SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

About SheepShaver, a PPC Mac emulator for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux that can run System 7.5.3 to MacOS 9.0.4.

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nsputnik
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SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by nsputnik »

Tell me what has to happen to make this dream come true.

I would like to have a Raspberry Pi running Rasbian and SheepShaver to talk to an external SCSI device, a digital sampler. There is special software for samplers that ran on System 7/8/9.x that allowed for sampled to be transferred back and forth, edited, etc.

There was RaSCSI which was both software and hardware allowed a Raspberry Pi to act as a SCSI drive, but once SCSI2SD became a reality I think that project died. But is there something in the RaSCSI that would allow for a Raspberry Pi hat that allowed it to host SCSI devices? I don't know. Plus most of the documentation is in Japanese. http://retropc.net/gimons/rascsi/
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24bit
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Re: SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by 24bit »

RaSCSI looks like something, nice finding.
If your RaSCSI was running some recent Linux flavour and if someone could compile a matching Linux flavour of the old Basilisk II Build 142 for Windows, your dream may almost come true.

I´m not aware of a SheepShaver build supporting SCSI, though the code must have been there from ShapeShifter.
Basilisk II Build 142 does talk SCSI (as does Fusion PC for DOS) but putting all parts together looks like a tremendous heap of work to me.
Meanwhile, I would look for a old Mac like a LCII from ebay running MacOS 7.6 to see how you fare with the sampler. ;)
nsputnik
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Re: SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by nsputnik »

At this phase I am trying to see how feasible it is/generate enough interest so that any devs/hardware makers might be motivated to make it happen.
http://retropc.net/gimons/rascsi/index.html
https://www.facebook.com/groups/akaisam ... 5944423361
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/to ... ad/&page=5
https://twitter.com/nsputnik/status/1145708233799004160
https://www.novaspirit.com/2017/04/13/r ... pberry-pi/

Old Macs eventfully eventually fail while people tend to take better care of samplers. That's why I want to push RPi since they are cheap and plentiful. The software I want to run is PPC so it would need to work with SheepShaver although there are a few 68k apps.
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adespoton
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Re: SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by adespoton »

I haven't looked into RaSCSI in particular, but one thing I know from the past is that a lot of hardware and software systems that "support" SCSI tend to only do it for either storage device control OR async serial control. For the SCSI device you're talking about, you've got an synchronous SCSI device with its own clock that wants to communicate with the machine at SCSI address 0. This may mean some writing from scratch on the Pi end to handle clock sync and bi-directional synchronous serial data, and then you've got to make sure this patches the appropriate parts of SheepShaver's ROM, which likely hasn't been done yet either -- especially since SheepShaver doesn't even handle regular serial with clock sync.

Is there a version of QEMU running on the Pi at reasonable speed yet? Because that at least has the interfaces already coded into it, and since it doesn't patch the ROM, it's using native ROM handling, which already works. So for QEMU, as long as the machine SCSI chip emulator is fully functional, things should "just work". You will, of course, need to compile the Screamer build of QEMU, or you won't get reiable audio.
Frank Carvalho
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Re: SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by Frank Carvalho »

Hi
I found this thread, as I am going down a similar route. I would like to hook up old Mac-disks to SheepShaver, mainly because I am trying to install my old Cubase VST from original disks. Cubase - and other programs - refuse to install unless they can identify an actual SCSI disk device.
But if I read this thread correctly, then it is questionable if the SheepShaver SCSI interface works at all?

I am looking into two ways to achieve this:
1. I have a PCI-SCSI-adapter to access the original drive. In Ubuntu this adapter should show up as a /dev/sgX device - a generic SCSI device - and my idea was to attach this to a --scsi0 argument in SheepShaver.
2. If physical access to an actual SCSI device is not possible, then another approach would be to clone the device, set up a loop device that accesses the device via generic SCSI, and then attach the loop device as --scsi0.

I am, BTW, working on a RPi, where the loop device solution seems the to be the only solution. The PCI-adapter would be installed on a Ubuntu PC, and I would have to compile SheepShaver for the PC in order to go with solution 1.

What is the status of SCSI integration in SheepShaver? .... or in Basilisk II for that matter?

/Frank
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adespoton
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Re: SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by adespoton »

Except for an older build (build 142) of Basilisk II on Windows, there is no SCSI support in SS or BII. All disks are presented either as floppies or CDs at the hardware layer. The loopback idea might work, as long as the device is presented correctly on the virtual SCSI stack in SheepShaver. This isn't guaranteed though, as nobody's really worked on that code since hardware SCSI support was removed well over a decade ago.
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Cat_7
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Re: SheepShaver in Raspberry Pi communicating over SCSI

Post by Cat_7 »

Depending on what guest OS your software needs, you might look at CockatriceIII. It can read scsi disk images.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10892

Best,
Cat_7
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