Using 90's tech to connect SCSI devices to modern computers in 2022

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video i'm going to try to run this a scuzzy hard drive on something like this which is a modern laptop it's going to be using something that is plugged into the usb port and let's see if this thing can actually work so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] so when it comes to retro computers and using old devices like this hard drive or the zip drive here if they used an ide interface it would be easy to plug that into a modern computer because ide to usb adapters have existed for a long time and we even have things like this which is a usb floppy drive which would allow you to read three and a half inch discs on a modern pc without any trouble but for whatever reason the ease of connecting old devices to computers has never seemingly extended to two scuzzy devices one of the reasons for that is that the scuzzy interface or scsi interface was mainly only used on the amiga and the macintosh line of computers and never really made its penetration into the desktop home pc market so it's probably a result of this lack of penetration which has resulted in a lack of options for connecting this stuff to a modern computer that brings me to this this is a microtech express scuzzy or usb to in to scuzzy intelligent cable now looking at the date down here in the corner this came out in 1999 and there's probably a number of my viewers who've actually used devices like this or maybe even own a device like this but me and myself i've never even seen one of these in person i've only heard about these existing well as you can tell this thing is shrink wrapped and a local viewer here in town ended up with this and passed it over to me to take a look at setup is as easy as plugging your devices into this cable here and connecting it to your computer now does talk about loading drivers from a cd which would obviously be inside this box that means that this may not work whatsoever on a modern computer but i'm certainly going to try this was made by the company microtech and there's their address and i'm pretty sure this is a very defunct company but they made a whole slew of external scuzzy devices and most likely usb devices after scuzzy sort of went the way of the dodo at least for desktop computers there it is preserve your investment skzzi peripherals connect up to seven storage devices to your imac g3 blue and white or usb equipped pc all right so enough talking let's open this thing up this is getting unboxed for the first time in its life 24 years later so there it is there's the device luckily the cable and everything is not too sticky and we do have some documentation we have the ibm 340 meg or 170 meg micro drive so basically a compact flash card with a tiny little hard drive inside regular 64 meg up to 64 meg compact flash cards we have smart media if anyone had digital cameras back in the day you might remember smart media it was about that big and had those gold contacts on it it was very thin and that slid into cameras up to 32 megabytes in capacity for microtech customers only special upgrades wow you could win a free digital camera see back for details we have the ixla digital camera suite only 20 web easy it's probably about making web pages or whatever with clipart included that's 30 u.s and ixala explorer which is um a browser maybe royalty free photos but just check out this 90s netscape goodness running on a mac os 8 or 9 here ah those days are long gone win all five you have to register and then you have a chance to win an imactor giving away one of each color so keep buying microtech log in and start building your collection so they're implying that you could possibly win all five of these if you just keep buying microtech stuff and registering it like the odds of that are basically next to nothing that's absolutely ridiculous to make such a claim nothing much to see here just a normal registration card you even need to put your own stamp on it how lame okay so next up there's the driver cd we have a little bit of manual here which i assume is pretty much what it said in the on the on the side of the box that is connect it up install the driver plug it into the side of your imac it's very focused on that and for the pc here does it even say you need the driver software it does it says uh when it finds the new hardware found insert the cd and hopefully that works all right so this is the scuzzy adapter or usb discussion adapter now plenty of times i've ended up with these types of things from then from this time era when they started making these clear cables for instance and the plastic or the pvc that's on the jacket of the cable becomes all sticky and nasty strangely enough this one is completely fine there's no stickiness at all although maybe this discoloration like this green coloring is actually some oxidation but it seems fine otherwise this is the microtech usb to scuzzy adapter definitely see some electronics in there 24 megahertz crystal oscillator there serial number 11137 now i have to wonder why were devices like this only briefly on the market why weren't these more prevalent and like why can't we still buy stuff like this today is that just because everyone thinks that no one wants to read scuzzy devices now i do have to admit it's been a little bit of time since i have last searched for any such devices modern recreations that is so maybe something exists out there now and if that's the case definitely please let me know in the comment section but last time i looked all i could see was similar devices to this