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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat May 29, 2021 8:42 am



Many of you know that one of my favorite period-correct upgrades for the Amiga 1000 is the beautiful Microbotics Starboard2 side-expansion equipped with a StarDrive SCSI controller.

The Starboard2 is upgradable to 1 or 2MB of fast RAM, a Real Time Clock (RTC) and can take additional expansion modules for adding a SCSI controller - called the StarDrive - or a 68881 FPU. You could also use more than one Starboard2 at the same time, to double your pleasure with Doublemint gum.

ogStarDrive.jpg

But when it comes to the StarDrive in 2021, we need to put our cards right smack in the middle of the table in full-disclosure mode, because there are four gaping holes that need to be pointed out.

Hole Number One
The Microbotics Starboard2 is really hard to find these days. They will show up every so often, but it can be a feeding frenzy when they do because they are so scarce.

Hole Number Two
The Starboard’s RTC clock software stopped working as of December 31, 2017.

Hole Number Three
If you think the Starboard2 is hard to find, let me introduce you to Mr. Unobtanium: Señor StarDrive. These little modules can make some Amiga 1000 fans lose their damn minds on Ebay if and when they ever show up.

Hole Number Four
The mechanical hard drives the StarDrive supported BITD are from a million years ago, weighed a ton, screamed like a jet engine and were fairly tiny by today’s storage standards. You know, back when a 20 MB drive might have cost you as much as an Amiga, or a nice Ford Pinto.

jankyMech.jpg

A few years ago with the help of some friends I managed to hook up an external 100MB SCSI Iomega Zip Drive to my StarDrive instead of attempting to source an old janky original mechanical drive. The Zip served as a semi-autobooting hard drive with the help of a custom floppy boot disk.

I simply love that setup. When it works. In my experience, it can be extremely finicky to see the drive the first time, but once it does it’s an exceptionally stable solution. As long as I didn’t mess with it I was cruising on that 100MBs of bliss. Need more space? Grab another disk.

But in the back of my mind I always dreamt about the larger capacity potential of SCSI2SD boards - one of the single greatest upgrades ever invented for retro computing hobbyists, in my opinion. But back then, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work.

But don’t fret, my friends. There is…
A New Hope.

In late 2020, AmigaLove.com site member and long-time Amiga fan Chris Brenner (aka Crispy and Amiga Guy), based out of central California, contacted me seemingly out of the blue.

He wanted to talk about the StarTime clock some of us had in our Starboards. Remember - if you had a multifunction module or a StarDrive SCSI controller, you had a StarTime RTC, too.

He asked if I’d be interested in having my clock tell accurate time again. Would I? You better believe it!

The past couple of years what I would do is set my clock 11 years behind the actual date. The year would be wrong, of course, but at least the days of the week would align. It was a kludge, but it was better than nothing. Plus the actual time worked just fine.

Chris had a Multifunction Module and I had a StarDrive. The clocks and software are identical for both. So when he fixed his clock it would fix all of them.

Chris proceeded to explain his investigation of the clock and his software solution, which you can read about in more detail in an article attached to this video down in the description.

He essentially updated the clock software which will extend their viability for decades. In other words, we won’t have to worry about this issue again until Jan 1, 2058.

Chris Brenner explained:
“The alarm register used to store the year is 6 bits wide, and since the software stores the year in BCD (or binary coded decimal time), the largest value that this register can hold is 39. This year value represents an offset from the Amiga epoch, Jan 1, 1978, which means that the RTC can only store dates between Jan 1, 1978 and Dec 31, 2017. This is why the StarTime software currently sets the Amiga system time to exactly forty years behind the current date.”
Chris wrote a small program to address this issue that adds forty years to the Amiga system time. You then call to it in the Startup-Sequence just after the StarTime command is issued. It works fine, and fortunately we won't have to worry about it needing another update until Jan 1, 2058.

Brenner:
“Note: The RTC chip is aware of, and can handle, the day Feb. 29. However, the chip has no means of automatically handling leap years since is doesn't keep track of the year. The scheme that the StarTime software uses to keep track of the year also makes it impossible to automatically adjust for leap years. And so, the date will have to be manually updated once every four years. The StarTime software also does not automatically adjust for daylight saving time, though there's no technical reason that it couldn't.“
Finally getting my StarTime clock to display true and accurate time felt like a gift from the gods of Mount Olympus. I was completely thrilled! And I figured that was that.

Soon after, Chris asked if he could borrow my StarDrive for a little while to try and reverse-engineer it. I didn’t hesitate and immediately sent it on its way to the Sunshine State.

In a very short amount of time Chris’ efforts proved successful. In fact I think he had to wait longer for parts to be shipped to his house than the actual replication of the PCB.

sidebyside.jpg
Behold the new StarDrive "R2"


He named his new version the StarDrive R2. Beyond reverse-engineering the original he also fixed a bug inherent in all StarDrives. It seems they shipped from the factory with incorrect SCSI termination. Chris fixed that stunningly glaring issue in his StarDrive R2 design and his solution works like a charm.

After he sent my StarDrive back to me, I ultimately bought a new one from him as well so I could test it against my various Amiga 1000 setups.

Now, in theory, anyone with a Starboard2 can have a StarDrive. No more Unobtanium! (more on this at the end of this post)

Note:
By changing the termination design, through extensive testing I’ve learned that I can not use the R2 in combination with a Rejuvenator. The Rejuvenator simply generates too much noise for the updated R2 to handle, and they simply can’t coexist without potential changes made to the Rejuvenator design some day, or a unique terminator is designed for the Starboard2's pass-through.

