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Where are all the SCSI2SD devices? Is this because of the chip shortage?

VERAULT

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 30, 2012
Messages
8,232
Location
Connecticut, USA
I was trying to buy a scsi2sd device but EVERYONE has ZERO inventory online (I am not going to pay the eBay mark up for the same device). These things were about $70-$75USD so thats what I would pay. Why are they all sold out? "Chip Shortage"?
 
A combination of chip shortage and a sales quota.

You wouldn't want your cash cow to flood the market and hit into your profits, would you? ;)
 
Considering they are priced better than alternatives, it would behoove them to keep the product on the market.
 
Hot take:
Never liked them. Flash SCSI disk replacements are nice and if you need a reliable 24/7 drive it's fine but SD is slow and I always felt he developed the board to a point where it wasn't too annoying to configure then left the rest to the community and let it print money until people got fed up, made their own versions that were (debatably) easier to use and cheaper. Then he started moaning and complaining.
I'll take my chances with real SCSI disks or ACARD adapters and casually ignore "oh, but those are getting hard to find an expensive" because more often than not you're putting a $5 saddle on a $10 horse.
 
I will agree they are very slow. But I use them in old slow hardware anyway so the slowness is not a real problem.

I have real scsi adapters and drives.. They are getting ancient. This avenue IS the only future path. I have had nothing but problems with Bluescsi. I know SCSI2SD devices work. Besides slowness the issue is backing them up is impossible on older versions.

But thats not the issue. I am not making this thread to defend them. I am asking why there arent any for sale.
 
Are those nowhere to be seen as well? Because Paul never had any of his modems available I went with the WImodem232 from cbmstuff.com and have been happy with it.
 
Are those nowhere to be seen as well? Because Paul never had any of his modems available I went with the WImodem232 from cbmstuff.com and have been happy with it.
Paul's design (hardware and firmware) is basically a clone of an earlier project that didn't find traction until after his got endorsed. Once that was was out of the bag everyone else cloned it as well because aside from the custom ESP firmware everything else is off the shelf parts you can slap onto a perfboard.

Disk emulators aren't as widely cloned because the FPGA makes development a serious investment.
 
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It is a truly awful design.
I left their discord after they clearly care about 'cheap' and not 'works'
It seemed great at first. After building one, it SEEMS to work at first try...... but then you actually use it... I wish I didnt buy the parts to make 8 devices. Now they just sit on my shelf. It wasnt a cheap undertaking making 8 of them either. Damn shame.
 
It seemed great at first. After building one, it SEEMS to work at first try...... but then you actually use it... I wish I didnt buy the parts to make 8 devices. Now they just sit on my shelf. It wasnt a cheap undertaking making 8 of them either. Damn shame.

I've managed to avoid caring too much about needing a SCSI replacement for anything, but I do remember laughing at a bunch of drama going on with the BlueSCSI guys being super defensive on forums about trying to aggresively enforce a non-commercial use only!!!! license (airquotes) to their hardware design which is, well, a few resistors, sitting in front of an off-the-shelf dingus running MIT-licensed, IE this:

Code:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files
(the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to
do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

completely free and no-strings software.

(IE, they were abusing the heck out of reporting mechanisms on eBay and such to protect their "IP". Which sure, fine, whatever, but it came across as kind of silly considering how little there was to it.)
 
I've managed to avoid caring too much about needing a SCSI replacement for anything, but I do remember laughing at a bunch of drama going on with the BlueSCSI guys being super defensive on forums about trying to aggresively enforce a non-commercial use only!!!! license (airquotes) to their hardware design which is, well, a few resistors, sitting in front of an off-the-shelf dingus running MIT-licensed, IE this:

Code:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files
(the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to
do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

completely free and no-strings software.

(IE, they were abusing the heck out of reporting mechanisms on eBay and such to protect their "IP". Which sure, fine, whatever, but it came across as kind of silly considering how little there was to it.)
What does that mean in the long run? I cant sell my 8 built bluescsi devices on eBay?
 
FYI there are a couple ADTX SCSI to IDE adapters on ebay right now for $75 + shipping.

