Hurray, I've got a squirrel!

[Doppie1200]

Hi all,

I'm happy to say I've obtained a nice Squirrel SCSI controller.

After being fed up with the lousy apollo scsi that I never got to work I stumbled upon a squirrel controller.

I bought it for 30 euro's and hooked it up today.
After some tinkering I got it going! I even installed the boing bags using the CDROM I connected to it.

So I don't know why I bother you guys with this but I'm really happy with the solution. Now I dont need to break out of the A1200 casing using a flat cable or something.

Great!

Indeed; another happy person in amiga land.

[BadBigBen]

Well, that is good news...

Lucky you...

Now how about a round of that famous Edammer Cheese, for the community?

[X-ray]

I would have thought he would have given us Gouda instead :-)

[BadBigBen]

Na, that would be too easy for him, seeing that he lives there... LOL...

[Doppie1200]

Edam are the competitors I only eat Gouda's Cheese ;-)
Actually those Edammers are quite good.

[adonay]

congrats with your squirrel . i always wanted to get one of those, people say they are good hardware


adonay :-D

[BadBigBen]

LOL... are you talking about the cheese or the people????

[amiga1260]

The Squirrel is a great SCSI controller, except it uses all the CPU power.

Now I am using a Blizzard SCSI kit, but I keep the Squirrel in my collection. The CD32 emulation software from the Squirrel was very good for playing CD32 games.

The Squirrel was faster reading a ZIP disk than my Blizzard SCSI kit. I have a Zip Plus drive.

The manual was the best I ever read.

[Hyperspeed]

Having SCSI also allows you to have super fast scanning, not to mention 7 drives instead of 2!

Beware though that the Squirrel doesn't get along too well with an '060!

And always remember to terminate your chain (standard passive termination will do for Squirrel, Surf Squirrel may need Active termination as I believe it's SCSI-2).

:-)

Hey, why do the Netherlands get called Holland and vice versa, what's the story there?

[Doppie1200]

@BadBigBen

ehm, I was referring to cheese. But come to think of it I never been there to check out the population ;-)

@Hyperspeed

Ofcourse way off topic but Holland is actually wrong. The Netherlands has 2 provinces called North- and South Holland. These provinces were in the 'golden age' the two with the most influence. This is because they contain the cities The Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. So referring to the Netherlands by calling only 2 provinces by name is really not fair to the other provinces.
[/offtopic]

[ontopic]

I have no problems with my apollo 1260 and squirrel combination yet. I have also not noticed any significant load on the CPU during transfer. But that might be because an 060 is a little overpowered compared to the chipset's bandwidth.

Anyway this is the ideal solution for me since I have no means of breaking out the original case anymore without using some ugly hack. The place where the scsi port was to go is occupied by my vga bracket.

As for other controllers being better in terms of CPU load or militairy spec. What would I need a higher througput for and what else has my CPU to do? It seems to have enough time left to decode MP3 or play AVI while transferring from the CDROM. Good enough for me.

[Karlos]

The problem with the squirrel driver is that it uses the MOVEP instruction that is not supported on the 68060.

A guy I knew wrote a small patch for his that replaced the MOVEP with a branch to some handling code he rolled for it and got a hefty speed up.

I expect oxypatcher would do much the same.

[Doppie1200]

Then it is MuRedox that is helping me out here. That traps all unimplemented instructions. Works great I must say. One mayor drawback of the squirrel is the short cable. I'll have to wait for the extender to arrive so I can clean up my desk again.

[bubba]

I got a squirrel a few months back from SoftwareHut and could never get it to work with my CD-ROM under AmiCDFS (I suspect it may be broken). Could you post the changes you make to your start-up sequences and the CD0: device to make yours work with the squirrel?

This is what I did:

- Installed the squirrel software 1.12 per manual

- Added the command 'c:SquirrelScsi MOUNT' to my startup-sequence after setpatch

- Installed AmiCDFS, moved it's CD0: device to the DOSDrivers folder and edited it to use squirrelscsi.device and changed the scsi id. I did try the hisoft cd.device, but it also never worked.

CD0: is mounted on my system but if I try 'dir CD0:' I get a requestor saying device is not available. I also see nothing on the SCSI chain when I run the SquirrelHDToolbox app.

I suspect my squirrel is broken. I've tried it on two A1200's with the same results and have verified the CD-ROM works on a old powermac. I have tried both an active and passive terminator on the drive. I'm out of ideas.

Thanks for the Help!

-bubba

[Doppie1200]

I did not use squirrelmount.

The device I put in the Devs folder. And I chanced the CD0 file to what I copied below. Also I put the CD0 in the dosdrivers folder. But that is trivial.

------------------------------------------------------
Device = squirrelscsi.device
Unit = 0
FileSystem = L:AmiCDFS
Flags = 0
BlocksPerTrack = 32
BlockSize = 2048
Reserved = 0
LowCyl = 0
HighCyl = 11000
Surfaces = 1
Buffers = 64
BufMemType = 1
Mask = 0x7fffffff
GlobVec = -1
Priority = 10
DosType = 0x43444653
StackSize = 600
Mount = 1

Control = "LC BL=8 FB=32 OLDMODE DC=3"

--------------------------------------------------

That is it. I also have MuRedox installed from what I hear that helps me overcome 060 issues. I don't know if that is rellevant to you.

Good luck

EDIT:

I forgot. This is important:

You must terminate the scsi chain. I did that by setting a jumper on my cdrom drive. The last device in your chain must terminate the signals or it will not work. You can either have the device do it, like I did. Or add terminators to the last connector.

Also make sure your device has the ID that corresponds to your CD0 file.