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CMS SCSI II card with 3-1-90 ROM - $150; is this good? Bad? How's the card?

olePigeon

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I posted on 68k MLA, but only got one reply. Was wondering if anyone else had experience with a CMS SCSI II card, and how it compares to the Apple SCSI cards for II and IIgs. I have an opportunity to buy the following: http://postimage.org/image/bxfnot9c5/

I did some Googling, but I couldn't find any real comparisons. I do know that the 3-1-90 ROM is the "good" ROM, with most of the bugs fixed and adding features such as DMA support. From what I can gather, it's a little more finicky than the Apple cards, requiring careful attention to the jumper settings. But at $150 for the card and HDD, compared to the current asking price for a high-speed Apple SCSI card, doesn't seem too bad. Anyone else have some thoughts on the card?

Thanks.
 
The CMS card is generally a poor card for SCSI. It doesn't use Apple's standard partition map, you hard code the partition table for your drive using jumpers on the cards. This rules out using removable devices like a Zip drive or CD-ROM. Its not that great of a performer in I/O speed either. For $150, buy a CFFA3000, its a much better solution.
 
Direct from the Apple II FAQ:

"The CMS SCSI Card is not recommended for use in the Apple IIgs at all."

Even the latest ROM has hard coded partitions, it just automatically segments out every 32MB as a partition. Forget using a giant HFS volume with it. CMS cards used to sell for dirt cheap years ago ($30 was typical) compared to the Apple Rev. C and HS SCSI cards.

comparisons with I/O speeds here: http://apple2.info/wiki/index.php?title=A2_SCSI_Cards
 
The card is from a IIgs. I guess the owner got it working. Oh well, I'll keep my eye out for an Apple SCSI card or RamFAST if I'm lucky. Thanks for the help.

olePigeon, I thought you bought the Focus controller from 16sector already. No good?

I did for about an hour. I read the manual carefully as suggested, but it didn't say anywhere what direction the card goes in. Having never used a IIgs before, I plugged it in backwards and blew up my computer, including my Mockingboard 1a which I can't buy anymore (Reactive Micro's no longer making/selling them. *sniff*) I already know I'm the biggest boggle head, but apparently there's no bounds to my stupidity. :( I talked to Tony about paying the difference on a repair, and he said he'd test it if I sent him the broken Focus, SD Card, and adapter. So I sent it to him, and I never heard back. I emailed him about once a month for 6 months or so to both emails listed on this website, but I never heard back. I don't know if he's hung up his towel or what.

I've thought about the CFFA3000. I just emailed Rich about contacting the guys at Kyroflux and maybe implementing support for their IPF format. I don't know how realistic of an idea it is, but if he could do that, then working with copy protected floppies would be a snap. :) Would be really cool to use both a Kyroflux and a CFFA3000 in tandem to not just duplicate and archive, but to also utilize the virtual floppies within the IIgs itself. Kyroflux will convert IPF to DSK, but then it loses a lot of important information about the disk. So if the company used a clever copy protection method, the DSK won't work (but IPF does if you have an emulator that supports it.) There aren't any Apple II emulators that support IPF as far as I know.
 
None that I can think of. While I find many of the hacker logos pretty cool, I don't think I've ever seen a normal Karateka screen until I bought a copy. :p I would just like to have the original for archival purposes. Would be nice for me, anyway. Also, the cracked version of Lady Tut is broken. You can't beat the game.
 
Interesting that this conversation came up. I've recently acquired a ROM 3 Apple IIGS and have been toying with the idea of adding a SCSI card and hard drive. I have the external hard drive and have, thanks to this forum, figured out the jumpers on it.

I also have a CMS SCSI II card. A very early revision I think as the date is either 85 or 86 and there is no revision number mentioned

After doing some research last night which included coming across the "CMS SCSI Card is not recommended for use in the Apple IIgs at all." from the FAQ site. Reading the manual it seemed I needed some CMS formatting software also, which I didn't have.

