Newsgroups: comp.periphs.scsi
Path: lth.se!sunic!mcsun!sun4nl!relay.philips.nl!philica!adrie
From: adrie@ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Subject: Re: SCSI-Centronics
Message-ID: <1992Aug24.085349.276@ica.philips.nl>
Keywords: Always Trantor
Organization: Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
References: <2876@contex.contex.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1992 08:53:49 GMT

In article <2876@contex.contex.com> frank@marvin.contex.com (Frank Perdicaro) writes:
>I just got some info from Always Technology concerning their
>Centronics<->SCSI products.  Although the hardware does what I want,
>the software is infantile, and the company refuses to give any low
>level programming info.

As I told a few months ago, I'm building such a converter myself. I bought
an NCR 53C90 (that was hard!) and soldered it with a micro-controller, an
EPROM and some buffers on an epoxy print and started writing firmware. I
implemented the TEST_UNIT_READY, INQUIRY, REQUEST_SENSE, WRITE, MODE_SENSE
and MODE_SELECT commands. The WRITE command sends a block of data to the
printer. The converter supports Disconnection, so I implemented the Mode
Select page 2, which contains the Disconnect and Reconnect times.
I currently use the converter to drive my NEC P6 pinwriter from my Sun
SparcStation IPC, but printing bit-map images takes a lot of time so I
plan to buy a fast laser printer soon.

My converter can only transfer some 35KB/s. Of course, I wrote a driver
for SunOS to send data to the printer. I'd guess that the Always converter
isn't all too complex either, but they might have used another command to
send data to the Centronics bus.

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
