This seems worthy of it's own thread, if you want me to split it into one just say so.
What is more mysterious is the original project BlueSCSI is based on (ArdSCSino-stm32) already did use STM32 hehe
- Thread starter xodaraP
- Start date
I'm struggling to think what problem we'd actually be solving with this one.
From my selfish perspective I have a couple of CPS3 boards and I'm too cheap to buy SCSI2SD adaptors for them - Clearly the only sensible thing to do is spend ten times as much and a hundred times as long making them instead
But more seriously I've been looking at the SCSI2SD ecosystem - there are tonnes of them, and tonnes of clones, and the source is closed, and sometimes they add features, and sometimes they dont. Our use case for CPS3 is a solved problem already. The more they innovate the less solved it becomes.
It would be nice to say "If you have a CPS3 board, this is the thing we do", remove all of the unwanted features and become the masters of our own SCSI destiny
Anyway - I drew some pictures to give me some inspiration - not to scale 'cause it's raining and I didnt want to get wet walking out to the garage to measure them
Without changing the board layout it would problably look something like this which is too tall (2.5")
If we squashed the board down to make it shorter and fatter it might be possible to get it closer to 1.5" and fitting inside those awesome TR fightstick cases
I'm not sure if my Eagle skills are up to it. wil try and see what happens
From my selfish perspective I have a couple of CPS3 boards and I'm too cheap to buy SCSI2SD adaptors for them - Clearly the only sensible thing to do is spend ten times as much and a hundred times as long making them instead
But more seriously I've been looking at the SCSI2SD ecosystem - there are tonnes of them, and tonnes of clones, and the source is closed, and sometimes they add features, and sometimes they dont. Our use case for CPS3 is a solved problem already. The more they innovate the less solved it becomes.
It would be nice to say "If you have a CPS3 board, this is the thing we do", remove all of the unwanted features and become the masters of our own SCSI destiny
Anyway - I drew some pictures to give me some inspiration - not to scale 'cause it's raining and I didnt want to get wet walking out to the garage to measure them
Without changing the board layout it would problably look something like this which is too tall (2.5")
If we squashed the board down to make it shorter and fatter it might be possible to get it closer to 1.5" and fitting inside those awesome TR fightstick cases
I'm not sure if my Eagle skills are up to it. wil try and see what happens
This whole thing was your idea
I read what you were doing and thought "yeah! thats what we need". To avoid duplicated effort I was kind of hoping that BlueSCSI might be our go-to. SCSI2SD is now an abandoned FOSS project, it looks like BlueSCSI is much better supported by a larger community. So if we can go that way I think we would get more help. Is there any update on the sector size and CD-rom image support? I suspect we are going to have to solve these use-cases with either project, might as well just do it once.
Also (and totally unrelated) I've discovered a new "thing". There are bots that scrape forums for text on projects like this one, put all that into the search string, do some simple SEO and get them to the top of search results for niche queries. Then when you follow the link you get ads for penis enlargement pills - or I get penis pill ads anyway, they are probably mining my search history. The facinating human ingenuity of the internet, if only we could use it for good...
xodaraP
Legendary
The BlueSCSI is now able to be used as a SCSI2SD alternative on CPS3! jokker of the Discord group is working on CD-ROM support for the BlueSCSI and was kind enough to share the current build which I have tested using the most current CD build for the custom CPU - it boots and runs fine and I ran through multiple full games of 3S with no issues at all. I haven't yet tried to flash a new game but will do this soon.
I have asked jokker's permission to share the firmware here and they have agreed but have asked me to note this is a very early release of CD support and there may be issues or it may not work at all in some circumstances. Use at your own risk.
You will also need an ST-Link clone programmer (these are available on ebay/Aliexpress etc.) to flash the BlueSCSI with the replacement firmware
Edit: Looks like I spoke too soon. You can boot an already installed game no problem and it will run fine, but if you try to install a new game onto the SIMMS it will get into the DS menu, but when you select a game it starts reading the files and errors out.
I have asked jokker's permission to share the firmware here and they have agreed but have asked me to note this is a very early release of CD support and there may be issues or it may not work at all in some circumstances. Use at your own risk.
You will also need an ST-Link clone programmer (these are available on ebay/Aliexpress etc.) to flash the BlueSCSI with the replacement firmware
Edit: Looks like I spoke too soon. You can boot an already installed game no problem and it will run fine, but if you try to install a new game onto the SIMMS it will get into the DS menu, but when you select a game it starts reading the files and errors out.
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xodaraP
Legendary
Ok so a further update - it looks like the controller on the BlueSCSI is at it's capacity and a hardware revision is going to be required to use on CPS3 and possibly other platforms
The current hardware is not able to pull down the voltage on the SCSI bus enough to bring it within the specification and while this doesn't seem to be an issue to get an already installed game to boot but when actively reading from it as a CD drive, it is too far outside of the expected voltage (both on the active high and active low pins) for it to function correctly
I will still leave the firmware above if someone wants to use the BlueSCSI to replace a hardware CD-ROM drive for an already installed CPS3 setup (and don't want to flash the NoCD BIOS) and there are people working on alternative revisions of the BlueSCSI that will hopefully resolve this issue in future
The current hardware is not able to pull down the voltage on the SCSI bus enough to bring it within the specification and while this doesn't seem to be an issue to get an already installed game to boot but when actively reading from it as a CD drive, it is too far outside of the expected voltage (both on the active high and active low pins) for it to function correctly
I will still leave the firmware above if someone wants to use the BlueSCSI to replace a hardware CD-ROM drive for an already installed CPS3 setup (and don't want to flash the NoCD BIOS) and there are people working on alternative revisions of the BlueSCSI that will hopefully resolve this issue in future
xodaraP
Legendary
There’s several people who are working on forks of the BlueSCSI design but to make it work with SCSI-2 will mean some fairly big changes
It’s open source so I think it will be done but not sure when
It’s open source so I think it will be done but not sure when
skate323k137
Enlightened
I have been having very good luck with BlueSCSI on old computers. It's far easier to use for hard disk image files than SCSI2SD util, especially for multiple disks.
