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more planning, more emulations

A project log for Tiny SCSI Emulator

Teensy 3.5 & NCR 5380 based SCSI device emulator.

david-kuderDavid Kuder 12/17/2016 at 10:240 Comments

I spent the day rethinking the architecture of TSE, and plotting out the eventual move to support other controllers and device emulations.

Still having issues with the Cabletron emulation, but it is being joined by DaynaPort SCSI/Link which hopefully is a little better documented.

I've split the ethernet controller driver out from the ethernet emulations so it will be possible to mix & match in the near future. Particle Photon / Spark Core have potential as WiFi bridges handling all the network duties and leaving the SCSI to the Teensy. RNDIS over USB is another option to explore.

Initiator implementation has been pushed up the stack a tiny bit, in case I end up implementing RFC 2143, which necessitates being both a target and an initiator, supporting full bus arbitration, and exciting things that direction. Outside of Linux hosts with a specific chipset and driver, I don't know of any other implementations of the standard. I still plan on TSE being usable as a standalone SCSI cloning box.

ScuzzyGraph & PowerView are on the radar for future implementation if I can get any sort of documentation or can reverse engineer one (donors?).

Transport mechanisms are another avenue to explore. Are there any tape / cd vaults that are documented well? It would be interesting to have an entire catalog of ISO images to choose from, and mount them from a native application. Even better if I don't have to write the front end.

I'm still waiting on my first batch of boards from OSHPark, so all testing has continued on the breadboards for now. I've dug out a sacrificial VaxStation motherboard (corroded by leaking caps, rodent contaminants) to steal a pair of 5380 chips from, and have one SCSI floppy controller to steal another from if needed.

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