Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 04:59:

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent […]
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dionb wrote on 2025-11-24, 20:25:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-23, 02:26:

[...]

The only other thing that stood out to me is the one 8bit ISA card is marked "Floptical", but I think it might just be SCSI... which is, again, not worth a lot or hard to find.

It looks like it has a bootROM. 8b bootable SCSI cards seem very sought-after. I was looking for one a while ago and couldn't find anything under EUR 150. So I got a Future Domain non-bootable controller and added the ROM myself 😉

If that card is bootable and particularly if it also supports large drives, it could be something of a unicorn. I can't make any of that out though from the pic.

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent years accumulated some of both... I don't know if there are any 8bit SCSI cards with a ROM though.

Two questions though...

First, how did you add a ROM to one that didn't have one? Did it already have a location or a socket for a ROM, or did you have to add one in a more "creative" way? 😁
Nevermind! I found your thread here! Nice work! 😁

Second, what are the benefits of going with SCSI vs going with IDE on a retro PC these days? If you have SCSI drives on hand and want to use them that's understandable, but it seems that SCSI poses some challenges and limitations... mainly that it's so difficult and expensive to get modern solid-state replacements for SCSI devices. Where as IDE controllers can often be hooked up to either a CF card on a simple adapter or a SD card on a more complex (possibly finicky) adapter.

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

SCSI was created as a high-performance data bus. During its time, it was superior to the other hard drive interfaces because it had faster data transfer speeds. With SCSI, it was designed to be able to connect multiple devices to it, as long as it was properly terminated.

s0s wrote on Yesterday, 14:42:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 04:59:

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote on 2025-11-24, 20:25:

It looks like it has a bootROM. 8b bootable SCSI cards seem very sought-after. I was looking for one a while ago and couldn't find anything under EUR 150. So I got a Future Domain non-bootable controller and added the ROM myself 😉

If that card is bootable and particularly if it also supports large drives, it could be something of a unicorn. I can't make any of that out though from the pic.

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent years accumulated some of both... I don't know if there are any 8bit SCSI cards with a ROM though.

Two questions though...

First, how did you add a ROM to one that didn't have one? Did it already have a location or a socket for a ROM, or did you have to add one in a more "creative" way? 😁
Nevermind! I found your thread here! Nice work! 😁

Second, what are the benefits of going with SCSI vs going with IDE on a retro PC these days? If you have SCSI drives on hand and want to use them that's understandable, but it seems that SCSI poses some challenges and limitations... mainly that it's so difficult and expensive to get modern solid-state replacements for SCSI devices. Where as IDE controllers can often be hooked up to either a CF card on a simple adapter or a SD card on a more complex (possibly finicky) adapter.

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

SCSI was created as a high-performance data bus. During its time, it was superior to the other hard drive interfaces because it had faster data transfer speeds. With SCSI, it was designed to be able to connect multiple devices to it, as long as it was properly terminated.

Of course, those were the benefits back then, but today we have a lot more options for cards to drop into an ISA slot and solid state devices will offer a lot more performance even on a slower interface. I was just curious as to what the benefits are for retro computing these days, compared to other options. Doing it for period correctness and just wanting to use SCSI is, of course, totally acceptable. 🙂

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 14:19:

Alright, it's in! The similarities with the Trident 9850 card are certainly there, but indeed, that heatsink.... […]
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Alright, it's in! The similarities with the Trident 9850 card are certainly there, but indeed, that heatsink....

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And now some redeeming words.

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Put away the gun, dion_b's head is safe.

Edit:
The Permedia BIOS string got me on the wrong foot. I really thought it was a Permedia 1. GLINT/Permedia drivers didn't want to install.

So I tried the Permedia 2 driver. Newsflash: it's a Permedia 2 with 4MB memory.

"Enhanced" means "2" ?

3DMark99 looks interdasting, no surprises.

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VGA output quality is great, one would expect from a workstation class card. Happy with it.

Mystery solved! That is interesting that the BIOS doesn't actually specify that it is a Permedia 2. Also, it's odd that it just uses a generic BIOS and seemingly has no branding on the card itself. The Permedia 2 was fairly prolific but was mostly found on clearly named cards from well known brands... Diamond, Creative, ELSA and Accelgraphics (not as well known now but were common in workstations back in the day). Googling it, I see that ExperColor, Innovision and Hercules also made them. An unbranded Permedia 2 card is definitely an interesting find! Especially with that funky memory configuration.

After typing that I was able to find this page for a Joytech Apollo 3000, which looks nothing like yours but is mostly unbranded (aside from FCC ID) and lists a similar generic 1.38 BIOS from the same date.

Also, for future reference, it looks like every Permedia 1 card has a large external (usually TI) RAMDAC, so that would be a way to distinguish between the 1 and 2.

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 14:19:

[...]

Put away the gun, dion_b's head is safe.

😜

Nice card. I suspect it's quite a late one. Early Permedia 2 cards were aimed at pretty high-end prosumer market, straddling professional 3D and gaming. Unfortunately for 3Dlabs it succeeded in neither, with the pro world thinking it a toy and the gamers considering it too slow too expensive. So it didn't sell well which left 3Dlabs with big surplus stock that they started to dump at low prices, iirc in late 1998 and 1999 and we're picked up by all the usual Taiwanese bottom-feeders.

Got a new toy myself:

A 3Com Audrey internet appliance. Huge commercial flop for 3Com, but I actually have an application for it- kitchen MP3 player (my youngest son stole the Google Nest my So had placed there. I hated it's voice control but missed the music - the couple of time it actually understood what I was asking it to play). It's powerful enough to do MP3 playback and some OS images for it support an NFS client. Unfortunately I just discovered this one doesn't so need to either find a package or - more likely - install a more suitable image.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 04:59:

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

I believe all Macs released prior to 1995, and some afterwards, use SCSI for their HDDs and Optical drives, so there's that.