#Syquest on Amiga and Mac
4 messages in this thread
This is the first I've heard of this for either platform… Since all the
drives are made by the same company, could you elaborate? Is there a particular
revision or internal ROM level which marks the breakpoint?
Mike Hobart
Mike;
>Is there a particular revision… marks the breakpoint?
Probably not. The problem is that Mac does not now, nor have they ever
appeared to be particularly concerned with things like scsi
specifications. MACs are not particularly scsi compliant.
You might note that Maxtor was even enclosing paperwork with some of their
drives telling the purchaser to contact Maxtor technical support if you
wanted to use the drive on a MAC (this was enclosed in boxes for drives
that were "standard scsi"). Unfortunately there were not enclosing
anything in boxes for drives that were intended for MACs.
While SyQuest has had a few problems and made several firmware versions
that were not correct for any machine, these drives would work ok in a MAC
because the MAC was not "asking" the drive any questions. When those same
drives are placed on an Ami (or for that matter a true blue IBM) scsi bus,
they were lying to the host. The host, naturally, assumed that the drive
"knew" what it was talking about…
-bill
That's interesting to here. I've got a couple of Syquests and have been able
to use the drives interchangably between Amiga, Mac, and PC (with the usual
caveats about a suitable controller, etc.).
I certainly agree with the comment about Macs and 'non-standard' SCSI! On some
Macs you get in trouble if you DO terminate at both ends of the bus!
Ah computer vendors. PCs with putting up with the magic bottom 640k
of memory. Macs with their "multitasking". And Commodore with in
many ways a better thought out machine but with the marketing skills
of a [you fill in the appropriate term as you see fit.]
Cheers, Mike
It is true that usually a compliant scsi device will work on the Macs but
the fact that something will work on a Mac means nothing when it comes to
Ami (or most serious PC scsi controllers).
-bill