Also you may be interested in ZuluSCSI.
 
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I don't think they can legally stop you. The design isn't patented and the name isn't trademarked.
 
I don't think they can legally stop you. The design isn't patented and the name isn't trademarked.

Yeah, all they can do is harass you, which has earned them a fair amount of ire on those aforementioned forum threads. (Supposedly one of their guys likes threatening to sue people... like I remember kids doing when I was, what, eight?)

In the United States at least you can't copyright, say, the "electrical schematic" of a utilitarian device; if someone buys a copy of your product and is able to reverse engineer it you're screwed and can't stop them from legally making a copy. (Firmware is a different matter.) You *can* copyright a particular drawing of a schematic, however, so about the only leg they have to stand on is the copyright protection for their actual PCB layout. But that only helps them so much. If you were, to say, download and *sell* their gerbers files without their permission that would be a copyright violation. But from what I can tell this idea that you can slap a "non-commercial use" clause onto these files and then use that to restrict what people do with articles they make using the patterns is built on some pretty weak foundations.

I'm not a lawyer, but this seems directly comparable to, say the restrictions that apply to things like sewing patterns for clothing, and at a glance at least Baker vs. Seldon, 1878 would appear to be able to preclude them being able to dictate what you do with whatever articles you make from following the pattern they gave you for free. Even a careful reading of the GNU platform document on the topic of licenses for open hardware admits:

For instance, a circuit, as a topology, cannot be copyrighted (and therefore cannot be copylefted). Definitions of circuits written in HDL can be copyrighted (and therefore copylefted), but the copyleft covers only the details of expression of the HDL code, not the circuit topology it generates. Likewise, a drawing or layout of a circuit can be copyrighted, so it can be copylefted, but this only covers the drawing or layout, not the circuit topology. Anyone can legally draw the same circuit topology in a different-looking way, or write a different HDL definition that produces the same circuit.

Copyright doesn't cover physical circuits, so when people build instances of the circuit, the design's license will have no legal effect on what they do with the devices they have built.

All that's left on the table here is the argument that the non-commercial use restriction they slap on the copyright for the gerbers conveys a legal contract that applies to the "derivative use" represented by the physical PCBs you churned out following their pattern. The problem here, as that sewing link suggested, is that even if you accept that "shrink wrap licenses" like that dictated by a single party are always binding, and that's still up in the air, and always work to trump the "first-sale" doctrine that otherwise applies to a single copy of a copyrighted work, that protection still ends once the "original thing" is no longer what's being conveyed.

I guess in short I sort of wish they'd just go ahead and try to sue someone already. I suspect they're not going to get too far, and it'd be fun to watch.
 
So I sent a few emails back and forth with Alex from Intertialcomputing. I ended up buying a ZuluScsi since they had them instock. He says in a nutshell It was made by engineers rather than hobyists. It uses some formatting rules from the bluescsi which is fine by me as making a backup of BLUEscsi was a feature that I really liked. He says its much more stable and is a far better product.

I got the device in. Seems very well made. I soldered on a berg connector and DB25F header to use as an external device. It boot with the SD card from a bluescsi with no additional configuring right out of the box and seems to run much faster than the bluescsi.


It wont take long to see if it has issues. The bluescsi devices crash on me all the time. So I will report back how it does. It is nice I can just use my existing installs/images and go without having to recreate another partition and load it up.

IMG_20220818_150733.jpg
 
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He says in a nutshell It was made by engineers rather than hobyists.

I'm sure the BlueSCSI guys would accuse it of being over-engineered. I mean, seriously, how dare they use proper voltage shifting tristate buffers instead of... NOTHING!!!! 🤪

FWIW, for laughs I decided to compare The BlueSCSI "schematic", which is literally just some pull-up resistors and the SD card socket, to this diagram that shows which pins on a BluePill are 5v tolerant, and is it just me or does it look like they tied some of the SCSI control lines to non-5v tolerant lines? (Specifically PB0 is tied to SCSI Data Parity, and PB5 is on SCSI Control/Data?) Eh, whatever. Keep on keeping on with those takedown notices, guys, you're doing the Lard's work.
 
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