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BlueSCSI Setup for Adaptec EZ-SCSI 4 in DOS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k1i_IFYy0U

Building a Retro PC with BlueSCSI: My Journey

Hi everyone! I wanted to share my recent adventure in building a retro PC setup, complete with a BlueSCSI for storage emulation. What started as a simple idea turned into a learning experience filled with challenges, unexpected twists, and ultimately, a lot of satisfaction

The Vision

I’ve always had a soft spot for old-school PCs. After scratching my nostalgia itch with an IBM 5170, I set my sights on building a DOS gaming machine—something to relive the magic of Doom and Quake.

For this build, I used a Baby AT motherboard. While most had transitioned to ATX by the time my board was released, this one offered a rare mix of PCI, ISA, and AGP slots. My CPU of choice? A Celeron 433, perfectly capable of handling those classic games. For graphics, I couldn’t resist using an ATI Rage Pro—a card I have fond memories of from my early PC days.

The plan didn’t stop there. I wanted top-notch sound for those immersive MIDI soundtracks, so I added a PicoGUS. This little gem allows me to emulate any sound card, including the legendary Gravis Ultrasound and Sound Blaster.

Finally, I needed versatile storage, and that’s where the BlueSCSI came in. I’ve used this device before and absolutely love its ability to emulate hard drives, CD-ROMs, and even floppy drives—all from an SD card.

The BlueSCSI Setup

I hit my first snag early on when I decided to use a purple Raspberry Pi Pico clone I had lying around. These clones are cheap and cheerful, but I didn’t realize they had a completely different pinout compared to the standard Pico.

I soldered the clone to the BlueSCSI board, but when I tried flashing the firmware, it just wouldn’t work. Powering it up was fine, but I couldn’t get the Pico to boot into firmware mode. After some frustrating back-and-forth, I unsoldered it, flashed the firmware directly, and soldered it back on—still no luck.

That’s when I finally noticed the problem. The clone has extra GPIO pins and fewer ground connections, which caused one of the pins to ground permanently. No wonder it wasn’t working! In the end, I reverted to a trusty Pico W, and everything worked flawlessly.

Configuring the BlueSCSI

With the hardware in place, I set up the BlueSCSI SD card. The storage structure is pretty straightforward:

  • CD1 folder for CD-ROM images.
  • FD2 folder for floppy disk images.
  • A raw hard drive image for the main storage.

I wrote a few custom batch scripts to simplify things. One script lists available CD images, another lets me switch between them, and yet another handles floppy disk swapping. I found a clever trick using Adaptec’s EZ-SCSI tools to manage virtual floppy disks.

BlueSCSI Batch filesDownload

You will need to get RMVTOOL.EXE (Removable media Tool) from EZ-SCSI 4 disk / CD (the compressed file is located on DISK 2) you can expand it to your hard disk using the below command

 expand rmvtool.ex_ C:\SCSI\RMVTOOL.EXE

All this works great, but only with Adaptec cards, which is a bit limiting.

Testing the Setup

With everything configured, it was time for the fun part—testing! I loaded up Discworld to check the sound and Doom to see how well the system performed. Both worked beautifully, and hearing those MIDI tracks through the PicoGUS and my Yamaha drum machine was incredibly satisfying.

The BlueSCSI performed like a champ. I could quickly switch between disk images, and the storage emulation was seamless. There was a small quirk with file ordering (images didn’t seem to appear alphabetically), but that’s a minor nitpick for such a versatile device.

What’s Next?

Now that the internals are done, it’s time to tackle the case. I’m going for a steampunk-inspired look, complete with a wooden bezel crafted by my friend Mike. He’s a skilled woodworker and has agreed to help me bring my vision to life. But that’s a story for another day!

