Re: What's wrong with Revision B SCSI?

[a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

The Byter <cabalslexicon@hotmaill.com> wrote:

>In the FAQs and other resources I find on the net, it seems that the
>card to have is either a RAMFast, Apple High Speed, or Revision C SCSI
>card.  The one I have is a Revision B, and I got it working with an
>old and tiny (5.25" full height 2 gig drive circa 1991) last night on
>my //gs.  

    The original Apple II SCSI Cards (September 1986 to April 1990)
were all identical, what changed was the ROM firmware on-board.
You can easily upgrade your revision 'A' or 'B' card by swapping the
EPROM chip. Stephen Buggie was burning copies of the 'C' ROM
for those looking for it.

>I haven't installed GS/OS on it yet, but can access it fine (well,
>32mb of it at least) in Prodos.

    One of the drawbacks is it _won't_ work with GS/OS, you 
need the latest ROM (revision C) to support it.

>Am I asking for trouble working with a revision B card?

    Potentially, yes. Any software that blindly tries to eject a
hardisk partition will issue a format command and wipe out
your volume!

    Besides being incompatible with GS/OS, there are other
limitations as well such as no support for CD-ROMs (it was
only designed to work with hardrives). I can't remember off-
hand whether it supported the same number of partitions
as the Revision C ROM, though it's rather moot seeing
as your limited to using ProDOS-8 or 16.

Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca