Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Appendix D: SCSI Hard Disks
Appendix D: SCSI Hard Disks
Well, here's certainly a topic not for the faint-hearted. As we
mentioned before, you can indeed hook up an Apple SCSI hard disk to
the Atari, and the Spectre will recognize and use it. LOTS of people
have asked us how to do this.
Now for the "ifs, ands, or buts." SCSI is an extremely complex
thing, and not at all "industry standard". Apple doesn't use standard
SCSI, neither does Atari. Hence, it can take some doing to make SCSI
work; and every now and then, I run into something SCSI that I just
plain can't get working period, for no apparent reason, no matter
what. (The last one was a Rodime disk drive ... ) Folks at ICD and
Supra make their living straightening out SCSI.
Apple SCSI is done in a variety of interesting ways, too,
depending on who you buy the drive from. For a fun afternoon, read
the "termination" section in an Apple SCSI manual; it's reminiscent of
a nightmare.
Thus, it is no simple "buy a cable and go" hookup. It depends on
your present hard disk setup, and what kind of Apple hard disk you
want to hook up to. Since we don't want people casually trashing
expensive hard disks; this is not a good place to start learning about
digital electronics and soldering!
However, we also do believe in information exchange, so we don't
want to suppress details on this just to cover ourselves legally. Thus,
we can't be responsible for what you do with this information, okay?
Now, with that out of the way, here's the details.
Atari uses ACSI, their 19-pin disk cable. This is not SCSI, it is just a
cousin. The ACSI cable goes into an Atari disk drive unit, and is
electrically translated into "true" SCSI (well, not multiple machine, but
close enough), a 50-pin ribbon cable. You can buy the ACSI-SCSI
translation unit separately from disk drive makers like ICD and Supra;
I happen to like lCD's, as it lets me daisy-chain to the SLM804 laser
printer, but there's a lot of quality units around from other companies,
too. (I just tend to find one that works and stick to it ... I've lost my
"spirit of adventure" when it comes to computer hardware, I guess.)
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