In the end I decided the project may be too problematic to tackle and that I'll wait until I get another type of SCSI card.

Tez
 
reviving a dead post. I recently was given a CMS SCSI II card with a silkscreen of 1987 (no ROM info printed), found the jumper settings online here: https://usermanual.wiki/Document/CMSSCSI20Manual.1041714565.pdf
DRKEN mentioned the CMS utilities at apple2online and he is right, there is something there to download but rather than a .PO or .DSK file they are a bunch of individual .SHK files. I have no idea what those are to be honest with you and this is the first I have ever heard of them. Anyone have an actual disk image?

So I have the card setup with the default jumper settings and there is a timeout but nothing ever happens. No ROM file shows up or detects my scsi devices. IS there supposed to be something on the screen giving detected device info? Is my card shot?

Tezza, did you ever end up tackling your project with this card?
 
My IIgs came with a CMS SCSI II card. Like previous posts state, it isn't compatible at all with the way the Apple SCSI card worked, and is kind of a pain to work with. While I was able to use it and create multiple 32 MB drives, I much prefer my CFFA3000 card for its flexibility. I did upgrade my card to the 3-1-90 ROM, but that doesn't really improve the usability.

https://www.apple.asimov.net/images/hardware/storage/disk/CMS%20HD%20Utilities.po
 
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I have one in one of my old IIgs... Besides the issue of finding any still-working SCSI drives that aren't 80+ decibels, it worked fine as far as I know.

It does only make 32M partitions, but that isn't really a big deal. GSOS is really too slow to be usable anyway on a stock IIgs which is unrelated and not the fault of the card. It works great for ProDOS, and 32M is a lot anyway.

I don't recall needing any disks. There is a hotkey sequence to get into the disk utilities at boot. I also seem to recall you could change the boot partition easily which is handy.
 
I have one in one of my old IIgs... Besides the issue of finding any still-working SCSI drives that aren't 80+ decibels, it worked fine as far as I know.

It does only make 32M partitions, but that isn't really a big deal. GSOS is really too slow to be usable anyway on a stock IIgs which is unrelated and not the fault of the card. It works great for ProDOS, and 32M is a lot anyway.

I don't recall needing any disks. There is a hotkey sequence to get into the disk utilities at boot. I also seem to recall you could change the boot partition easily which is handy.

Thanks guys. Id like it for use on a backup machine. I have a floppy emu, and a cffa3000, but it would be nice to have this as a secondary hdd installation on another apple II. Not sure whether I want to use it in a IIe or IIgs but Id like to option to try in both. Glad some of you have had success with the card. Any chance I could get one of you to make a disk image of the utilities I can write with adtpro? That would be extremely appreciated.
Mick

Edit: Playing with the jumpers I was able to get this screen. I can rescan the external HDD and hear it access but thats it. Without the utilities I cant do anything else. But notice in the screen it says logical volumes available 032.. Interestingscsi.jpg.
 
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So Timelord on the AppleFritter forum came through for me and supplied a few disk images for the CMS scsi card. Even though mine has a date of 1986 the rom in the socket is a 1990 version.20200619_141433.jpg20200619_143848.jpg20200619_145725.jpg

So the card saw my external 1gb scsi drive and partitioned and formatted 32 X 32MB partitions. Strange thing is I only saw two from GS-OS Why did it take 40+ minutes to format and partition the other 30 if it only uses 2?
 
I think it does only see two at a time, but you can select which two at boot time. I know it's not optimal, but consider when it was created, there were no hard disks of that vast size.
 
Can I have more than two scsi devices though? 2 scsi HDD's is fine, but Id like a scsi CDrom and maybe something else as well. Either way I am pleased with this card for what it is.
 
I think it does only see two at a time, but you can select which two at boot time. I know it's not optimal, but consider when it was created, there were no hard disks of that vast size.

Hmm, that may be useful, if I can select. I will spend more time with it.
 
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