on ebay and they're all relatively expensive and of course i don't even know if any of these things even work so that's we're about to find out so for the hard drive here termination resistors are installed so you need to have termination on the end of your scuzzy chain this is a ribbon cable it goes to a centronics 50 pin and then this is the 25 pin connection that would plug into a macintosh now it's a male connector here for the hard drive cable and then a female connector on this adapter so we just connect that up like so of course we need to power the hard drive up so i'm just going to use one of these things which are little switch mode power supplies that are designed for running hard drives externally so on the power cord for this power supply there is a little switch to power on the hard drive there it is this connor hard drive is spinning up no problems i'd already tested this to make sure that it does work and right here on the bench this is a usb extension cord that plugs into the back of my bench pc i keep this here just for convenience so i'm not constantly reaching up and let's plug this in all right so i've gone into computer management and here is the usb mass storage device that's definitely just showed up for what this is device cannot start the requested operation was unsuccessful so i've gone under details and looked under device instance path and here we're going to see the vendor id and the product id for this particular device and that can allow you to sometimes find the appropriate drivers for it so let's just do a quick google search so typically if you're looking for one of these drivers you just type in both like this that can usually work so here it is scuzzy db25 scuzzy bridge by shuttle now unfortunately here this page says no drivers exist and be warned that these are some shady sites a lot of these places that this stuff brings you to so sometimes it involves looking around a little bit see if you can find a more modern driver i don't think that's actually what we're looking for nope all right here's one patch newer technology scuzzy usb converter okay so this talks about newer technology which was another manufacturer of devices like this and it says that like other similar products it was that shuttle technology oem device and check this out here's a list of the various devices that are all actually based on the same thing and there it is the microtech db25 device that i'm trying to use now there obviously was an hd50 version at some point plus a belkin and then the shuttle one which is the actual manufacturer of this so maybe these drivers exist somewhere and i can just modify them to then work with the microtech one but let me search for the shuttle one here and maybe i can find drivers actually work here uh nope no drivers there you know what before i do too much searching on google let's try looking at the cd maybe there's something on here that's actually useful for windows 10. maybe there's something here that can actually point us in the direction of a driver to get this thing working take a look at the files on here there's the microtech inf file but there is the shuttle usb.cis that would imply that this is definitely a shuttle oem so i'm going to google for this file let's see if we can find this maybe there's a newer version so after some more googling i found that castle wood also sold a scuzzy to usb adapter and i'm pretty sure it's basically going to be the same thing as one of these so i did some looking around for drivers for this maybe thinking i could find a newer one and certainly i did find something while opening the inf file take a look it's the eu scuzzy which i'm pretty sure is exactly the same as this thing and it looks like here it says 2000 so it's possible that this driver is actually going to work there was actually a win 98 folder here and these are the older files for windows 98 so why don't we just give this thing a try right here now there's actually a setup program here but i am not going to run that first of all i'm going to right click on this and i'm going to hit install aha no digital signature so the version of windows i'm running here is the 64-bit version and it enforces driver signatures so it'll refuse to install any drivers that aren't signed now before you comment down below i know it's technically possible to disable driver signing on windows 10. i'm not going to do that on this bench pc i use this thing too much to have potentially unstable or bad drivers running on it so i'm just going to keep it the way it is so i think what i'm going to try doing is i'm busting out my old netbook here let's see if the battery still has charge look at that as charge boot this thing up this has windows xp on it here and let's see if this thing works with those drivers on windows xp because to be honest i'd be happy with that because i can use this machine to copy files on and off scuzzy devices or image them for instance and then just use a thumb drive to copy the files off this onto a modern computer or actually connect over the network to my retro samba share so let's just connect this up without even attempting any kind of drivers on this thing let's see how this goes and immediately we have the mass storage device with no driver i have the drivers copied onto this usb thumb drive here yeah it's got no case but that doesn't mean it doesn't work i'm going to say install from a specific location it's all very similar to how it was on windows 10 not much has actually changed it did install but it has a same error 10 device could not start i'm going to power off this hard drive we're going to