Shoutouts and Thanks

A huge thanks to Derek at Flame Lily, the UK distributor for PicoGUS and BlueSCSI. His excellent service made this project so much easier. If you’re into retro computing, definitely check out Flame Lily—you won’t regret it. Flamelily Shop

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Flashing PCIe X1900GT for G5 Mac

I did this to install MorphOS on a PCIe G5 PowerMac

Required Hardware

  • Mac-specific 6-pin PCIe power cable
  • Radeon X1900GT 256Mb, these are getting rarer but do come up on eBay and Thrift shops
  • PC setup with PCIe Slot and power (Capable of booting from USB)
  • USB Drive ton install a DOS image on

Flashing Steps

  • Setup a USB device to boot the PC from with MS DOS 6.2.2 (FreeDOS doesn’t work)  balenaEtcher can be used to restore an image of onto a spare USB Drive.

MS-DOS Boot Disk Download

Click “Show older versions”

4.07 (Versions not in order)

  • Create an ATI directory/folder in the root of the DOS USB Drive
  • Move ‘atiflash.exe‘ to the ATI directory on your prepared DOS USB drive. Rename ‘Radeon X1900 GT rev 109.rom‘ to ‘x1900GT.rom‘, and move that to the same place.
I have a pre made disk image here Dos6.22 ATI.img
  • Install X1900GT into the PCIe of the x86 PC. The X1900 GT itself can provide the video output from here on; using an additional PCI graphics card is not necessary. If the PC’s power supply does not have a 6-pin PCIe power cable available, use an adaptor; these are available from the common online stores!
  • Plug the DOS USB drive in, and boot from it.

at the prompt type

cd ATI

then to check the contents type

dir

You should see ‘X1900GT.ROM’ and ‘ATIFLASH.EXE’ listed.

We need to know the adaptor number, type

atiflash -i 

note the adapter number of the installed X1900 GT, which is identifiable by the ‘R580+’ tag in the middle column.

Usually, the adapter number to the far left of the ‘R580+’ will read ‘0’, provided the card was installed to the PC’s first (or only) PCIe x16 slot.

Note In the following steps it assumes the adaptor number to be ‘0’, replace the 0 with the correct adaptor number if it differs.

Optional If you want to backup the X1900’s original ROM to the current directory, type 

atiflash -s 0 x19back.rom

To flash the card type 

atiflash -p -f 0 x1900GT.rom
  • -p tells atiflash to program the card’s ROM
  • -f tells it to force the program
  • 0 tells it which adapter to program (change this if your adaptor number differs)
  • x1900GT.rom is the ROM it should use to program the card with

Your screen may flicker for a couple of seconds. Afterward, it should tell you that the flash was successful, at which point use the power down the machine.

Remove the newly-flashed X1900 GT from the PC, and install it into the G5.

If all went well, the Apple logo should come up, and you should now be in Mac OS X. Verify the GPU information via Graphics / Displays in System Profiler, and rejoice!

You have successfully flashed a graphics card completely on your own, and now possess a Radeon X1900 GT PPC Mac Edition.

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The Purple OLED Project

If you’ve been following my journey, you might recall a video I did a while back where I converted an old Amiga external floppy drive into something cool and retro-inspired. If you missed that one, no worries—I’ve linked it below. We’re taking things a step further. I’m about to transform this incredibly grubby, stained Cumana drive into something truly special, and I’m super excited to share the process with you.

Retro GOTEK

The Vision: A Purple OLED Dream

Ever since I started this project, I’ve had one thing in mind: creating a purple OLED screen. I know it sounds a bit ambitious, but that’s exactly what I’m aiming for. Imagine pairing that vibrant purple screen with the Charity Amiga’s purple case—how cool would that be? Today, we’re going to see if we can bring that vision to life.

Before we dive in, though, I have to issue a little disclaimer: please remember that I’m not exactly a professional. In fact, I’m just an enthusiast with a lot of curiosity and a willingness to experiment (sometimes wildly). So, if you decide to follow along, do so at your own risk!

The Not-So-Exciting Prep Work

Like with any good project, I had to start by cleaning everything. And I mean everything. The drive, the cables—nothing escaped my cleaning spree. I won’t bore you with the details of rubbing down cables, but trust me, it was necessary.

