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SCSI BIOS for 53C400 based controllers

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First post, by Kubik

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Folks, I wonder if someone has any experience with the problem I am facing right now.

I have some SYMBIOS 53C400 (A) based 8bit ISA SCSI controllers. As far as I know, they come in two flavours - one vanilla 😀 and one with three GALs on it, converting chip's native memory mapped architecture into I/O based one.
From what I found out, those chips were used on various ISA controllers, namely Rancho. Some sources also say that Trantor and Seagate controllers use TI variant of the same chip, and Future Domain controllers are "similar", without saying whether that means "compatible" or not.

Now: I've tried to use Rancho BIOS 8.1 with both "vanilla" and "GAL" variant of the controller, but in both cases, the BIOS stops when trying to initialize the card.

Is there any known combination of those 53C400 (A) cards and SCSI BIOSes that would allow me to boot from SCSI disk attached to these cards? I could try Seagate, Trantor, Iomega and other BIOSes, but that would take a lot of time and EPROMs, so if anyone already has some working results, I'd be really grateful for an advice.
I'm also not sure if those BIOSes are fine with 8088 or V20, as I am testing on V20 equipped 5160 (PC XT) mainboard...

BTW: the cards I have aren't equipped with ROM socket. I'm using LAN card with ROM socket to put the BIOS in.

Reply 2 of 2, by Horun

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Can you post a picture of your SCSI card ? There are many variants...
ROM for NCR 53C400 is a bit tricky to find the exact one that will work with your card as Kubik mentioned. Some cards were full jumper set and others were partial jumper and memory mapped, some had no jumpers (the Mustek scanner ones).
The BIOS files are slightly different depending if there was jumpers and if a PAL or two added.
I have a two Rancho Tech RT1000B scsi cards with bios, one is full retail RT1000B-2 ValueStor the other is one from Iomega package (Iomega PC90), both use jumpers+memory mapping but are slightly different.
The DTC controller bundled with Corel as the Corel LS-2000 has even fewer jumpers but PALs and probably is full memory mapped and uses different driver.
The Rancho Tech with BIOS v8.2 could handle up to 1GB HD's but the LS-2000 only up to 512MB iirc.
Here are the drivers and BIOS off my cards plus the BIOS and drivers from Longshine LCS6821. It is messy because I quickly compiled files off two machines: http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … 6&menustate=0,0
The drivers are different for each card type because the BIOS is slightly different.
It is possible to use NCR SDMS 3 or Corel SCSI! to install the drivers but that depends on the card. Will Post what ever other drivers and BIOS I find to VogonsDrivers library also...

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  • Corel LS2000.jpg
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Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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