exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I use a external scsi hd with a scsi2sd (protar) in it as the drive long ago stopped spinning. Also it is possible to but a mfm sd card mod in megafile

Tom

JezC wrote: 22 Apr 2021 12:07 Yes, hoping that you @Smonson manage to succeed with this!
Keep hearing of lots of people finding issues with US, so not prepared to risk the asking price...but a future cheaper option would be nice!
Especially if/when my mechanical SCSI drives finally give up the ghost... :?

It's working quite well for me now, the only problem is it's slow. I have another design which I'm working on now which should be quite a bit faster.

UltraSatan is the gold standard for hard drives and represents an incredible technical achievement. I don't expect to reach those heights. I only aimed for a low price.

Smonson wrote: 22 Apr 2021 13:30 I only aimed for a low price.

It just so happens that's my favourite kind of price!

BW

May just be me...but others on the forum are suspecting that the US might be contending with the DMA & I'd prefer not to kill any of the custom ICs if at all possible.

If I ever manage to build up the second H4 & H5B1 and the TF536 to go with them, then I'll see where people have got to...
:sigh:

JezC wrote: 22 Apr 2021 15:12 May just be me...but others on the forum are suspecting that the US might be contending with the DMA & I'd prefer not to kill any of the custom ICs if at all possible.

If I ever manage to build up the second H4 & H5B1 and the TF536 to go with them, then I'll see where people have got to...
:sigh:

It may possible that people complaining about the US are running machines with none of the mandatory fixes applied, and are running into problems of corruption and floppy drive issues when using it.

I have been using my CosmosEx, which is essentially an Ultrasatan at heart. The only problems I had were prior to the fixes. Just a thought.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Apr 2021 15:30 It may possible that people complaining about the US are running machines with none of the mandatory fixes applied, and are running into problems of corruption and floppy drive issues when using it.

I have been using my CosmosEx, which is essentially an Ultrasatan at heart. The only problems I had were prior to the fixes. Just a thought.

Actually, changing the bus pull-ups to the "mandatory fixes" value made things a whole lot worse, I had to revert them to get the floppy to read/write correctly. The floppy barely worked with 4.7K pull-ups, with lots of read and write errors. Reverting to 10K brought the floppy back to working again.

stephen_usher wrote: 22 Apr 2021 15:46

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Apr 2021 15:30 It may possible that people complaining about the US are running machines with none of the mandatory fixes applied, and are running into problems of corruption and floppy drive issues when using it.

I have been using my CosmosEx, which is essentially an Ultrasatan at heart. The only problems I had were prior to the fixes. Just a thought.

Actually, changing the bus pull-ups to the "mandatory fixes" value made things a whole lot worse, I had to revert them to get the floppy to read/write correctly. The floppy barely worked with 4.7K pull-ups, with lots of read and write errors. Reverting to 10K brought the floppy back to working again.

Interesting. I used 2.2k for mine and had no problems. Just goes to show how random these boards can behave. When I was doing some booster testing for exxos it was so variable I can understand why he wanted to shelve it on account of what works on one machine doesn't on another.

The joy of Retro.

pixelpusher wrote: 22 Apr 2021 06:45 Thx for all the feedback!


Could you add details about what you use as scsi adapter (as that is something I'd like to look into later too)?

Here is the SD2SCSI adaptor I use or close to it. The host adaptor is part of the MSTE.. the board you plug the scsi cable into from the drive or SD2SCSI. There's a number of setting you can set up on the SD2SCSI, termination on/off, parity, etc. You must turn off parity because the host adaptor does not support it. You can also get a host adaptor out of an old Atari disk system.

[url]https://www.ebay.com/itm/193772665410?h ... NfxAs7/url]

Here's a document talking about scsi and the Atari and how to use a variety of drives.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Apr 2021 15:51 Interesting. I used 2.2k for mine and had no problems. Just goes to show how random these boards can behave. When I was doing some booster testing for exxos it was so variable I can understand why he wanted to shelve it on account of what works on one machine doesn't on another.

The joy of Retro.

Indeed. These things are like a old car, how much time do you spend on fixing them before giving up and starting new..

In case people have missed it, I am doing a small run-off DMA fix boards for original machines.. These boards take care of all currently known DMA issues.. And of course for the mandatory fixes also need doing otherwise it may be counter-productive to only modify one part of the machine and not others.

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... 230#p62006

@rubber_jonnie Yes, a Cosmosex would be an altogether more attractive proposition for me as it offers USB and Ethernet support as well (and floppy emulation?).

Not seen any progress with the newer versions of these for a while....and no availability of the original.