[BBC-Micro] Domesday players and modern hardware

[Jules Richardson]

Someone on here a while back had a Domesday VP-415 player hooked up to (I 
assume) a more modern machine - afraid I can't remember who it was now (either 
Darren or Ian I think!).

I've just been taking masses of Domesday-related photos, and as the player was 
near to a PC with a SCSI card in it, I thought I'd hook it up and see what the 
system made of it.

The short answer is, not a lot. Or at least, both Adaptec's BIOS and Linux 
barf rather nicely, apparently because the player's one of those lovely 
devices claiming SCSI compatibility which doesn't support the Inquiry command.

Adaptec's BIOS gets confused and thinks it's a fixed disk for some reason 
(yes, "support removeable drives as fixed disks" is disabled :-) - reporting 
the unit as being drive C: with no device name available. Linux just chokes 
and refuses to recognise the unit as it won't respond to Inquiry (I'll post to 
one of the Linux groups about that in case there's a workaround).

So, to whoever managed to get this working, what setup did you use? Or did you 
just happen to have a player with later firmware? I've done all the obvious 
stuff (parity disabled, forcing the data rate to something obscenely low 
etc.), so it looks like I'm just hitting a brick wall because the player isn't 
"properly" SCSI compliant. I'm not *that* bothered, I was just curious as to 
whether there was anything "archiveable" on the Eco / Countryside / Volcanoes 
discs as there is for Domesday.

cheers

Jules

-- 
there's a carp in the tub
there's a carp in the tub
so nobody's taken a bath