Hi,
Does anyone here have an old Series I GVP SCSI controller? For example:
Impact A500-SCSIImpact A500-SCSI+4Impact A2000-1/XImpact A2000-SCSI+2Impact A2000-SCSI+8Impact A2000-HCImpact A2000-HC+2The board pictures on amiga.resource.cx show two EPROMs, labelled
GVP V1.0
EVEN 1A3Band
GVP V1.0
ODD 69D9I'd like to get a copy/dump/image of those EPROMs, and any other versions which exist. Let me know if you have one of those boards. You can dump the ROMs to disk by running a program on the Amiga; you don't need to remove the chips.
The original autoboot EPROMs contain a version of scsidev.device which doesn't support the SCSI Direct (HD_SCSICMD) standard. That means you can't use SCSI-Direct-compatible filesystems like
PFS3AIO to work with larger partitions and bypass device size limits (1GB).
The best solution is to burn gvpscsi.device v3.15 into an EPROM and replace the two original ROMs with that chip. Get that from
Ralph Babel's web site. gvpscsi.device is much more compatible, works with CD-ROMs and multiple drives. However, doing that may require you replace a PAL (programmable logic) chip on the board, which nowadays may be difficult or impossible to obtain.
If you don't need to autoboot from hard disk you can use the gvpscsi 3.15 BindDrivers driver instead, no need to replace the old ROMs. But what if you
do want to autoboot?
I have attached "BETA2" GVP autoboot EPROM images. If you're unable to use gvpscsi.device 3.15, you can burn EPROMs with the BETA2 data and use them. Presumably this is less buggy than the original version, and (from my examination of the code) it does seem to support HD_SCSICMD. The BETA2 ROMs still won't work with CD-ROM drives, but supporting HD_SCSICMD
should allow other filesystems like PFS3AIO to be used. You can only boot from an OFS or FFS partition, but you can mount a PFS3 partition from the startup-sequence and transfer control to it.
I posted an archive containing the BETA2 ROM images to
this thread on eab.abime.net recently. I've attached the GVP BETA2 ROMs in a more Amiga-friendly format here.