unplug this now it's possible when i unplug the power here on it that some phantom power was getting to this over the termination from the drive like term power let's see what happens if we plug this back in it doesn't even show up at all on the computer so hit the power for the drive oh and then it detected it so it does get power from the drive oh look there it is usb drive oh the drivers are installed wait a second is this working no okay so i'm not seeing any kind of drives here but i don't think this hard drive is formatted for the pc so let's go to device manager and unfortunately nothing is showing up the only thing that's on here is this usb stick which if i remove there is nothing here oh i was a little quick on the draw i think if i just wait a second it would have said here that the device cannot start now just in case this is a problem with this drive let's try uh this scuzzy drive here amiga os 204 and when this shows up right away i noticed that it says no drivers are installed wait wait wait look it works it's working it said fujitsu hard drive was installed just now fujitsu usb hard drive wow so back under disk management there it is 500 megabyte hard drive is showing up i don't want to erase this because it is amiga os on here but i could easily run win32 disk image and i should be able to image this drive onto the computer apologies earlier for trying to record the screen on this tiny laptop i could just plug the vga output into my capture device and yeah now you have a really nice clear image now i was looking for a utility that was compatible with windows xp that could rip this hard drive into a file there are plenty of utilities that can take a file and write it to a drive but i wanted to be able to back up drives like this onto the machine i tried using rufus which of course has a windows xp version but this utility can really only write to the disk it can't read from them as i mentioned earlier the perennial win32 disk imager just doesn't work on windows xp and i did some googling and sure enough the authors of that program said that windows 7 is the bare minimum for compatibility i have this net bsd floppy drive creation utility tool and this can probably write to the disk there it is fujitsu but certainly it can't read from it then i found out that the person who maintains this website has a version of dd for windows when you go to downloads and you look at the versions that are available well there's dd release 64. that's not going to work that's 2017 64-bit but look at these older versions all right so there's the syntax and i am copying bs is 512k the input file is the actual block disk and then the output file is the file on your hard drive dash dash progress shows the progress and now we wait unfortunately this adapter is usb 1.1 so that's pretty slow i can't remember what the max1 bandwidth of that is 12 megabits or something like that so it's gonna take a while to copy this luckily most scuzzy devices that you would be potentially connecting to this are relatively small so that's not that much of an issue all right we'll finish copying the hard drive and notice the error here drive cannot find the sector requested i'm assuming that is like a read error of some kind but there it is amiga drive 519 megabytes or whatever that translates to 507. let's send that over to the thumb drive okay so the image file's copied over onto this thumb drive now i was curious on this hard drive what scuzzy id it is and i think it's set for id 0 because i think these are the id jumpers and there are no jumpers installed when we look at this long string here for the fujitsu drive it has a zero at the end let's just see if anything changes here if i change the drive id on this hard drive i just popped a jumper these jumpers are a little too big for this jumper block onto id0 let's turn this back on i guess uh the reason for that delay before we were seeing that driver error was because it's probably scanning the scuzzy bus from that adapter and when it determines you can't find a drive that's working that's when it probably gives that error oh no look it didn't work this time wait could that be could that be the jumper i just put on the drive here let's unplug everything and turn it all off take this jumper off turn the drive back on we should power up this adapter through the termination power let this finish spinning up and now let's reconnect this maybe that was the difference between this counter drive is it wasn't set to scuzzy id 0. i'm not sure if these are the scuzzy id jumpers look at that it did it showed up again hmm i'm gonna make an assumption that right here are the scuzzy ids let's pull that off and now let's try out this counter drive with this adapter maybe it'll work this drive is so much quieter but i think it should be set to id 0 now let's plug this in just waiting for this to finish seeking okay i think it's booted up look at that connor it works so the instructions for this thing were like it's so easy just plug in and work but it seems like your device needs to be set for id 0. maybe i missed that maybe that was there and i just didn't see it well if we go over to disk manager now this connor drive hooked up oops that's device manager disk management okay we're not going to initialize we're just going to hit next okay yeah there it is one gigabyte i guess that's what this is all right well let me power this off and let's see if i can load that image into win uae and actually boot it to confirm that it actually read the drive properly all right here's win uae and i'm pretty terrible at using this it always takes me a little while to