MFM and ESDI SCSI bridge boards (was Re: SCSI emulator)

[Jules Richardson]

Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 5 Nov 2010 at 17:05, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> 
>> Since I moved from PETs and C-64s and small DEC machines first to
>> Amigas and Macs, then much later to PCs, I was very happy when
>> embedded SCSI drives displaced all the Adaptec and Emulex and Xebec
>> and Omti boards - much easier to set up and move from environment to
>> environment.
> 
> Years ago, I worked out an MFM-RLL-to-SCSI-to-ACSI adapter for the 
> Atari 520 ST.  Worked pretty well, but the command set for the OMTI 
> was pretty sparse.  I seem to recall that there was no IDENTIFY 
> command and that for a host to obtain the drive geometry (not 
> capacity, but CHS) it had to be read from the OMTI adapter's buffer 
> right after bootup. 

Yes, I *think* the OMTI was pretty basic, but was at least more-or-less SCSI. 
I think the Xebec boards were SASI, and don't even work at the low level 
against a modern SCSI board.

> I've got the documentation for the adapter somewhere.

Yes, me too. I think I have ones for various board (disk and tape) from 
Adaptec, Xebec, OMTI and Emulex, too. ISTR the Xebec docs come with a nice 
little suggested Z80 interface schematic in the back of the manual - those 
were the days :-)

cheers

Jules