[aperezbios]

Hi folks,

Since it's been a handful of months since we launched ZuluSCSI, and nobody seems to have learned about it here, so I thought I'd introduce it. There's a new SCSI emulation product in town, closely related to SCSI2SD V5.1 and V6. If you're familiar with SCSI2SD, you can think of it as somewhat of a fusion of SCSI2SD V5 and V6, performance-wise. Unlike SCSI2SD V5, ZuluSCSI supports synchronous SCSI, at both 5Mbytes/sec and 10Mbytes/sec (although read throughput is limited to around 8 megabytes/sec, best-case. Write performance is generally in the 2-3 megabytes/sec range, noticably faster than SCSI2SD V6, but nowhere near as fast as the FPGA-accelerated SCSI2SD V6 is. Unlike SCSI2SD, ZuluSCSI configuration requires no desktop utility, relying purely on file name conventions, as well as an optional plain-text INI configuration file for more advanced uses.

Astute observers may notice that this board layout is extremely similar to SCSI2SD V5.1's PCB layout. This wasn't accidental. We re-used the SCSI2SD V5.1 board layout as a convenient starting point, when devlopment of ZuluSCSI began back in December of 2021. Feel free to ask an questions.

Full disclosure: I own Rabbit Hole Computing, which commissioned development of ZuluSCSI, as a response to critical semiconductor shortages. Those shortages have prevented us from being able to manufacture more SCSI2SD V6 and V5.2 boards, and show no signs of improving. 

I've also had a bunch of SGI gear since long before SCSI emulators were an affordable (or even existing) thing, and had an account on Nekochan for a number of years, prior to its implosion. I say this only because I'm not _just_ here to make a buck.

The GitHub project page is at http://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware and there's a basic ZuluSCSI web page at http://zuluscsi.com. Here's an obligatory high-res photo: