VivienM wrote on 2024-11-12, 00:41:
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Here is another question in the 'things I don't really understand' category: what is the best way to work with CDs on an older retro PC, e.g. to install software? Anything 98SE or higher, you can mount ISOs easilyish enough, but what about for something older? You can burn discs in a modern system I suppose, but is there something simpler? In Mac world something like a BlueSCSI would let you mount CD images as fake hardware CD-ROMs.
One other thing that leads me to ask: why is there very little love for SCSI in retro PC land? This Dell D300 I have, a friend of mine had one new back in the day and he had gotten a super-crazy spec, and he had a 4GB SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM, and some SCSI PCI card (either BusLogic or Adaptec) from the factory. You can get an Adaptec 2940UW for $40CAD on eBay, yet for some reason it seems that no one does anything with SCSI emulator things like BlueSCSI. I assume there's a good reason for that..
Waiting for luckybob post in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 😜
But pending that:
SCSI is niche in the PC world. It's relatively complex from a hardware perspective (termination, different bus widths and voltages, different transfer speeds, device IDs etc) and from a software perspective (in DOS you need ASPI drivers or even more obscure non-ASPI stuff to get anything other than bootable C:-drive to work, and then juggling those with conventional memory requirements of games). And due to the higher cost, not so many people came into contact with it in their younger days, unlike in say the Mac world, or the various workstation flavours in the days when workstations weren't x86. Oh, and the drives tended to be LOUD.
Of course SCSI is also amazingly flexible if you understand it, SCSI HDDs tend to be more reliable than IDE and have lower seek times, SCSI CDROMs tend to be a lot more reliable than IDE and SCSI is less CPU dependent. And you can hook up all manner of devces if you have the right adapter cables and software, including emulators.
But bottom line is few people have warm, fuzzy retro feelings about the stuff, the learning curve can be steep and there's not really a compelling reason to do so for most.
Now, I'm one of the exceptions. As a student I messed around with Sun and SGI workstations and being a poor student (or at least one who spent most of his disposable cash on travel and beer rather than computers) I raided university and company dumpsters and bought unfashionable (High Voltage Differential) things being dumped at cheap prices. And then there was the SGI Origin 2000 I bought for EUR 1 with its Fiber Channel (not quite SCSI, but closer to that than to IDE) array... So I do get warm fuzzy feelings from the stuff. I have a couple of SCSI builds, a dual P3, a VLB Pentium (with VLB SCSI controller, of course) as well as a Sun SparcStation 20 and my XT has a whopping 500GB SCSI HDD running off a modded-to-be-bootable 8b SCSI controller.
CDRom emulation is a very interesting use case. I for one hate physical media in any form, in particular floppies and CDs. I love Goteks for the former and would really like a good solution for the latter. I once built a RaSCSI setup (similar to BlueSCSI) and had it working for accessing images, but not to boot from. I sort of gave up after a while.