SCSI to SD adapter

+Ksarul · May 17, 2015

I actually listed the progression of the various cartridge boards in another thread somewhere on the board in answer to someone's questions. The first board was an 8K clone of the old Funware cartridge boards that was redesigned by Acadiel to become a 16K 379 board by Acadiel and Stuart, using the switching methods on some of the old DataBioTics cartridges. Acadiel modified the board to use two additional latches an extended it to 64K. I came into the picture about then, as I helped refine the board layout to make it a bit easier to follow and to make sure it would fit into a cartridge case when all chips were socketed. There are a LOT of those boards out there, probably close to a thousand by now Acadiel hacked the design to use the last 379 latch and added a pair of switches to add latches five and six--and posted a picture of his hack on his website. I went oooooohhhh, and converted his hack into a new iteration of the boards (these became the Black boards). It wasn't a major thing at that time (I think Acadiel made just four of them to test the design and we were done, as the market was pretty much saturated with 64K boards at that point in time). In parallel, Tursi, Acadiel, and I were working on the initial iterations of the UberGROM (it started out with a 379, moved to a GAL design that failed for some reason we haven't taken the time to identify yet, and switched over to the 378 to get the six latches we needed). Physical copies of all three board types were assembled and tested, but only the 378 version is in circulation.About the time we got the design working beautifully, I looked at it and realized I could make a 512K ROM-only version really easily--and I did (the Red boards). I used standard ROM chips instead of the Flash used in the UberGROM, just to make it easier for the folks who had a programmer to work with the boards without needing another adapter. At some point after that, I was looking at the datasheet for the 377 and realized it would work beautifully to extend the schema even further. I then researched chips that would give me two megabytes of storage and realized that there were very few chips in that range or larger that were capable of operating in 8-bit mode--but that they did exist and the prices were still in the range of reasonable. My programmer would program them, so I designed the Yellow 2048K boards. The 8Kx4 Supercart boards were the result of a long, late-night conversation with Arcadeshopper. He mentioned at some point during the conversation that it was a lot of work to modify an old TI board to work as a Supercart. I spent the weekend looking at the Supercart modifications and designed a board that had all of them incorporated into it already, with the added bonus of being able to fit into a cartridge case with everything socketed. I then did a small run of them to see if there was much interest in them--and that run sold out in less than six months. I need to do another small run of those soon. . .

Bama · May 17, 2015

@Bama: First off, a Sparc notebook is pretty damn cool. Secondly, he mentions that some Apple notebooks use this adapter, but does not mention which (darn it.) Lastly, my interest right now is only curiosity -- I would like to see a 2.5" IDE with a SCSI adapter on it, but right now I do not have a practical purpose for it. (Although, it might fix my problem with Solaris 8 panics using a 128GB IDE SSD...)

I have created a gallery of photos to share.