Hello NeXT Community:
I went ahead and ordered the brand new version 5.2 scsi2sd pcb card and a version 6.0 rev 2020C to beta test on NeXT Hardware. Everything Alex is saying sounds great so hopefully a smooth transition from 5.1 to 5.2 .... I think you will find this of interest and yes once , I have them up and running I'll have preconfigured solutions available for NeXT hardware with Apps. I'm also curious about the new version 6.0 cards as earlier revs proved to be buggy on NeXT imho.
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Rob,
Thanks for the order. We're totally out of V5.1's, and are not planning on making any more of them in the future, unless a customer needs that specific version, in a quantity that justifies assembling a batch of them. V5.2 is the intended replacement, moving forward.
We're expecting this next batch of V5.2's (the first full batch of them, the ones we'll ship to you today were part of our test run) by the 24th of 25th of this month, in fewer than two weeks time. The assembly house (new contract assembler) had committed to getting the first 500 V5.2's to me by the 23rd, and it will take a day or two for them to come via next day air.
V5.2 is, at a schematic level, extremely similar, but not identical to, V5.1. The build quality is immensely better, and the boards are now being assembled in Canada. PCBs are gold ENIG plated, and the overall assembly quality is a cut above.
On the SCSI bus side, the only electrical difference is the removal of the traces that fed to the DB25 landing pad area. The removal of these traces actually improves signal integrity/quality, so I don't expect you'll have any issues. Other than that, we've moved the SD card pins on the PSoC to ease routing, but there's no user-facing difference, from a usability perspective, until we get further down the road with firmware development, which is moving at a slow pace, for a variety of reasons (it's 2020, after all)
In all of our testing, anything that worked with V5.1 or v5.0 should work fine with V5.2.
Regards,
Alex
Hello NeXT Community: Of course I have it working
https://youtu.be/AcDxcAP9D3A successful beta test and install, one of the first computers on the planet running the brandnew scsi2sd version 5.2 cards is a NeXT :) Best Regards Rob Blessin
Hello - I am trying to get a SCSI2SD 5.2 working with my non-turbo slab. I've followed instructions to get a known working config saved to my SCSI2SD. I have Windows and used Win32DiskImager to write the Nextstep 3.3 dd image (from WinWorld) to my SD card. When attempting to boot, all self tests pass. Then says the following:
boot sd(0,0,0)diagnostics
booting SCSI target 0, lun 0
blk0 boot: sd()diagnostics
Booting from SCSI target 0 lun 0
diagnostics: not found
load failed
Could you help interpret what's going on? Is there a problem with my SCSI2SD config or maybe with just how I wrote the image to the SD card?
Quote from: nullvalue on April 20, 2021, 11:25:34 AMHello - I am trying to get a SCSI2SD 5.2 working with my non-turbo slab. I've followed instructions to get a known working config saved to my SCSI2SD. I have Windows and used Win32DiskImager to write the Nextstep 3.3 dd image (from WinWorld) to my SD card. When attempting to boot, all self tests pass. Then says the following:
boot sd(0,0,0)diagnostics
booting SCSI target 0, lun 0
blk0 boot: sd()diagnostics
Booting from SCSI target 0 lun 0
diagnostics: not found
load failed
Could you help interpret what's going on? Is there a problem with my SCSI2SD config or maybe with just how I wrote the image to the SD card?
This happens if "boot extended diagnostics" is enabled. When on the command prompt of the ROM monitor you can type "p" to change preferences. Just hit enter until you see "boot extended diagnostics: yes?". Then type "no" and hit enter until it drops you back to the command prompt. Then reboot and it should be fine.
Update: Some instructions on how to use the ROM monitor can be found here:
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/NeXT_ROM_Monitor_FAQ
Quote from: andreas_g on April 21, 2021, 06:09:35 AMThis happens if "boot extended diagnostics" is enabled. When on the command prompt of the ROM monitor you can type "p" to change preferences. Just hit enter until you see "boot extended diagnostics: yes?". Then type "no" and hit enter until it drops you back to the command prompt. Then reboot and it should be fine.
That worked, I'm in! Thank you!