The Transformation Begins

Now, let’s talk about the case. It started off in a horrible state—stained, yellowed, and just plain ugly. But with a little bit of elbow grease and a lot of black paint, it’s undergone a serious transformation. It’s now a sleek, glittery black, which I think gives it a much more retro and sophisticated look.

You might remember from the previous video (linked bove) that I built a black Gotek drive with a blue OLED display. It looked pretty cool, but I had my heart set on purple this time around. Finding a purple OLED display, however, turned out to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. After scouring the internet, I came up empty-handed—purple just isn’t a color that’s readily available in OLED displays. I found plenty of blue, orange, green, and white options, but purple? Not a chance.

The Lighting Hack: Creating a Purple OLED

But I wasn’t about to give up. Drawing on my days in theater and lighting design, I decided to try a little hack: using a color filter. By cutting some purple lighting gel to size and securing it with double-sided sticky tape, I managed to give the white OLED display a purple hue.

And guess what? It worked better than I expected! The purple actually looks really good. One trick I used to enhance the effect was turning the OLED contrast up to its maximum setting. You can adjust the contrast in the FF.CFG file, which you load onto a USB drive—just like any other configuration for FlashFloppy. If you’re interested in trying this yourself, I’ll link the GitHub page for FlashFloppy along with the specific configuration details you need.

Flash Floppy Config Wiki : https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy/…

oled-contrast=255

Final Touches and Thoughts

To add a little extra flair, I decided to make the inside of the drive pink, giving it a neon accent that ties in nicely with the purple Amiga aesthetic. I’m really pleased with how it turned out—I think the combination of colors gives it a unique, retro-futuristic vibe that’s hard to resist.

I hope you’ll agree with me that the final result looks pretty amazing. This project was a lot of fun, and it’s always satisfying to see a rough, grimy piece of tech turned into something stylish and functional. And if you liked this project, why not give it a try yourself? Who knows, you might surprise yourself with what you can create!

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Building a Frankenstein Amiga: A Journey of Restoration and Customisation

Today, I’m diving into another exciting project: creating a Frankenstein Amiga from various parts I have lying around. Most of these parts come from a job lot of leftover spares I found on eBay. You might be wondering why I’m doing this. Well, I’m challenging myself and also building an Amiga for a charity auction organized by a friendly man named Lee from the YouTube channel More Fun Making It.

The Challenge Begins

There’s something a little strange going on with this Amiga 500 Revision 5. It seems that not all the RAM chips are managing to output TTL logic levels. Based on what I’m seeing on the scope diagram, it’s giving me random green and blue flashes. So, I’m going to pull all the RAM out and socket it. Having the RAM in sockets will be a much better solution for the new owner, especially if any of the RAM I’m installing goes bad in the future.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The first thing I desolder, ignoring my marks, is the resistor pack. Well, let’s just style that out and pretend no one noticed (lol). Now, all the RAM has been removed, before we can solder in any of the new sockets for the RAM, we need to tack back in those resistor packs—the ones I unsoldered for no reason. Not that I’m planning to put any of the original RAM back in, but let’s go ahead and test it to see if it shows up as bad. Amazingly, all of the RAM tests good. I suppose the heat from desoldering the chips might have revived it, or maybe the logic levels I saw are enough for the tester but not for the Amiga. Or perhaps the RAM isn’t the issue, and we’ve got something else causing the Amiga not to function.

Progress

Time to start putting the sockets in: 16 * 16 pin DIP sockets, that’s 256 solder points plus the resistor packs that I unsoldered for no reason. I tack in one socket and solder it up to make sure I’m happy with the temperatures before I go ahead and install all the rest. I tacked in the rest using the two voltage pins, 5 volts and ground. The followed up by soldering the rest of the pins and clean up the flux. That’s all the sockets installed. Now they just need chips.

Installing the RAM

I remembered someone saying they hated turn pin sockets because they’re hard to line up with the chip pins. So I thought I’d showcase how I do it. This is just how I do it; it’s not advice. I’m not a chip insertion instructor. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. I’m just saying it works for me. Basically I insert one row of pins and then gently apply pressure to the other side while running my tweezers across the chip pins this locates the pins in the socket, it usually takes a couple of strokes for all the pins to align then the chip just goes in without issue. This is similar mechanics to picking a lock…

All the RAM is installed and looking lovely. I took the liberty of fixing the ROM socket so it will take a 27C400 EPROM or a later mask ROM. This is another future-proofing step for the next owner should they want to upgrade to a later Kickstart version.

Final Touches

We have life! I’ve cleaned up the flux and covered the bodge wires from the ROM socket modification. We have a working board, but we need more than that to build a full Amiga. In the same job lot of parts, I have several bits of keyboards. This is where it gets even more Frankenstein. The keys aren’t laid out in the same way as my other 500s. I think this is from an earlier keyboard. The controller is from a Rev 6 Green Power Light. If you can properly identify the original revision any of these parts came from, then please comment on the video.

Testing and Tuning

Hooking it all back up with the keyboard and making sure it’s happy before we swap out DiagROM for Kickstart and try booting the Amiga into Test Kit. After confirming all is well with the Amiga, the next step is to get it to boot into Workbench and see if we can load StarTracker from the external GoTek drive. The plan is to load a module and play it, which will give I/O, graphics, and RAM a fairly good workout.

Going the Extra Mile

Since we’ve opened Pandora’s box, I thourght why not see if we can get that 512K of RAM in the trapdoor to be chip RAM? Having a total of 1MB chip RAM opens more games and options for the next owner. We just need an 8372A Agnus some little modifications. JP2 needs to be swapped, we need to cut a trace from Gary to the trapdoor, and we need to cover pin 41 on Agnus to keep it in PAL and prevent it from switching to NTSC.

While you weren’t looking, I’ve sprinkled a little cosmetic customisation over this Amiga 500. All we need now is a case.

Part 2 coming soon!

Building this Frankenstein Amiga has been a labor of love, filled with moments of frustration and triumph. I hope it finds a good home at the charity auction and brings joy to its new owner!

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Reviving the Amiga 2000: A Journey of Restoration and Problem-Solving

I’ve taken on the challenging yet rewarding task of bringing an Amiga 2000 back to life. If you’ve been following along, you know the journey hasn’t been smooth. The last update left the Amiga half-assembled with a problematic CPU slot and an overheating hard drive. As if that wasn’t enough, the power supply decided to give up on me.

Upon deeper inspection, it was clear that more work was needed. The power supply was non-functional, leading me to replace a suspect capacitor, though these fixes didn’t solve the problem.

Delving deeper, I decided to replace the voltage comparator and the strobe controller—fortunately, these parts were inexpensive. I installed new sockets and integrated circuits, hoping this would fix the issue.

Despite all these efforts, the power supply still failed. This led me to completely recap it, which seemed promising until it catastrophically failed again after just 15 seconds. I realized that some parts were either unknown or impossible to find.

I obtained a COMPAQ HB 146 SNQ power supply that mirrored the Amiga 2000’s requirements, I decided to adapt an ATX power supply, ensuring it matched the original’s settings. This required making it a permanent 230-volt input and using the original Amiga 2000 switch to activate the ATX’s PS-ON signal, effectively integrating it with the original system.

Testing the new setup, I used an old SCSI hard drive as a load to ensure stable voltage outputs. The results were satisfactory, with the 5V line perfectly on target, although the 12V line was slightly low—a point some might contest.

With the power supply sorted, I turned my attention back to the Amiga itself. I cleaned up acid damage on the board, replaced the battery with a more reliable one, and swapped out the old hard drive bracket for a 3D printed back plate, enhancing the setup.

However, issues persisted. Testing revealed unexplained memory discrepancies, and further investigation showed a short across two address lines on the board—a likely artifact from replacing the CPU slot. After removing the offending sliver of metal, I restored proper functionality to the memory and Zorro boards.

