mat@zeus.opt-sci.arizona.edu (Mat Watson) (06/23/91)
I'm reposting this since I suspect that it never left the U of A, and I'm really quite interested in hearing whether others can confirm or deny what the NeXT person told me. Don McGregor writes: Susan Fichera writes > > I'm still looking for sources of 3rd party optical drives > for the NeXT. Has anyone tried hooking up the various Mac-ish SCSI ISO optical drives? Seems like it should work in theory. I just called NeXT technical support, and the agent who spoke to me indicated that special software is required. Specifically one needs to have a device driver capable of controlling the 3rd party drive from the NeXT across the SCSI buss (apparently all SCSI devices are not created equal :-) ). One company which sells such a beast (you get the driver with the drive) is NeXTConnection. For a mere $3875 they will sell you a SONY 600MB drive (which cannot read NeXT optical disks). This is way outside my budget for an optical drive, but so far it is the only one I've found with a device driver for the NeXT. Shall I write my own device driver, or is that a path tread only by the immortal? :-) I've messed around with sockets and ioctl. Does this qualify hack the next kernel? Does my Sun Unix documentation on device drivers apply to the NeXT/Mach combination? Has someone else already done this? Sure would save me some time if they have. Cheers to all, --Mat mat@zeus.opt-sci.arizona.edu