figure this out so add hard file let's try that and there's amiga.img of course the geometry shows us 506 megabytes i guess we're just gonna see if this works let me put in dh0 i'm just going to make a guess there for that and let's hit ok and why don't we hit start whoa look at that it freaking worked it's amazing how cool is that and that's right this was the hard drive i was using on the amiga 2000 amigo s204 for testing the bridge board because that's what this pc mono is here well that is cool you know what i just had a thought the testing i was doing on windows 10 when i initially plugged this adapter in was with this hard drive set to one of the other ids what if i plug this in now set to id 0 which i know works it's really unlikely this is actually going to work what wait what it does just work i just did all that on windows xp for no reason because it's actually working it just freaking worked wow all right what i'm gonna do for the ultimate in test here let's plug this amiga 500 meg drive back in and let's run uae again and point it directly to this drive over usb and see how that works and now if we go to disks add disk we pick the fujitsu disk there it is add drive and we hit start there it is it's freaking working it is booting the amiga directly off this hard drive through this scuzzy adapter on windows 10 latest patch version 64-bit it just freaking works and again just to show that this is working without any special trickery or drivers if we go to details here it is right here that is the actual device and they're under driver you see it's just using the very standard microsoft windows usb storage driver in fact it's using some windows 10 version there i can't believe this just works i can't believe this would have worked from the very beginning if i had just had the hard drive set to zero i'm still very confused about that okay so we know these two hard drives are working when they're set to id 0. let's move those out of the way let's grab a zip drive this is a scuzzy zip drive it's actually an apple one but just wanted to test that removable media does work so termination should be on and that is that jumper closest to the connector here and we're also going to have to set the scuzzy address to zero now it looks like one through six are the only possible options but that is surely not the case we just take off both jumpers and that should become id 0. and while i'm at it i'm going to take this jumper and i'm going to put it on there on the first one to enable termination plug this ribbon cable in just like we did with the hard drives plug power in okay it needs a adapter because the zip drives use the little berg small connector like a floppy drive and i turn on the power to it okay the disc is on but you know what is not on is the adapter so i think the problem is here is that the zip drive is not providing termination power and this thing even though i have it plugged into a usb 3 port actually it does not get enough power from usb it really needs the termination power to work so that is certainly one of the caveats with this now let's try something else i think should provide termination power how about a sciquest 88 megabyte drive and this is in an external case so of course it's got the 50 pin centronics connectors and a selector for the id so i can set it to zero okay we got this thing has got a light here so that's powered up let's wait for it to scan the bus and hopefully the side quest drive shows up oh look at that sciquest usb device i'm pretty sure this is a working device let's grab one of these cartridges that a few my viewers sent in and nicely donated to me let's see if we stick this in here like that there it goes spinning up all right so the led on here is blinking and now we have a green light and if we go to disk management see what we see windows should support this even windows 10 or windows 11 theoretically so let's format this we're going to just format it as fat we'll name it cyquest fat we'll do a quick format yes it's fine erase it nothing's on this anyways it's doing stuff lots of activity oh no format did not complete successfully well i've been fiddling around trying to clean the disk create new partitions and it's just it refuses no matter what disks i try in it so either the drive is not working anymore the discs are all bad or it's incompatible with this adapter and it could be any one of those i'll have to plug this into a macintosh because i know i was testing on the mac and it was working there so i'm gonna grab another scuzzy drive to test let's get this out of there all right so the cyclist drive doesn't seem to be working so how about this it's a jazz drive from i omega one gigabyte per disc so it's very similar to the side quest just later newer so higher capacity oop there we go there it is i omega one gigabyte usb that's the jazz and the zip drive is internal to my computer it's a 250 megabytes and it's over a tapi or ide so new simple volume uh one gigabyte we're gonna assign a drive letter k sure we'll do ntfs i mean this is just a test call a test the reason why i'm doing this i want to see how quickly i can copy files across this usb 1.1 link to this external jazz drive and there we are test is formatted we have one gigabyte and there it is the k drive is visible here are some obs captures let's take this one that's uh 258 megs and let's copy this over and this should at least give us the speed it's going ooh that's slow although i mean it's not terrible it could be a lot worse most of the devices you're connecting to that thing like old hard drives and stuff are slow anyways they're probably not