exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

rubber_jonnie wrote: 04 Sep 2023 12:48 Quick update, but with tested/passed BluePills, the BlueSCSIs are working fine with my Mac Classic.

Great to hear @rubber_jonnie!

So after a period of running the Classic on a System 6 install that I'd done with the fake BluPills (It installed fine and crashed on every boot with the fakes) but now using the good ones, I went ahead and created a new drive image from scratch, and, installed System 6, booted to test and then upgraded to System 7 from an original set of floppies I have.

It all went seamlessly and boots perfectly to System 7. No crashes, no weirdness, it's just working. I may add another blank hard disk to the Classic just for funzies since I have a nice blank image to use.

So, my thoughts now turn to the A5000, which allowed formatting and file copies with the fakes, but would never boot with the fakes. I think whilst I'm on holiday this week, I need to try again and see if it will work with the real BluePill.

More on that when I've given it a try. I'm also considering ordering another couple of BluePills from the same source so I have some known good spares to hand in case I build some more.

Apologies for the thread hijack.

Finally managed to confirm that my "original chip" blue pills from Aliexpress work properly :)

Bit of breadboard prototype to start with, couldn't get it to work properly or debug properly. Note for others: Some of the DSD Tech CP2102 serial to TTL adapters on Amazon only works up to 1Mbit, whereas acsi2stm firmware defaults to serial output of 2Mbit. An hour or two of wondering why I couldn't see anything on the debug output from acsi2stm followed by recompiling with a max serial speed of 115200 ...


3 weeks later, the PCBs arrived from JLPCB. Massive shout out to jfceklosky (https://github.com/jfceklosky/acsi2stm-alt-hardware) for the board design which I found much simpler than the acsi2stm standard offering (the compact design hadn't been published at the time of ordering).


A doddle to put together. I used header block pins for the DB19 connector to make it work as my cutdown DB25 is a bit of a pain to align to the board holes.


All connected and happy, just need to sort out a permanent 5v/GND connection now.


Proof of life using Petari's HD image, renamed and placed onto a FAT32 formatted Microsd card in the acsi2stm/hd0.img location :) I've checked all three of my Aliexpress blue pills on the first board to confirm they worked ok before soldering up 2 additional boards :)


Special shout out to Retro16 (Jean-Matthieu Coulon) for ACSI2STM in the first place, there doesn't seem to be a way of contacting him to donate?

Extra special shoutout to David / Badwolf for the Youtube video titled "Prototyping an ACSI2STM for my Atari STE" which spurred me on to complete my first project like this :)