Spyrus RD300 aka MCDISK-2 and EMU
Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2009 2:48 amBought one of these on ebay a couple of weeks ago, after giving up on the 2.5" ide caddy, thinking that it would definitely be compatible, seeing as scsiforsamplers recommended them, and there is a US ebay seller selling them for use with emus.... how wrong was i??? :(
Tried all sorts of tricks, but couldn't get he bugger to work - the emu just wouldn't see it. Eventually I downloaded and burnt an eeprom with the latest firmware from mpl.ch. This helped a little - I could now see the drive but got errors trying to read/write it.
Eventually, I discovered that if I booted it with the latest firmware in, the emu would detect it ok - if I then powered down the card reader and put the old firmware back in, I could repeatedly read and write it without any problems as long as I didn't redetect it, at which point it would dissappear again. A bit of detective work on the scsi buss showed that with the old firmware, the device was identifying itself as a processor, while the new firmware showed it as a direct access device (i.e. disk drive).
A couple of nights of motorola mc68hc11 disassembly and firmware hacking later, I have managed to find the byte in the firmware that sets which device type it identifies itself as, and I now have a mod-o-fied version of the old firmware which shows up as a disk drive, and lets me read/write/format/whatever the drive to my hearts content!! :D
If anyone else has one of these drives and is struggling to get it working, let me know and I'll see what I can do to help!
Now maybe I should turn my hand to coldfire disassembly....
Tried all sorts of tricks, but couldn't get he bugger to work - the emu just wouldn't see it. Eventually I downloaded and burnt an eeprom with the latest firmware from mpl.ch. This helped a little - I could now see the drive but got errors trying to read/write it.
Eventually, I discovered that if I booted it with the latest firmware in, the emu would detect it ok - if I then powered down the card reader and put the old firmware back in, I could repeatedly read and write it without any problems as long as I didn't redetect it, at which point it would dissappear again. A bit of detective work on the scsi buss showed that with the old firmware, the device was identifying itself as a processor, while the new firmware showed it as a direct access device (i.e. disk drive).
A couple of nights of motorola mc68hc11 disassembly and firmware hacking later, I have managed to find the byte in the firmware that sets which device type it identifies itself as, and I now have a mod-o-fied version of the old firmware which shows up as a disk drive, and lets me read/write/format/whatever the drive to my hearts content!! :D
If anyone else has one of these drives and is struggling to get it working, let me know and I'll see what I can do to help!
Now maybe I should turn my hand to coldfire disassembly....
