which I can find 0 documentation about how to interact with it. Closest I've seen is vmount, which the opensource component just shells out to `umount`, which fine, I could do too, but I always get "Device is busy" when I try to manually unmount/eject the device via the cli.

Any pointers or tips would be appreciated, and I'll keep digging. Worst case is we call "switch" then you have to manually eject the device in WM, then your selected CD will show up. Not ideal but better than nothing.

 

[eric]

Well I removed the `?` from the title as I just have a few things left to address before I can send an alpha to some testers!

Here's a demo of the first pre-alpha version A UI in project builder will be coming of course. Still occasionally run into umount busy issues, but thats what alphas are for

 

[modsk0]

Very nice!
Speaking from a non-programmer point of view, maybe this holds the potential for also being ported to a Linux variant based on GNUstep?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep and https://gnustep.github.io for reference.

 

[eric]

Yes, should be possible to port to older BSD/Linux with enough #ifdef's

Things left todo:

* Find out why umount sometimes thinks the CD is busy and wont eject it (seems to happen regardless of bluescsi/cd chagner)
* Clean up the c-code and make it more manageable
* Figure out how to determine the mappings of /dev/device to label to scsi id so I can grab what is needed depending on the operation.
* Build a UI and wire up the c code
* Maybe build in a SD Transfer util, though seems less useful as networking is so easy

 

[eric]

Got some time to clean up my PoC C library and learn just enough about Project Builder to wire it up. I've made some progress on unmounting but WM still fights me. I've seen this has always been the case in some old discussions and none of the work arounds seem great..

Anwyas here's a very ugly but functional UI calling some C code to find the BlueSCSI, more to come.

 

[CygnusTM]

It's great to see this moving along. I have both black and white hardware running NeXTstep if you need another tester. I've been using a PiSCSI when I need to be able to swap CDs, but I've never liked that I have to worry about getting the Pi OS started and shut down correctly to avoid corruption. That's why BlueSCSI is always my preferred option.

 

[MacintoshLibrarian]

this is amazing work !