BlueSCSI v2 DB25 on 486 Always In-2000 SCSI ISA card

[dgveedubbus89]

Hello Tinkerers,

I have been trying to get my BlueSCSI v2 DB25 to boot and I have been having issues to say the least.

My SCSI card is an Always IN-2000 ISA card with Bios.

If I set a blank image as ID0 the bios says it sees a SCSI HDD but using MS DOS DEBUG as the manual says to initialize the image shows nothing but the controller on ID7 found.

If I set the images to ID3 or ID4 for example, the bios on boot up doesn't see the images but MS DOS debug does. When I try to initialize the images, it says it doesn't have a drive connected.

I seem to be in a fun loop lol

SCSI card has termination installed but I haven't tried removing them.

If I try and leave the image as ID0 the computer tries to boot but says "No ROM Basic, System Halted" and all I can do it ctrl-alt-del which then freezes when looking for the disk again.

I'm on the verge of just getting an XT-IDE but I REALLY want to make this SCSI card work. Does anyone have any experience with this issue or a premade image I can try? The images on the BlueSCSI documentation don't seem to be working as it's one of the images I have tried to load.

Here are a few photos of the debug interface:

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[bakkus]

What does the debug log from the BlueSCSI look like?

 

[dgveedubbus89]

Good Morning Bakkus,

Here is a copy of the logs:

Platform: BlueSCSI Pico
FW Version: 2023.11.16-release Nov 17 2023 03:26:27
Flash chip size: 2048 kB

=== SD Card Info ===
SD card detected, exFAT volume size: 7661 MB
SD Name: SMI , MID: 0x6F, OID: 0x00 0x13

=== Global Config ===
Config file bluescsi.ini not found, using defaults
Active configuration:

=== Finding images in / ===
== Opening /HD3_DOS622.img for ID: 3 LUN: 0
---- WARNING: This image does not appear to be a valid Macintosh Device image. See: https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI-v2/wiki/Disk-Images
---- Image ready
== Opening /HD4_NEWDOS622.img for ID: 4 LUN: 0
---- WARNING: This image does not appear to be a valid Macintosh Device image. See: https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI-v2/wiki/Disk-Images
---- Image ready

=== ROM Drive ===
Platform supports ROM drive up to 1692 kB
---- ROM drive image not detected

=== Configured SCSI Devices ===
* ID: 3, BlockSize: 512, Type: Fixed, Quirks: Apple, Size: 2097216kB
* ID: 4, BlockSize: 512, Type: Fixed, Quirks: Apple, Size: 2096640kB

Initialization complete!
INFO: Pico Voltage: 3.258V.

Other than it saying the images are not valid Mac images, which is obviously correct, I don't see much else out of place. What do you think?

 

[eric]

I've had great luck with the Adaptec card on my 5x86 PC build with @Stinkerton18's premade image (links on the bluescsi docs)

That said I know next to nothing about PC's of the early 90's so hopefully someone can help you out!

Note if you'd like to skip the check add this bluescsi.ini file to the root of your SD card:
[SCSI]
System=Generic

It wont change anything except the log.

 

[dgveedubbus89]

Got it working!!!

So here is what I learned. I sat and read the manual for my SCSI controller and it states that you can't skip SCSI ID's, on this controller, you just set the first device to ID0 and the second to ID1, etc. So trying ID3 and ID4 was the reason it was seeing the HD .img files but I could not initialize them and error out.

Next thing I did was try again using ID0 but I ditched the premade images from the BlueSCSI documentation. I found a way to create 2GB image files and after changing the name to follow the BlueSCSI format and making the new image ID0 I booted into my DOS Startup floppy and used the debug command which finally allowed me to initiate the image. So far so good!!!

Next I quit from the debug program and used fdisk to delete the image partition and start a new DOS partition.

Last but not least I used my DOS 6.22 install floppies to successfully install DOS to the newly found C: drive. It asked to format the disk again which took a bit of time but all went smoothly from there.

Looks like we can add a new working SCSI Card to the BlueSCSI documentation!!

Let me know if I can help test anything else, I am more than happy to try whatever you need.

Thanks!

 

[eric]

I sat and read the manual for my SCSI controller and it states that you can't skip SCSI ID's, on this controller, you just set the first device to ID0 and the second to ID1, etc.

"Back in the day" you only had the manual - glad you figured it out and what an odd requirement for a card. If you want to try the BlueSCSI DOS Toolbox app (you can switch CD's, transfer files, etc from the BlueSCSI via DOS program) checkout the Toolbox page in the docs for a link.