The SCSI2SD dudes just released a new version that basically works like BlueSCSI (file name images on a readable SD card, which is neat and easier for most people).
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/announcing-azulscsi-a-file-based-scsi-device-emulator.40749/
However, they named it "AzulSCSI" which caused some drama before chanigng it to ZuluSCSI.
I don't have a CPS3 anymore, or I would try to get BlueSCSI working on it out of principle. They are very affordable especially if you solder a few things yourself.
The SCSI2SD dudes just released a new version that basically works like BlueSCSI (file name images on a readable SD card, which is neat and easier for most people).
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/announcing-azulscsi-a-file-based-scsi-device-emulator.40749/
However, they named it "AzulSCSI" which caused some drama before chanigng it to ZuluSCSI.
I don't have a CPS3 anymore, or I would try to get BlueSCSI working on it out of principle. They are very affordable especially if you solder a few things yourself.
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skate323k137
Enlightened
I have way too many SCSI emulators lol... SCSI2SD v5 and v6, BlueSCSI, RaSCSI... Right now BlueSCSI wise I'm using 2 BlueSCSI's that I assembled, one for an Apple IIgs (with a ProDOS and HFS volume on 2 separate IDs), and one for my MacSE (HFS volume).
Being able to take the SD card out, pop it into a computer/mac and have it recognized, and then mount or work with any of the image files on it in an emulator is amazing.
On SCSI2SD, if I wanted to take an already working SD from a retro Mac and work with it, I would have to either DD the card to the machine, work with it, and DD it back, or symlink to a block device and have Basilisk II interact with it (it works, but it's not easy or safe for most people to mess with that stuff, and it's certainly not convenient to do regularly).
If the new AzulSCSI has stability/support of SCSI2SD with ease of use of BlueSCSI, it will be a killer device to be completely honest. But I still personally hold the opinion that the SCSI2SD guys are not right for naming it like that, because people are already confusing it as an update to BlueSCSI, when in all actuality it's a ported and updated SCSI2SD that uses ~30 lines of BlueSCSI code and "feels" more like a BlueSCSI to use.
Being able to take the SD card out, pop it into a computer/mac and have it recognized, and then mount or work with any of the image files on it in an emulator is amazing.
On SCSI2SD, if I wanted to take an already working SD from a retro Mac and work with it, I would have to either DD the card to the machine, work with it, and DD it back, or symlink to a block device and have Basilisk II interact with it (it works, but it's not easy or safe for most people to mess with that stuff, and it's certainly not convenient to do regularly).
If the new AzulSCSI has stability/support of SCSI2SD with ease of use of BlueSCSI, it will be a killer device to be completely honest. But I still personally hold the opinion that the SCSI2SD guys are not right for naming it like that, because people are already confusing it as an update to BlueSCSI, when in all actuality it's a ported and updated SCSI2SD that uses ~30 lines of BlueSCSI code and "feels" more like a BlueSCSI to use.
xodaraP
Legendary
I’ve spoken to the BlueSCSI devs on the Discord a bit, the code for the BlueSCSI is fine for the CPS3 (it even works to boot games) but it isn’t fast enough to emulate a CD-ROM properly.
They were looking into ways it might be possible to improve the code to make it work but it sounds like it just needs to be a slightly more powerful board, and there are forks out there doing that (sounds like this AzulSCSI is one of those)
At least there are more options coming for SCSI emulation
They were looking into ways it might be possible to improve the code to make it work but it sounds like it just needs to be a slightly more powerful board, and there are forks out there doing that (sounds like this AzulSCSI is one of those)
At least there are more options coming for SCSI emulation
skate323k137
Enlightened
That's the thing, AzulSCSI isn't a fork of BlueSCSI. If you ask the BlueSCSI folks It uses at most 30 lines of BlueSCSI code. It just acts like BlueSCSI for the user; The rest is SCSI2SD v6 ported to a new chip. (BlueSCSI has even requested they remove that snippet of code and suggested it would be trivial).
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xodaraP
Legendary
Good news!
A new firmware has been released adding official CD support for the BlueSCSI and it works with the CPS3
CD support is still in beta but I didn’t have any issues loading 3S on my setup
A new firmware has been released adding official CD support for the BlueSCSI and it works with the CPS3
CD support is still in beta but I didn’t have any issues loading 3S on my setup
This is indeed astonishingly good news, with the free open source nature of this solution the CPS3 SCSI problem can be solved. Thank you bluescsi team!
Raph_friend
Grand Master
I want to build one, any schematics around?
