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Introducing ZuluSCSI Blaster - now with more cowbell!

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First post, by aperezbios

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Just over two and a half years ago, Rabbit Hole Computing developed and brought to market the first RP2040-based SCSI emulator, which represented our second-generation ZuluSCSI offering. Over the last six months, we've been hard at work, implementing support for the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 Wireless, which was accomplished late in 2024. This laid the groundwork for supporting the RP2350A's big brother, the RP2350B, which adds another 18 GPIO pins, compared to the RP2350A. This additional hardware capability allows the new ZuluSCSI Blaster to function more efficiently while also allowing us to introduce features that have been absent from previous SCSI hardware emulation devices.

Announced just over a month ago, ZuluSCSI Blaster is an advanced SCSI storage emulator and is powered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation's larger and more-versatile RP2350B microcontroller.

ZuluSCSI Blaster features include:

  • USB-C connector
  • 16-bit stereo CD Audio playback emulation via dedicated i2s header. This requires an optional $5 plug-in DAC board.
  • Support For FAST-20 Single Ended SCSI in Device mode
  • Support for ROM drives of up to 15.8 MB in size.
  • Initiator mode support for both reading from and writing to Hard Drives and CD-ROM drives via USB!
  • Expansion header with six GPIOs for future add-on functionality.
  • Up to 18 megabytes/second read speeds, 11MB/sec write speeds
  • Support for 8-bit narrow Ultra SCSI (20MB/sec) timing, as well as SCSI-1 and SCSI-2
  • SCSI Termination is DIP-switch controlled
  • Firmware upgrade simplicity; As easy as placing a file on the SD card
  • Highly configurable using a text-based ini file, ZuluSCSI.ini
  • External activity LED pin header for attaching remote activity LED
  • Still designed to be powered via SCSI termination power when provided by the host
  • Emulates up to 7 SCSI devices simultaneously, including CD-ROM, Magneto Optical, removable (SyQuest/Jaz-style), and SCSI floppy device types

ZuluSCSI Blaster supports synchronous and asynchronous SCSI transfers, with synchronous read throughput of up to 18 megabytes/second. A sufficiently fast SD card and SCSI controller with Ultra SCSI support is required to achieve maximum throughput. [/list]

As always, ZuluSCSI firmware is open-source, and GPLv3-licensed.

Since the initial firmware release, we've also made additional improvements to read and write performance in the most recent https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware … tag/v2025.04.10 release, and we continue to actively work on improvements in the firmware realm

In case anyone here is interested in performance data collected by third parties, a ZuluSCSI Blaster owner posted the following throughput results a few days ago in
this discussion on GitHub

If you have questions or would otherwise like to know more about ZuluSCSI or ZuluIDE, please visit our Discord server

ZuluSCSI Blaster can be purchased from:
* Rabbit Hole Computing (US)
* AmigaKit (UK)
* Studio Services (Germany/EU)
* DECromancer (Canada)

Reply 1 of 4, by aperezbios

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And of course, I forgot the pretty photos!

Reply 2 of 4, by Amigaz

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Nice!

I will probably get one for my Amiga 4000D and use a 68pin to 50pin adapter

I am very pleased with the older products as the Zuluscsi RP2040 and compact which I use in both Amiga computers and 486 based PC’s

Reply 3 of 4, by feipoa

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I think a list comparing the latest ZuluSCSI variant with the original SCSI2SD v6 would be helpful for many users here.

Could you add a feature to ZuluSCSI which lets the user selectively enable/disable SCSI ID's on the fly via the DOS prompt? This would be useful for users who have, for example, Windows 3.11 installed on SCSI ID1 and Windows 95 installed on SCSI ID2. Disabling ID1 via a DOS command would let Windows 95 then boot while being the primary drive/partition, C:\. There could be other reasons why someone might want to enable/disable SCSI ID's on the fly; this is but one example.

I recall testing options for this situation many years ago using SCSI2SD v6 and Partition Magic to hide drives, but it didn't help the booting situation. I needed to connect the SCSI2SD USB cable to my Ubuntu machine, then load the SCSI2SD software, download the SD card's config, disable ID2, re-upload the config to the SD card, and finally reboot the vintage computer. This is a cumbersome process just to enable/disable SCSI ID's. If you could provide a DOS app which does this on the fly, I'd be more inclined to try ZuluSCSI.

Thanks.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 4 of 4, by aperezbios

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feipoa wrote on 2025-08-02, 11:30:

I think a list comparing the latest ZuluSCSI variant with the original SCSI2SD v6 would be helpful for many users here.

Understood. I will work on such a comparison as time allows. I've just returned from VCF West and am exhausted for now. For now, suffice it to say that performance wise, ZuluSCSI Blaster will exceed the performance of SCSI2SD V6 in every case.

When it comes to configuration of ZuluSCSI boards, no such configuration utility is necessary, and therefore one does not exist. Therefore, there's no need for a DOS utility to configure it. All configuration is done via either an ini file that resides on the SD card, or, for less-advanced configuration details, such as device type and SCSI ID, that information is stored in the first three characters of the actual filename of the image files on the SD card. The mechanics of how this works is explained in the documentation I've linked to below, but the TL;DR is:

An image file file named HD4.img will result in a rigid SCSI device at SCSI ID 4 being configured by the firmware.
An image file/ISO named CD3.iso will result in a CD-ROM/optical SCSI device at SCSI ID 3 being configured by the firmware.

In both cases, it is not necessary to manually configure the size of the images, because the image size is defined by the size of the actual image file itself.

I would recommend consulting the documentation at https://zuluscsi.com/README and https://zuluscsi.com/manual, and the following up with us directly if you have any remaining questions, after spending a few minutes reading up.

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