Hi,
I'm fortunate enough to have a Macbook Pro as well as an old XP box. I used the XP box with the Emu for Zeos and with Mobius (Squarecircle) to slice and dice samples and chuck them over to the sampler.
I've been spending a bit of time recently with all the data i this forum as well as others regarding USB + SCSI on the mac, and it appears that just recently, some of the other forums out there (applefritter) have shown some uses finding success with SCSI on OSX on the MacBook Pro.
Specifically, like the posting here, it seems that we have this situation where there are operational SCSI-USB interfaces but with little documentation on the products since the vendors were either acquired or went out of business or dropped the product as parallel SCSI started to die as a technology replaced by the SATA style protocols.
Anyway, it seems that the Intel Macs, long thought to have none to limited SCSI support actually DO WORK under certain conditions, seemingly due to the interface cards.
On the PC side of things, some of these interfaces claim that support SCSI chaining for example, bit on the Mac only one device connected.
Not only this, as the other boards suggest, there are preconditions that have to be set to allow the drives/device to mount under OSX namely:
1. The SCSI ID must be Zero (0)
2. The SCSI device must be connected to the USB interface and then powered on
3. Termination power must be set to be provided by the SCSI device
4. The device must be powered ON first, THEN plugged into the Mac to be recognized.
5. Some devices seem to require Async settings to be set to allow devices to mount.
6. Scanner SCSI device need 3rd party drivers (Vuescan) to work but Hard drives and storage devices mount without drivers needed - OSX Recognizes them. This includes MO, HD and other drives.
So - there is some glimmer of hope here. The trick is the number of parameters that can change from configuration to configuration and the time needed to get the combination (along with termination etc) to work.
Now to my research and next steps - I need help from this board:
I have one of the UBS/SCSI adapters purchased off Amazon - no drivers provided. What I want to do is this:
1. Get the unit working properly on XP (it makes it easier to see whats going on as I have tools like Mobius for sending data to and from the sampler, and SCSI tools like Symbios SCSI tools to inspect SCSI parameters.
2. Translate this operational setup to the Mac under OSX on MBP. My limitation here is I only have the demo version of DSP Quattro which is a bit old, and I've no experience with it on SCSI transfers.
I do have a fully working internal Zip -> SCSI Card (Tekram 310U) -> External Drive (Zip + Microtech PCB-47B CF/PCMCIA/Smartmedia) -> Emu Ultra E5000 on XP with internal 120 G IDE laptop drive (Samsung).
Software on PC: Mobius 1.2a, Recycle (1.7 - ugh) and Translator demo (Anyone used SampleWrench by the way ? any good?) XP SP2.
So far, due to my lack of drivers I can't get item 1 (XP) going with the USB unit - so drivers first. Given how long it took me to get my EMU to work with XP, an internal ZIP on the PC, a Tekram 310U SCSI card, an external Zip + Compact Flash Reader to work, I want to start with a known working config.
Incidentally, I could NOT get the microtech CF SCSI reader to work when it was installed on the internal SCSI bus inside the sampler (moved floppy internally, set term ON on Microtech (which has opposite jumper settings to what you expect, off = on) when connected to the PC SCSI bus (worked find if it was the only thing in the system - i.e. to EMU only). Has anyone got this config going so you can read/write the drive (EOS format) from e.g. Translator on the PC?
So - first things first - if the first poster can send me the links and info on drivers I'll give it a shot.
I'm very experienced with SCSI (from samplers to PC/Sun setups) so happy to experiment and exhaust all possibilities here. I fully understand the termination issues esp. with active/passive/LVD blah blah blah.
I'm also working out if the IDE interface in the EMU can support the non bootable flash reader devices. These are NOT ATAPI - standard IDE - devices arrive soon for experimentation. the only problem is these devices are not hot swappable. However, they cost $2 on ebay :) If this works then:
* We can have an IDE CF card plus internal IDE hard drive (usual PC split cable). IDE CF card will stick out the back on one of the expansion slots.
* We can have SCSI to Sampler from Mac OS X and XP to transfer samples/send keymaps etc. e.g. Use Peak and DSP Quattro
* We can hopefully resurrect the Zeos guy who asked for info on getting SCSI to work on Intel Macs on OS X
* OR, with CF and FAT32, it should be possible to write scripts or code to edit EIII banks native on the CF cards so that offine sample bank creation an editing is possible.
Of course all this in between my hectic day job that funds my "SCSI sampler Lab" :)
So - lets keep this humming - send me info on drivers for USB/SCSI - if needed I'll pick up another on ebay to experiment.
All this just so I don't have to become a mouse clicking laptop droid stuck with soft samplers :)
Links to successful use of SCSI and USB on Mac OSX on Intel MPBs:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/6924
(See last post and the read back on settings).
M
's'allbollocksinnit.