DecayWTF

Gay Eminem on 9/11

@DecayWTF

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computer

 


 

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Click here because I can't put an audio widget in the profile

 

The scenes with the shark are usually very intense and disturbing.

 

I use Arch BTW

 

Fun fact: Neo-Nazi dipshit cartoonist Stonetoss is in fact Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, Texas

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DecayWTF
@DecayWTF
micolithe
@micolithe
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Using the SCSI2SD to emulate a CDROM

I could not find a single doc on google explaining how to use a SCSI2SD to emulate a CDROM, so I had to write my own and put it somewhere that will hopefully get into the goog. It's not hard, but it's one of those things that, if done wrong, leaves you with zero diagnostic info, It Just Doesn't Work™

Online Nerds are really bad about saying "no, you don't need an example, it's self-evident." Yes, as it turns out, it was self-evident. I picked all the right options intuitively, but that's not the point. Everything needs an example, even if it's a program with a single checkbox and a button, because otherwise you can never be one hundred percent sure that you got any part of the process right. For all you know, "save settings to device" was the wrong option to pick. Without an example, everything you did is questionable.

In my case, I had in fact configured the device and written the ISO right, but the driver on my Eduquest was looking for a specific vendor string. Had I been one hundred percent sure that I had done the first two steps correctly, I would have started considering down-in-the-weeds stuff like "what if the driver is hardcoded for vendor lock-in," but since I had no reference for reasonable device settings, I was unable to discount the possibility that I had picked e.g. the wrong blocksize or start offset.

The SCSI2SD is one of the most abandonware-ass "projects" I've ever seen. It seems like whoever created it simply didn't give a shit whether it was usable to anyone, and I can't find any reasonable documentation for it, just rando forum posts from people who Figured Shit Out, like me.

I have little doubt that whoever created/maintains this project convinced themselves that they "aren't getting paid enough" to write documentation for "every possible situation." This is a copout - you don't need to do that, and nobody expects you to. Write a doc for one situation, and many people will extrapolate, leaving only a few percent of your audience in the dark. Write no docs, and people will be paralyzed, leaving half your audience in the dark.

Also, wikis aren't documentation. Make a fucking website, even if it's only a single .htm.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

FWIW I can contribute one small bit of information:

"It has been suggested to me that by convention, 'hard drives are 0 and 1, and CDs are usually 2 or 3, on big iron / unix systems, but usually 3 or 4 on consumer gear (mac, amiga).'"

I can't speak to Amiga but the rest of this is just made up and your suspicion that any ID is fine is correct. Any device on a single narrow SCSI bus can be any ID under most circumstances and the only thing close to a convention I ever ran into back in the day was that the initiator was almost always id 7 (first device to get enumerated) so other devices had to be 0-6; some controllers could even be reconfigured for a different ID than 7 but that was generally a bad idea, but just be aware that even that can't always be counted on.

A frequent default on PCish systems was that a bootable controller (eg most of your decent Adaptec cards) would default to ID 0, LUN 0 for the boot device, but that was always configurable too. As I recall the last RS6000 I dealt with had the hard drive on ID 6, LUN 0 but the firmware could be happily convinced to boot from any ID, just like a PC.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

As far as I know they were reporting on observed behavior, but I can't speak to it. All the same, yeah, it was my expectation that pretty much anything computer-y would work that way - my real question is, do things like logic analyzers and synthesizers have hardcoded SCSI IDs?

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DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

I never ran into such devices but that doesn't mean they never existed because, as you know, computers. There were a fair few systems that made things super /inconvenient/ to reconfigure, like really old SunOS that had the primary hard drive ID (3 of all damned things) compiled into the kernel so you had to rebuild to change it, so I have no doubt at all that there's probably plenty of weird old systems that were more or less effectively hardwired just by not giving the user access to whatever stupid bullshit you would have needed to do to reconfigure.

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Ackart
@Ackart

Swear to god, finding info about CD ROM emulators is like pulling teeth so thank you for this

I really want an IDE CD Rom emulator with the ease of use of, hell, I’ll settle for a Gotek. While I’m at it I would like that bridge in green.

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