However, the Rejuvenator can coexist with the original StarDrive modules. This is not going to be an issue for the vast majority of Amiga 1000 Starboard 2 owners.
myGuru.jpg

---


Now that Chris had his own StarDrive, he was off to the races with a 100MB Zip Drive setup like mine. He eventually got a 4GB mechanical drive working by going into the drive's non-volatile ram and disabling SCSI plug-and-play. While successful he continued to look at other options.


I’d told him of my personal fantasy of trying, and failing, to get a SCSI2SD card to work with the StarDrive. He didn’t have a SCIS2SD card at that point but looked into it.

He ultimately did purchase one and began to rewrite the StarDrive drivers.

Chris Brenner:
The motivation for rewriting the SCSI driver was to bring it in line with the Commodore SCSI standards that just about every other SCSI card out there uses. The Microbotics driver was apparently developed before Commodore started defining their standards for SCSI. The Microbotics driver doesn't conform to those standards, and consequently doesn't work with any of the handy SCSI tools such as HDToolBox.
In order for things to work, you need to use a custom boot disk with his new StarDrive.device driver in the Expansion drawer.
stardrive-icon.jpg
I made a 2-state StarDrive "R2" icon for the new setup. Note the Starboard2 on the side of the A1k. =)


You would then update the mount list based on your SD card’s size.
I’ll post a more detailed How-To on how to do this soon and will update this post accordingly.
my1gbMountlist.jpg
This is what my Mountlist in Devs looks like for a 1GB card.

scsi2sd55.jpg
The external SCSI2SD version 5.5 made by Inertial Computing.

scsi2sd55andcable.jpg
I went for the "plug and play" SCSI2SD 5.5. I needed to purchase a cable with a connector, and found a way to mount it to the case. Voila!


For extra awesome sauce, you can also install a small program he wrote called “autoboot” into the C directory and call to it in the Startup Sequence so that autoboot is the first program loaded.  The autoboot program loads the StarDrive driver and a bootstrap program into memory, protects it from being overwritten, and then reboots the machine.

Brenner:
“Lots of guess work and experimentation because the bits and pieces that make this work are so sparsely documented."
Why is this cool? Because unlike all other current side expansion options that require a boot disk, once this is done you no longer need the boot disk when you soft-reboot!

Brenner:
“After the reboot, the Amiga starts from the S:Startup-Sequence on the hard drive. 

All this is possible with my new driver because I can now use HDToolBox to create a Rigid Disk Block with all the partition information on the hard drive.“
So there you have it, folks. A completely updated StarDrive PCB that also adds some nice new features, a brand new StarDrive driver that brings the controller up to modern standards, an ability to ditch the boot disk on reboots and an updated clock that’ll take us decades into the future!

How bad ass is that?!


EPILOGUE

In the meantime, Chris has also been working on the integration of a CD-ROM filesystem that works seamlessly under OS 1.3 so we can easily attach a CD drive to our StarDrive SCSI chain as well.

Chris Brenner:
I realized that it wouldn't take much extra work to put in the finishing touches that would provide full support for CD-ROM filesystems. Now it works great with the Xetec CDx filesystem under 1.3!
More on this in the near future... :boing:

So of our original 4 gaping holes, 3 of them have been completely filled and painted over like new. Yes, the Starboard2 is still the only Achilles heel in this setup, but that’s true of almost any period-correct hardware we desire in 2021. It’s all hard to get these days no matter what you’re after. And most new stuff, with a few exceptions like the Parceir, try to recreate modern versions the original experience. Most try to push machines into very different user experiences than the era they were made in. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just different.


Ordering Info for Starboard2 owners, for a limited time

For those of you out there that have a StarBoard2 and want to get that impossible-to-find StarDrive SCSI module, Chris has decided to create a limited batch of StarDrive R2 boards. Keep in mind he is not a factory and there is a significant chip and parts shortage going on. Therefore production times could take a while.

You can purchase a fully assembled StarDrive for $150 plus shipping. Or, you can purchase a kit and assemble it yourself for $100 plus shipping.

Shipping internationally will produce higher shipping costs and slower delivery times.

To declare interest, contact Chris Brenner at
[email protected]

In the meantime, I’ll be playing with this amazing new setup!

User avatar
JoeUser
Dallas, TX

Posted Tue Jun 01, 2021 7:07 pm

Awesome news, and terrific post! Now, to only snare an elusive Starboard...

User avatar
Warty

Posted Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:44 pm

So, I've spent the last 2 Saturday's trying to get a StarBoard to work. The first day, we just had the original driver/boot disk, which in our case, was WB1.2. We also didn't have a SCSI2SD available, and several of the spinny drives we had available were dead. the first day, we could get the "AskDrive" utility to give us the right cylinder info, blockspertrack, etc. But we couldn't get the drive to format.

Today I brought in my Gotek, SCSI2SD, Supra 4x4, kick work (booting to supra-scsi2sd), and was like: "this is going to be easy". I had pre-made a WB1.3 boot disk for the star drive. (I don't remember why, but last week I was convinced we failed at the end because of a WB1.2 limitation). well... crap. Drive that worked last week would just freeze up system this week. Tried another spinny, same result. (Maybe putting in a new battery for the clock was bad juju?).

Gave up on the spinny drives for a bit, tried to get SCSI2SD working, with a spare 512MB card. This would mount no problem. But I couldn't get FORMAT command to work. It would always quit with "not enough memory". Tried raising stack size, etc. Maybe not high enough?

Will this magical new boot disk work for people who have original hardware, do you think? Or only if we have the new module?

User avatar
Warty

Posted Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:44 pm

I forgot to add: great icons!!! Love that touch.





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