Flashing an Adaptec AHA-2940UW to Mac

[Kai Robinson]

So, i seem to recall when i was working in the DTP/Pre-press industry about 20 years ago, UW SCSI was the absolute best thing since sliced bread. All those high density 68-pin cables and nice trapezoidal chunky connectors....aaah, those were the days.

Anyway - I have before me, an Adaptec AHA-2940UW. But it's a PC version - v1.25 BIOS. I seem to recall that it's possible to fit an EPROM that's loaded with Mac firmware - like the PowerDomain SCSI cards - does anyone remember, or have any information on this? I'd love to get it working in my Power Macintosh 9600!

 

[trag]

@Kai Robinson

I wrote an article on that about 25 years ago...

It has way too much detail on the difficulty of desoldering a PLCC32 Flash chip -- a process that is more or less trivial to us today, but seemed like magic back then. You're best off just skipping down to the summary. Remove the old chip. Solder in the new chip. Flash the blank chip with the Adaptec updater. Getting that out of the way before hunting down a link.

Edit: Oh, and I just went and reread the whole thing. I would do the Soldering the New Chip in Place section differently now. Silly to pre-tin the solder pads. That makes it more difficult. I don't know why I recommended that back then, other than lack of experience.

It was hosted on xlr8yourmac.com but Mike has pruned a ton of useful legacy material. Grrr. Not to mention taking down the forums and the compatibility database which were full of useful information and the work and contributions of readers.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990922121133/http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/tips/adaptecConvert.html

Is the 2940UW you have based on the AIC-7880 chip? There were some later Adaptec cards which still had the 2940UW name, but appended a "dual" or some other word to the end, and were based on, IIRC, the 7895. There was never a Mac equivalent of those cards, so there's no conversion for them.

Let me know if you need me to hunt down a Adaptec firmware updater. I'm sure I have a few saved on my archive drive at home.

 

[Kai Robinson]

This is luckily, the AIC-7880P. I do actually have some 29F010 EEPROM's, which i presume should also work in place of those earlier ones mentioned, but i bought a dozen of the Atmel ones, just in case.

I found the firmware updater - it's STILL on the adaptec site!

If i have time, i'll solder in a PLCC32 socket this weekend.

 

[trag]

Sounds like you've got what you need. Compared to some of the conversions done today, the 2940UW was really pretty easy, but it was also one of the very first that anyone did. I think it predates all or almost all the video card conversions.