Peter Slegg introduces SCSI to his
Milan
When the ST was designed, Atari had
the foresight to equip it with an ACSI interface. This
port proved to be readily adaptable to the, then new,
industry standard SCSI interface for connecting hard
disk drives and other fast, data intensive peripherals.
SCSI ports were built into the later
Atari computers and most of the clones but curiously
it was left out of the Milan. This was probably to reduce
cost since the Milan uses a 'PC like' design and has
internal IDE interfaces. However, given that most Atari
users have SCSI hard drives and SCSI peripherals like
scanners and CD-ROM drives it wasn't long before Milan
were talking of offering software drivers for plug-in
PCI SCSI cards.
The SCSI Pack
I wanted to connect my old
Syquest EZ230 Flyer exchangeable drive and planned to
get a colour scanner so I ordered a SCSI card from System
Solutions and was able to collect it at the 1999 ACC
in Staffordshire.
The pack contained a boxed SCSI card,
a slim manual (in German) and a single floppy containing
the driver software plus current versions of the Milan
Bootblock and TOS. The card is a Top Sys CI-2520 Fast
SCSI-II port capable of 10MByte/s. It has two connectors,
an external 50-pin High Density connector (a Mini-D50)
and an internal Low Density connector for the more familiar
IDC ribbon cable which is also provided. There are no
leads supplied for the external connector.
Installation
Step 1. Taking the necessary
electrical and anti-static precautions I fitted the
card in about 10 minutes and powered up the Milan to
make sure all was well. Next I translated the part of
the manual that described the software installation.
The software supplied is all ready keyed to match the
Serial number of the Milan and, although I didn't realise
it at the time, the disk I had didn't match my Milan.
This would cause problems later.
Step 2. The driver installation uses
the Milan FLASH program that is normally used to update
the Bootblock and TOS versions. When FLASH is run and
TOS is selected from the menu a dialog box appears where
the file containing the TOS image is selected from disk.
My Milan was up-to-date so I chose the same version
I installed last time. The lower part of the dialog
allows extensions to be added and this is where the
SCSI driver is selected from the disk.
Once the selections are made the ROM
is FLASHed. This is a worrying moment as problems could
cause the Milan to become un-bootable. The stress level
is heightened by the frozen mouse pointer. The FLASH
takes about 10 seconds at which point normal service
is resumed. Quit out of the FLASH program and reboot
the Milan.
When the white screen with the MILAN
logo appears it is now followed by a message from the
SCSI driver. If there are problems when booting the
Milan SCSI driver can be by-passed by holding down a
control-key as soon as the MILAN logo appears. The driver
then asks the user if they wish to install the SCSI
system or not.
Step 3. All was well at this point
so I powered down the Milan and connected my Syquest
EZ-Flyer 230Mb exchangeable drive using the lead that
came with the drive. I switched on the drive and removed
my ST disk, this disk is my normal ST hard disk and
I didn't want to damage anything on it. With the drive
on, I booted the Milan, the SCSI driver started but
didn't detect the Syquest.
Step 4. My Milan uses the excellent
HDDriver by Dr. Uwe Seimet to control access to its
IDE hard disk and CD-ROM drive but it needs to know
about the new SCSI devices. I have set-up several hard
disks using HDDriver but I don't regard myself as an
expert. The Syquest had been set-up with the SCSI device
id 0 and through the device configuration menu option
of HDDRUTIL this SCSI device can be "enabled".
I experimented with various settings, installing HDRIVER.SYS
and re-booting until I was able to get the SCSI drive
to detect the Syquest at boot-up. The final settings
where:
I0 enabled for the IDE hard disk
I1 enabled for the IDE CD-ROM drive
S0 enabled for the SCSI drive
A0
E0 PCI SCSI
NB: The SCSI id of the SCSI card should
not be enabled. View screen shot [here]
Getting It Working
At one point the Milan would
recognize the drive and with a spare disk in the Syquest
I could view the partition information using HDRCONF
but I couldn't access the drives from the Thing
desktop. Eventually, with the correct settings, I selected
the Mount devices option from the Thing desktop and
all the new partition icons appeared. Problems can arise
if the disk in the Syquest is bootable as the Milan
then detects two bootable drives. Try disabling the
boot option on the Syquest disk or use a spare Syquest
disk that is not bootable. There is probably a better
solution th this but I haven't found it yet. This had
been the trickiest part and took about 2 hours to sort
out, I hope these notes will save others some time.
I was now able to open the partitions
and view the contents and run some programs but this
was when I discovered that I couldn't write any data
to the Syquest. The problem was that the SCSI drive
software didn't match the Serial number of my Milan
so it only ran in demo mode. With the correct copy of
the SCSI disk I was able to re-flash the ROM and write
to the Syquest.
The Scanner
A few weeks later I acquired
a UMAX-1220s SCSI scanner from TCL Technology and ScanX-Pro
scanner software from System Solutions. Connecting the
scanner could not have been easier. With all the systems
switched-off I plugged the scanner into the Milan using
the same lead that I had plugged into the Syquest. So
far I have resisted the temptation to use both at the
same time to avoid any termination problems that can
result with SCSI chains but I could easily connect both
by using the D-50 to D-50 cable that came with the scanner.
Using what I had learned earlier I used HDDRUTIL to
activate devices:
S5 enabled for the SCSI scanner
A5
E5
NB: I don't know if the A5 and E5
settings are needed, perhaps someone could enlighten
me. View screen shot [here]
I powered-up the scanner and the Milan
but could not get Scan-X to detect the scanner. After
a great deal of experimenting I realised that it was
necessary to activate SCSI device 5 by using the MSETUP
application supplied with the Milan. From the Settings
menu choose the Disk option and ensure that device 5
has been "blacked out". I had been lucky earlier
with the Syquest because it is device 0 and that was
all ready selected in MSETUP.
I had never even used a scanner before
and getting the first scan was quite enjoyable. Using
Scan-X Pro is quite straight forward and I have only
found one minor bug which affects moving of the scanned
area.
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