First post, by dionb
- Rank
- l33t++
For some months now I've had an ancient 1986-era ASC-88 8b SCSI controller knocking around in the bottom of my 'to-do' box. Now I have an XT-class machine (Olivetti M24) I've decided to see what this device can do. I've been testing on a 486 system.
The card is very simple, with an AMD-sourced NCR5380, internal 50p and external 50p Centronics connectors and two jumper blocks, the one for bus power, the other for ROM address. Jumper settings here:
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy … es-ASC-178.html
Now, the hardware bit is clear enough, and so long as I don't choose a conflicting ROM address, I get this at POST:
Advanced Storage Concepts
SCSIBIOS - ver. 3.3
date - 12-Aug-87
So it looks like the BIOS is at least loading and it's likely the card is working. Now what...
What I would like to do is to be able to connect a SCSI hard disk and/or CDRom drive to my old XT (once I find a keyboard for it) while running DOS, but for now at least to the 486. What I don't necessarily need is the ability to boot from SCSI - I have a perfectly good IDE drive in my 486 and there's an old but still good 20MB MFM in the XT. Also the smallest SCSI HDD I have is larger than the Int13h limit...
Trying to find drivers I found this page:
http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/apple.cabi.net/U … SI.TUTORIAL.txt
ADVANCED STORAGE CONCEPTS (The Houston based company in this article.) sources a board that just drops into the pc XT AT or 386 and uses an included self installing device driver to configure the board and install itself as a DOS device driver.
Uhuh. Well mine certainly isn't self-installing anything.
I've been digging around for any kind of drivers for the 5380, but haven't found anything. Regular ASPI drivers don't work, but that's no surprise with an adapter 4 years older than the ASPI standard. Anyone have any suggestions?
Edit:
There's a thread on VCFED about it, with a link to a dumped BIOS newer than mine, but also no utils/drivers
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?131 … torage-concepts