The journey didn’t end there. The Amiga’s ZZ9000 card, used for flicker fixing, lacked a crucial tick signal. I cobbled together a 50 Hz generator using a 555 timer and various components, which not only worked but improved the ZZ9000’s output.

This project has been a testament to the challenges and triumphs of hardware restoration. It’s a continuous learning process, filled with setbacks and victories.

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Vintage Vibes: GOTEK Drive’s Nostalgic 80s Upgrade

In my latest quest to enhance my Amiga tech setup without succumbing to the often-inflated prices attached to Amiga-branded tech, I decided to embark on a project that not only tickles my nostalgic senses but also brings modern efficiency to my beloved Amiga setup. I’ve always had a particular disdain for the aesthetically displeasing, modern external floppy drive enclosures that seem to populate the market today. They often come with compromises, such as a lack of the vintage 23-pin D type connectors, essential for that authentic connection, or the absence of a pass-through feature on the back, which I find incredibly useful.

Determined to maintain the vintage aesthetic while upgrading the functionality, I turned to an original external floppy drive enclosure from the glory days of the ’80s and ’90s. The charm of these enclosures isn’t just their look; it’s the functionality they offer – the 23-pin D type connectors, the pass-through capability, and the drive enable/disable feature on the back, all of which are sorely missed in their modern counterparts.

For this project, I chose a CUMANA 3.5-inch floppy drive enclosure, a brand that resonated with my school days, being the provider of all floppy drives during my education. The aim was to convert this enclosure to house a GOTEK floppy emulator, a device that replaces the traditional floppy disk with a USB flash drive, thus bringing the convenience of modern storage to vintage hardware. The GOTEK itself is pretty standard, equipped with a seven-segment display and basic firmware, but perfect for what I had in mind.

The upgrades planned were significant but straightforward: replacing the seven-segment display with an OLED display for better visibility and aesthetics, and adding a rotary encoder for improved navigation and selection of the USB files. The OLED display choice was the compact 0.91-inch version, which fits perfectly without overwhelming the vintage enclosure. The rotary encoder, a simple but effective analog device, adds a tactile navigation method that feels right at home with the Amiga setup.

One of the interesting challenges was ensuring compatibility with the Amiga’s unique floppy disk format. Modern GOTEKs are designed with industrial applications in mind and don’t naturally support the Amiga disk format. However, with the Amiga community being as vibrant and inventive as ever, custom firmware solutions like FlashFloppy have emerged. This firmware enables the GOTEK to read and write Amiga disk formats, effectively mimicking an original Amiga floppy drive.

The actual conversion process involved some soldering and a bit of creative cable management but was overall a rewarding experience. It involved installing a jumper, soldering a right-angled six-pin Dupont header for the rotary encoder, and making minor modifications to the GOTEK’s case to accommodate the OLED display. The end result was a GOTEK emulator that not only fit perfectly within the vintage enclosure but also functioned seamlessly with it, providing a modern solution to a retro problem.

Testing the setup with an Amiga 500 and Kickstart 2.4, I experienced a seamless boot to the Amiga Test Kit, followed by successful loading of Workbench 3.2 from the install disk image. This confirmed the successful integration of modern storage technology into the vintage Amiga ecosystem, all housed within an enclosure that keeps the aesthetic of the era alive.

This project, sponsored by PCBWay, showcases the perfect blend of retro aesthetics and modern functionality. It’s a testament to the enduring legacy of the Amiga and the innovative spirit of its community. For anyone looking to replicate this setup or seeking assistance with similar projects, PCBWay offers comprehensive services from PCB prototyping to assembly, making them an invaluable resource for hobbyists and professionals alike.

In conclusion, this venture into blending old with new has been an immensely satisfying journey. It reinforces the idea that with a bit of creativity and community support, we can preserve the essence of vintage computing while enjoying the conveniences of modern technology.

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