First post, by Kubik
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.