chris@aivru.sheffield.ac.uk (Chris Brown) (09/21/90)
In response to Phillip Hallam-Baker's question about SCSI interfaces to transputer arrays, I have never used a SCSI TRAM but I suspect they are really intended to let you connect a disc to a transputer array; i.e. there needs to be software already running on the TRAM to make the SCSI i/face actually do anything. So I think it might be difficult or impossible to make the TRAM emulate a SCSI peripheral (which presumably is what you want), at least BEFORE it's been booted. I endorse the point about cost savings; in the Sun world you pay dearly for VME slots too. What we did was to (ab)use the SCSI port on a diskless workstation by just treating it as a bidirectional bus and a heap of control lines. We built a simple interface using a C011 (or was it a C012, I can never remember which is which) a couple of bus buffers, and a PAL. We have a very simple unix device driver to talk to the workstation's SCSI port. This gives a very low cost connection. Of course, you can't have a REAL scsi device co-existing with this arrangement. Chris Brown, A.I. Vision Research Unit, Sheffield University (chris@aivru.sheffield.ac.uk)