as slow as it's going here which maybe is an average of 600k per second or so it's better than it not working at all and we saw with uae it was actually booting the amiga directly off the original scuzzy drive and it booted pretty quickly so even though we're bound by the slow throughput of this adapter it's still pretty good windows has finally given me an estimate five minutes to finish copy this file it's already copied 23 of it and this is all considering that the dell workstation here i'm using for my lab pc doesn't have any more slots in here so i can't even put a scuzzy card in here okay file is successfully copied on here it took a while but the estimate was correct and uh yeah it worked all right so i've shown that this adapter works great on windows 10 when you have the devices set to id 0 of course and it works on windows xp but i had to fudge on that driver but how about how does it work on a macintosh this is a macbook air m1 so you know latest generation or whatever of macintoshes uh i'm gonna need to grab a usb adapter because you know dongle life when you're using a macintosh i'll be right back i'm back and i basically spend 10 minutes looking for my dongles i have two of them i couldn't find either so i have this which is a usbc to hdmi usb 3.0 hub thingamajiggy this will actually charge the computer while it's at it so we'll try using this all right so the computer is charging so let's plug in this into one of these ports and of course on a mac there's no like inserted sound or anything like that uh so is it seeing this drive i don't know so let's just put this disc in maybe it will mysteriously just show up i think the mac can read ntfs partitions which is how i formatted this thing and i was about to say i was going to look for the drive but look it just popped up right on the desktop there it is that's the file i just copied over from the pc and if you double click on it should load it it's uh there it is it's the video capture that i made so like it actually works it totally totally works so windows 10 thumbs up mac os i think monterey or whatever the latest version is thumbs up that totally works why don't we go for uh how about this uh google pixel phone here let's see if this works all right for testing android i'm going to use the same hub thing here i used on the mac this is my google pixel it's running the latest version of android 12 or whatever the current patch is let's plug that in i'll plug this disk in here and i've opened up the google files program here and i'm not really familiar with removable storage on this version of android but if i go to other storage yeah other storage doesn't really show anything that's helpful just as a control let's plug in this little thumb drive i'll plug this into the hub all right and it just says usb is now available wait plug into the thumb drive now it says usb scuzzy db25 uh okay so even though the name of this is the scuzzy adapter this is actually what's on the thumb drive so that is that is not what's actually on the uh on this the jazz drive here so that's a strange glitch that it was showing this as the usb discussion even though it was like just a naming problem so i gotta say i'm really impressed with this thing i can't believe it just works on windows 10 and on the latest version of mac os it may work on windows 11 although i didn't test that so your mileage may vary and i don't have a linux laptop handy so i couldn't easily test that but as you saw it didn't work properly at least on google pixel version of android maybe it works on samsung devices i'll be getting a samsung device soon actually so i can uh give it a test on there as far as ios i have no way to actually even attempt to connect this thing to ios so it may or may not work the fact that it works on the mac means maybe it works on ios although like i said i have no way to even hook it up so i don't know now the biggest problem is the availability of these things it's really hard to find them and i think when they do pop up on ebay they're very expensive and for me i didn't ever want to risk buying one of them because i just had no idea if it would work on modern computers and sure enough it does so rest assured if it's this one at least it will work as far as those other oem versions from that company what was it shuttle i can't say but it would be absolutely amazing if the community could step up and make an open source version of this like perhaps one of those blue pill scuzzy emulators or the raspberry pi based ones that instead of making an emulator for a drive for say a macintosh or amiga to see it as a hard drive how about the other way around emulate the host adapter so that it can control the drive and you can archive your stuff even if it was just a raspberry pi solution where you could take a drive and image it into a file and then copy it onto your main computer for running in an emulator i think that would be hugely useful so be really great to see something like that because it really sucks that these are so unavailable and so hard to find so if you found this video interesting that these things exist and they actually still work thumbs up would be really appreciated and a subscribe and all the youtube stuff and check out my patreon i really want to thank my patrons their names are scrolling beside the screen comments down below and all the usual stuff and i guess that's going to be it so stay healthy stay safe i will see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 147,204

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Id: APn4IhaYAlc

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022