On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Richard Earnshaw wrote:

> > > The really slow discs are on an Acorn SCSI card; performance on that 
> > > sucks, which is why it takes so long to check them.
> > 
> > With 1.2 it used to be 170 KB/s on my ARM610 and AKA-32.
> 
> Arrgh, another variant of that card!  I've got both an AKA-30 and an 
> AKA-31, but I hadn't realised there was a -32 as well.  How many more are 
> there?  Are there any driver differences or are they just revs of the 
> layout...?

There are only three of them, the AKA-30, AKA-31 and AKA-32. There
may be different issues of each of them, but I just don't know.

I do have an AKA-30 as well, and the firmware for the AKA-32 did not
seem to work on that when I tried it back in 1996.

So, to be honest, I don't know.

You may want to post a message to comp.sys.acorn.hardware and ask.

> > > 2) I heard about 2 years back that there was some work on making the Acorn
> > > SCSI card use dma to and from it's buffer memory.  Does anyone know what 
> > > happened to that work?  If it got completely lost, does anyone have the 
> > > programming info for those boards?  I might be able to find time to look 
> > > at improving this driver (I don't have any critical data on those disks at 
> > > this time, so I can do some testing without fear :-).
> > 
> > I don't think there was ever released a technical manual for this
> > card, but I do have the data sheet for the Am33C93 SCSI chip somewhere,
> > and I do have the original manual that accompanied the card.
> 
> An Am33C93 data sheet would be useful, but most of that info can be 
> gleaned from the existing code.  What's missing is the info on the DMA 
> chip that Acorn put on the board (Sorry, the card's at home so I can't 
> check what it is).  There's also some buffer memory on the board (4k I 
> think), so I'd also need info on how/where that was mapped.

The AKA-32 has 64 KB on the card, and unfortunately, I cannot tell
where it is located. But, Alsystems should know. They made a their
Power-tec software on it, and it performs just as well as the Acorn
one. I can try to contact them and ask them.

Kjetil B.
mailto:kjetil@thomassen.priv.no
http://home.eunet.no/~kjetilbt/