 

[dgveedubbus89]

"Back in the day" you only had the manual - glad you figured it out and what an odd requirement for a card. If you want to try the BlueSCSI DOS Toolbox app (you can switch CD's, transfer files, etc from the BlueSCSI via DOS program) checkout the Toolbox page in the docs for a link.

My next challenge is to get my PicoGUS working and after reading the documentation, I was stumped at how they wanted me to "extract" the install files over to the 486 being that the sum of the zip file does not fit on a single floppy. This is definitely going to help! Will try the DOS APP and keep you posted Eric.

P.s. I realized last night who you were and I wanted to thank you for all of your contributions to the vintage computer space. All 4 of my Mac's (That support SCSI) have Internal BlueSCSI's and my DB25 is one hell of a tool in my toolbox. I appreciate the attention you gave me on this issue and hope to keep helping any way I possibly can.

THANKS!

 

[eric]

Maybe @polpo can comment on the size of the zip - but since DOS is just a FAT file system and you're using a BlueSCSI - another way is if you're on a modern mac just name the image file ending in .img and double click it! It'll mount right on your desktop and you can copy files too and from it. If you're on windows you can use WinImage I believe to load files onto a FAT image file.

 

[dgveedubbus89]

Maybe @polpo can comment on the size of the zip - but since DOS is just a FAT file system and you're using a BlueSCSI - another way is if you're on a modern mac just name the image file ending in .img and double click it! It'll mount right on your desktop and you can copy files too and from it. If you're on windows you can use WinImage I believe to load files onto a FAT image file.

You my friend are a genius.

PicoGUS is working like a charm. I backed up my working image in case I messed anything up then used WinImage to create the folders and transfer the files needed to get it working. From there it was a piece of cake.

Now I need to make some time to test out the BlueSCSI file transfer.

My girls wanted to play Cosmic Osmo so I had to stop and setup my IIci.

Thanks for the suggestion Eric!

 

[Stinkerton18]

Oof, I missed this thread so I'm coming in super late. @dgveedubbus89, if you have the DOS ASPI drivers for the card, I can add them into the pre-made DOS images on the BlueSCSI WiKi.

Looks like it's a Xilinx chip on the card. Older non-Adaptec cards sometimes do have weird quirks. I have a DT-530 card that if the ASPI drivers are not loaded high, it doesn't work with the toolbox app for image change/selection.

EDIT: Does it look a lot like this: View attachment 1720456973997.webp

 

[dgveedubbus89]

@Stinkerton18 never too late to these types of threads.

I have not had a chance to try the toolbox with my card, I promise the moment I have a bit of free time, i will give it a try.

The funny thing about my card is that I never loaded and drivers, and if I am being honest, I wouldn't know how. I found a quick start guide as well as the full manual for my card and both documents say that the DOS drivers are preloaded on the cards EEPROM, here is the exact exert form the quick start guide:

ALWAYS Technology Corporation

The Always IN-2000 16bit SCSI uses it's own driver.
Adapter is based on WD33C93A which is hardware compatible with NCR5380 under Unix.
WD WD33C93A/JM SCSI bus interface controller, 5Mbit/sec with DMA
WD WD37C658 floppy controller interface.
Xilinx chips XC3020-50 and XC2018-50 Field Programmable Gate arrays..

====

IN-2000 Hardware Features -
Operates in any 80286/386/486 based IBM AT or EISA bus computer.

Supports all SCSI peripherals including hard disks, (including SyQuest and Iomega drives), 1/4" and
1/2" streaming and 9 track tape drives, DAT drives, CD-ROMs, optical disk drives and other devices.

Built in AT style floppy disk controller for 5 1/4" and 3 1/2", high and low density floppy disk drives.

DOS driver in EPROM, does not use any system memory.

Supports any SCSI hard disk size and type up to 2000 MBytes in capacity.

===

I am a total noob on the subject so I could have just stumbled upon an easy card to work with but any input would be greatly appreciated.

I will attach the docs I found for others to reference.

Who knows, maybe I stumbled upon the world best idiot proof card, perfect for idiots like me LMAO.

 

[Stinkerton18]

Hmmm, very interesting. So it's a Western Digital controller chip, just using Xilinx FPGAs. The biggest question I have is whether or not the CDROM drives show up/are accessible in DOS directly. If you didn't load/modify your config.sys to include any drivers and didn't add/setup your autoexec.bat file to have mscdex, then the card must be just mapping CDROM drives directly to Int13 redirects like it's doing with hard drives.

Any chance you'd be willing to copy/share your autoexec.bat and config.sys files? This is indeed a peculiar case since other cards still require you to load an ASPI driver, then a CDROM driver in config.sys before invoking mscdex to actually "attach" the CDROM drive(s) to a drive letter in DOS.