Unusual hardware

[Quixote]

:-) Recently, I found an unusual piece of hardware.  It connects to the computer via a SCSI port, and it seems to accept standard audio cassettes, or other cassettes of the same size and shape.  SCSI inquire on the Amiga reports it as a TEAC MT-2ST/N50, revision E.  

:-( Internet search engines failed to find drivers for it, but Aminet had something interesting: a driver for a TEAC SCSI floppy.  I’ve never heard of a SCSI floppy drive.

:-? Can anyone provide more information on these?  Specifically, were might I find drivers for the tape drive, and where might I find a SCSI floppy drive?

[Quixote]

seer said:

...Some kind of backup drive maybe..

;-) I have learned that it could only back up 150 to 160 megabytes of data, depending on which web page one reads.  Of course, standard audio tapes come in varying lengths/capacities, so the drive may be able to back up more than that.

:-( Actually, I'd been hoping to find a hack on Aminet of wherever that would allow it to read audio data into the miggy, to be spooled to hard drive, to be converted to sound files.  Another use would be to transfer old Vic-20 and C64 programs from tape to hard drive, for emulators to use.

[Quixote]

blobrana boasted:

Its a mac thing...

:-) Thank you, sir.  I'm down loading the PDF now...

[Quixote]

...Seems like it was from the era that a 20Mb HD was huge ?

;-) Most likely.  And you're right, squeezing that much data onto an audio cassette is remarkable, considering that the old Commodores ran out of room with much less data than that...

[Quixote]

seer suggested:

...If it is a mac drive, why not try to emulate a mac and find mac drivers for it ?

:-D I've got a SCSI-equipped PowerBook, so I wouldn't need to run Shapeshifter or Fusion, but--

:-? Looking at the PDF that Blobrana suggested, this device seems more like a UNIX thing than a Mac thing.  

;-) The PDF mentions OS-9 and 68000, and the drive is on the SCSI interface.  These are all Macintosh things, so that’s a logical first impression.  But the PDF also mentions commands to be used with a CLI or Shell, and Macintosh OS 9 doesn’t have one.  Also, Mac OS 9 won’t run on a 68000 series processor; it requires PPC.

:-? Of course, it may be for Mac developers; that would be a little different.  I’ll need to read the whole thing to be sure.

:cry: Anyway, I was hoping to find Amiga drivers…

[Quixote]

mips_proc mentioned:

Tapes are always huge... my friend's got a Sony tape drive and its capacity per tape is like 200GB's or so... crazy huh?

;-) That's a drive that uses tapes custom designed for backing up computer data.  The one I bought yesterday uses standard audio cassettes, just as the Commodore 64 and Vic-20 used.

[Quixote]

blobrana berated:

DON`T PUT  a normal tape into it...

I think they use a special metal tape(?), that looks  exactly like an audio tape...

:-( Crumbs.  I was hoping to read old Commodore data with it.  Now I'll have to find a source for the proper tapes...

[Quixote]

seer stated:

Hmm.. Well, this may of interest,  or this one.. Browse groups.google.com maybe you get lucky ?

:-( Your links aren't working for me right now.  I suspect it's trouble with my ISP at the moment.  It can't find lots of sites right now.

[Quixote]

T_Bone tossed in:

Even if the tape media was compatible, the tapes most likely wouldn't be. The vic20/c=64 used really screwy methods to read/write the tapes, and there was alot of undocumented wierdness happening in those drives, concerning timing, etc. I remember Jim Butterfield being interviewed about the possibility of reading these beasts in an aftermarket reader, and he was quite convinced it was next to impossible.

:-) And Jim Butterfield would know, I suppose.  I remember his name from the Compute! books for the C64 and Vic 20.

;-) Well, there's always the method of reading the program from tape into the C64, with its own tape drive, then saving it to floppy, and using that to read it on the Amiga.  (With the appropriate DOS driver, of course.)

:-( However, some of the old Commodore software would run automatically when loaded, and then disable the break key.  This was probably to prevent piracy, but today it just means that the program is that much more difficult to preserve.

[Quixote]

Odin offered:

Any chance of a pic?

:-( A picture is unlikely any time soon.  I own tons of eletronic hardware goodies, but a digital camera isn't one of them.  Santa wasn't that generous last year, and as I'm currently unemployed, I'm not going to dip into my savings.