Lisa QuickBoot ROM - info and history
Lisa QuickBoot ROM - info and history
It's great there is still a little interest in the Lisa SCSI QuickBoot upgrade.
Attempting to address some of the questions and speculation:
The original Lisa SCSI card was developed around 1989 by Sun Remarketing (now defunct), not Apple Computer Inc.
Sun Remarketing had a lot of Apple's Lisa computers to liquidate. To sell more of them, they developed the SCSI card and MacWorks Plus to make the Lisa closer to the Macintosh Plus in capability.
The original SCSI board's ROM (as sold with the card) contains only an ID word to identify the type of card ($00 $1B as the first two bytes). The rest of that 2716 EPROM is unused/zeros.
The Lisa's CPU board ROM predates the SCSI card, and has no ability to use it. So to use the SCSI card with the original codeless SCSI board ROM, one would cold boot MacWorks Plus or MacWorks Plus II from either a parallel port hard disk (eg. ProFile), or a floppy disk. Once MW+/II is loaded, it recognizes the SCSI card and the Macintosh system can be loaded from a SCSI drive (or a ProFile or floppy). Subsequent restarts of the Macintosh System usually did not require the cold boot floppy.
As ProFiles were failing rapidly, a way to boot the Lisa from a SCSI drive was desired, spurring development of what became the LSAC (Lisa SCSI Accessories Card) which includes two 28 pin ROM sockets. The LSAC's SCSI boot code fit in a 2764, and it can boot MW+/II via the SCSI card or via an XLerator board's SCSI port.
However, a 2764 won't work in the socket of the SCSI board as it has only a 24 pin socket with 11 address lines. A 2732 is 24 pins, but since the SCSI board implemented only 11 address lines, only half of a 2732 EPROM is accessible. The Lisa expansion slots do have 12 address lines.
With some further effort, the LSAC code was trimmed/optimized to fit in a 2732, and the piggyback PAL was added to implement a page switch to enable access to the entire EPROM without modifying the board. That became the user-installable QuickBoot product released in 1992.
Since the Lisa ROM has no knowledge of SCSI or a Macintosh hard disk, code to cold boot from a SCSI drive requires implementing SCSI, and navigating the Macintosh File System to locate and load MW+/II on the SCSI drive -- that's what the LSAC/QuickBoot code does.
The SCSI card is functional without QuickBoot. QuickBoot adds the ability to cold boot MW+/II from a SCSI drive to avoid using a floppy or ProFile.
QuickBoot was not developed by Sun Remarketing, and so the effort to develop the code wasn't subsidized by sales of the SCSI card and the Lisas they were sold in. Purchase of a Lisa SCSI card didn't include a license for QuickBoot, they are separate products from different companies.
QuickBoot wasn't developed until the Lisa was substantially obsolete, and the buyers are limited to Lisa enthusiasts that want to run MW+/II. This is a small market and since QuickBoot is not a requirement to use a Lisa with the SCSI card and MW+/II, the market is smaller still.
Lisa QuickBoot is not abandonware (as of May 2018, at least). I presume Lisa enthusiasts pay to add this feature and aren't eager to distribute it freely because they still want to encourage support and potential new development for the Lisa platform.
Disclosure: As the author of the QuickBoot code, I derive financial benefit and personal satisfaction from sales of this product, as minimal as they may be.